Sending bulk mail

Sending bulk mail is currently done via Mandrill, which is explained in some detail here (Warmshowers Mandrill Mail Handling) and here (Mandrill Studying Email Delivery). Access to Mandrill is obtained via https://mandrillapp.com, using the MailChimp credentials. Basically, one needs to do the following:

1. Go to https://www.warmshowers.org/admin/people/vbo
2. Select the users who should receive the mail. for newsletters: a. Select all languages apart from those for which translations exist. To send out the translated mail, it has to be done individually for every language. b. Be sure to select only one role. If one selects all roles, users can appear several times (or as many times as they have roles) or just deselect the donation roles. c. Be sure to check E-mail opt-out = False
3. Click "apply", then select all users using the box in the title row. This will by default select all users on the current page and say "Selected 50 rows in this page." Click "Select all 78882 rows in this view." to select all contacts matching your criteria
4. Click "Send enhanced tokenized e-mail" and enter the HTML code from the email to the body.
5. Send the mails. This can take longer for bigger amounts of contacts, based on how the Cron job is scheduled. It should be normally set to 30 or 15 minutes and can be decreased to 1 minute during the sending of the mails in order to accelerate the process of sending mail. One should set it back to a higher value once all mail has been sent in order to keep the website charge low.