Cobb

I'm just a marketing hack by day. A wannabe ruby hacker (and former coldfusion/php) hack by night. Much as I'd love to snag some of them gigs, I'm not remotely ready for even low-level stuff right now. I'll leave the migraine-inducing headache of normalizing zillion-table legacy databases to those with foreheads much taller than mine. Mebbe one day, tho.

This situation did come up at work the other day that i think youse could help me with. It's basically a scenario where we're giving some email specialist company a big email list, the cannon fodder for an email blast. When the rejects come back from the blast (bad addresses, spam blocked, etc), this company is supposed to hold on to that list of rejections. Apparently we do not have the capability to take the rejects list and use it to clean our original db of email addresses (it's coming, i hear tell).

So, in three mths time, when we give them a "new" list (which WILL include the same addresses from the original list), we need THEM (the contracted company) to be able to prune from this latest list all the crap ones from the last blast. Plus we want them to give us the list of rejected addresses paired with the company it's for.

The contract company is claiming they'd have to do this prunin and sorting by hand. Smells xtra shifty/stoopid to me. We gave them our original list as an excel file (with columns for co_name, fname, lname, email_address). I dunno if any LDAP (i know, not OLAP) whozzywhatsis mojo was used to convert the file to something their mail server understands, but couldn't this pruning be done programmatically?

I suppose i'll hafta find out exactly what kind of server they're usin (assuming they didn't farm the work out in turn), but is there some general process you can think of to get this done (the pruning)?

I've got those tools myself. This is a no brainer. Ask them to give you a very specific reason why not. Whatever they can't do, tell 'em you'll outsource. Even if it's in the millions, this can be done with just a little bit of programming. Of course what's easy for me might be difficult for others.

If you give me a big list mixed bag and a small list of rejects, I can clean the big list. This is computer science 101.

I also have some specific email tools. A list verifier, a subscription manager, and a website scraper.

Y'know, I thought it would be an easy-peasy thing to do. Unfortunately, my knowledge of email servers (nevermind servers, generally) is way less than wee. I'll get more specifics and tap you on your shoulder again later (via email). Thanks.

this seems like a snap with a little perl magic. if you need a hand (heck, cobb could probably crank something out in a hot second), i'd love to see the specifics also.

i'd welcome more work talk from you cobb. i'm planning my exit strategy from the sys admin world, and the DW/BI world looks interesting. certainly through osmosis i'd learn something from your experiences......

Perl is exactly what I was thinking. I probably have some of that code just sitting around somewhere. DW and BI are hot and getting hotter. Now we're going into realtime. I also have a genius idea if I could get some UI programmers. It could make 20 million in 3 years.