Intro to me and my adventures with CiviMail

Hi CCRM Friends, My name is Shane Hill. Some of you may have read my name in a few places or on some lists. This post is meant to introduce me and give some background. I am with the organization The Urban Alliance For Sustainability. http://www.uas.coop and we use CiviCRM to manage our constituency and send email blasts. At first, I was just a volunteer with UAS as I believed in their mission (now my mission) and I wanted to lend my experience to what they were (are) doing. Then in time I inherited their web operations which eventually led to having to deal with CiviMail. :) When I say I had to deal with CiviMail, do not get me wrong. I love CiviMail and CCRM, it's just that CiviMail comes with a high technical bar to entry and at times I felt a bit like a pole-vaulter using a soda straw (bio-degradable plastic) to get over the bar. So I changed a few things about the CiviMail implementation that we had going and ended up with a very robust and stable newsletter system. So much so that UAS decide to offer our SMTP as a service to other users of CiviMail. you can read about it here: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,908.0.html and you can apply for the service here: http://www.uas.coop/civismtp-application please direct any and all questions to shane[at]uas.coop And then because the CCRM dev team is quite supportive and open, I ended up having the opportunities to contribute to CiviMail and ended up making a number of changes and optimizations that I will talk about in other blog posts. One in particular gave email generation a nice order of magnitude speed up. That felt good to be fortunate enough to contribute in that way. I did not do anything hard-core, In fact, I did not even change the algorithm or architecture for email generation. it is quite good already, I just eliminated the need to do some regex scanning work. details later. Going forward it is the intention of UAS to help make CiviMail enterprise grade and rock solid. I think we are pretty darn close to that. just a few more additions... more on that later as well. I have to get back to launching a CiviSMTP service. :) peace, -Shane