CharityFocus sends out more than half a million emails every week.  That's every single week, to people who have requested them.  At the rate we're going, we'll probably send more than 50 million emails in 2008.  That's a lot of emails. :)

For most of us, sending emails is about "compose" and "send".  But as you scale past your "Bcc" limit, it becomes a lot more complex than one might imagine.  Here is the usual process:

• First, you have learn about the context of email marketing.  Email has proven to be super effective for the commercial world, but what how does it work for the social-profit world?

• Then, you have to learn about drafting the message of your email.  There are many articles (and idealogies) on writing the perfect email. :)

• Following that, you have to design the email.  Unfortunately, there are no standards for emails, so AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook and everyone else will render emails differently.  Images may or may not show up, stylesheets may or may not work, it all depends.  So you have to optimize the email into an elegant, lightweight design that degrades gracefully all the way to text-only, and then you have to test it with all the combinations.  Fun, fun. :)

• Still, before you send it out, you have to think about the little things that can make a big difference -- like the subject line.  Subject line is more important than you might imagine. :)  You have make sure you are serving your audience. Then there's even more subtle protocols that you probably don't want to violate.

• Once the content is ready, you have to figure when to blast.  Tuesday through Thursday are polled to be the best days, but ultimately, you have to refer to the Time to Send Formula.

That is the easy party.  Now we have to actually deliver it, so that it gets delivered to the Inboxes and not in the spam folders!

• When a mail daemon gets 10K emails within a second, it'll error with: "Oh, that must be spam."  So you have to trick them by rotating the IP's, get adopted into "white lists", buy third party authentication, and stuff like that.  Once we get past the mail spool, you have to get past the content filters.  That means that your message has to be properly formatted and all that jazz.  Despite all that, there's no guarantee and you have to constantly tuned into the mail-man vs. spammers score.  This has become so difficult that there are many companies that just provide this service.

• After the delivery, you have to handle the bounces, unsubscriptions, and responses.  It just takes work. :)

• And in the end, there's the final analysis -- co-relate the open rates of the emails with the subject line, track the clicks to see what the readers are enjoying, measure the ratio of unsubscribed to subscribes, and so on.  Based on the feedback, continue to make adjustments for the next email blast.

Ten years ago, if someone would've told me that sending-emails could be listed as a core-competency, I would've laughed.  Today, I barely grin. :)