I was looking around for a email marketing tool to send emails in batch emails
for my side hustle and i only really found cloud based ones. I'm kinda familiar
with mailchimp and hubspot but if I remember correctly, the emails were sent from
their own specialized domain. I wanted the emails to come from my business email
address so I ended up going to the rabbit hold of finding offline programs.
Before I did that though, I was tinkering around with writing code for this. As always
I look around for a repo in github that I can just customize for my end but I didn't
really find anything satisfactory so I ended up going for RAD by utilizing chatGPT.
The problem I faced was that first, the code ChatGPT gave me wasn't good. I don't know
why but sometimes, ChatGPT code is just shit, especially for the modern languages. I would
recommended it for older languages like C or Assembly. A couple of days in though, I ended
up writing some code in Google Collab and decided to use the AI code generator it had and
it actually gave me a working code.
At home, I was testing out the programs I downloaded. Mail Blaster 9 kept trying to update
itself even when patched and I was too bollocks to care about blocking it via my firewall
so out of the picture, then I tried SendBlaster Pro which worked but now I kept having issues
with the SMPT configuration.
Initially, since I thought my business email address was a GoDaddy setup, I had to use the GoDaddy
settings but it didn't work. It would connect but it wouldn't send out emails, thats with SendBlaster
and the custom code via Python. It would connect but would never send out email. I then had the idea
of using the Outlooks SMTP settings since I have it setup there as well (or GoDaddy uses them by
default, not sure) and that worked, it connected properly and sent emails when I tried it with the
custom code.
So for a final last ditch effort before writing my own code, I tried it with SB and it would connect
but not send emails. I tried a couple of things here and there but I eventually just scrapped that idea
and just decided to finish writing the program.
And here we are; zzClusterEm. I named the program based off Cluster bombs. If you don't know what that is,
it's basically a missile launched and a couple of seconds later, the front will open up to release hundreds
of bombs to the target.
I wrote the program in Python and as a CLI tool, I might end up doing a win based GUI for it if it becomes
necessary but I'm pretty happy with it. It takes the important info off config files then launches emails
in 5 seconds increments, the only limitations it has is based off your server. I think GoDaddy only has
a 250 per day email limit, not sure so I'll be capping it around 100 emails a day. I like it as a CLI
program but I do feel like GUI is needed. (easier message editing, maybe different profiles for different
accounts, etc). I still have to think about it.
This will help immensely with my business and I will release it as open-source with MIT license so everyone
can use it. With this program, I finally feel like I wrote something useful LOL. Anyways, back to the drawing
board, still have lots of things to do.
lizard people have taken over the wurldo..