Last week I set up MiaB for my company on a new VPS. Everything is working so far, the hosting company has turned on the SMTP ports and we let them know we plan to do a mailing of 1-2 campaigns per month for a list of 15K customers, which they agreed is fine.
After reading the install instructions for phpList (Installing phpList man... | phpList manual), I am not sure if it’s possible to install this anywhere on the MiaB server. PhpList shows the server destination directory as “public_html” but MiaB doesn’t have that in its file structure.
Based on that, is the best solution to do the local Windows installation that phpList suggests where the user installs the XAMPP Control Panel to their PC followed by the local install of phpList? If it is done this way, do there need to be any files at all relating to phpList copied to any directories on the MiaB server?
I guess I’m asking if it’s just easier or better to install the interface on the local Windows PC which would include the XAMPP control panel that has Apache and MySQL and then I wouldn’t have to install any files at all on the MiaB server? Then I would just use XAMPP and phpList locally and put in the proper credentials to reference my MiaB installation as the mail server to use?
Is this correct? Am I missing anything important or vital if I do it this way?
Honestly, my advice would be to use mailchimp, Moosend, Hubspot, Omnisend, GetResponse, iContact, MailerLite, AWeber, or any of the other platforms for this type of activity.
In my opinion you basically are just going to cause everyone on the subnet in your VPS provider a bunch of grief. Your server will likely be classified as a spambot and be blacklisted in spamhaus. The reason the above services cost money is because they work with large email providers to ensure they are not “blacklisted”
Its all a scam if you want my 2 cents, but I really dont think you can do mass emailing anymore without lots of headaches.
Just looking for an answer to a technical question. Management has decided they want to do it this way and be in control of their own customer list and mailing. It’s not unreasonable.
Unfortunately Management doesn’t know what they don’t know. You would be better off signing up for Office 365 or Google Workspace and using that to mass mail people rather then sending it from Mail-in-a-Box. Your using this tool for something it wasn’t designed to do. I strongly suggest you read: Why You May Not Want To Run Your Own Mail Server | DigitalOcean
I am also just trying to be honest with you. Running a mail server for a dozen different domains with a dozen or so email addressed on each domain is challenging. Sometimes you end up on spam lists for no reason. These are some of the things you should bring to “management” so they have all the answers before making decisions that affect their business.
I think others on this forum might agree with me here. Maybe not…
Not looking for a fight, not looking to be right. Just wanted to point out something with a bit of experience behind it.
Actually, it is unreasonable. Very very unreasonable.
I think you need to convince management to compromise. You can be in charge of your own data and use self-hosted mail or contact management software to maintain your lists and campaigns … but for the love of actually having a chance of avoiding management wanting to fire you for being an idiot when things don’t work out as they expect - they will want someone to blame rather than themselves … don’t do it this way. Hook up your mailing list software to AWS SES.
For the answer to the technical question. MiaB is designed to be a self-contained single purpose email hosting appliance. Install your PHPList on a different VPS. It will be much easier to deal with than trying to run XAMPP locally.