Hot answers tagged bulk-email
21
Hotmail/Live is ... quirky. Much, much quirkier than other email services when it comes to "protecting" users from bulk email. You can find many complaints about Hotmail/Live all over the web about this stuff -- and it's true in my experience.
First, make sure you sign up using their SenderID forms.
The Sender ID SPF Record Submission Form will put your ...
18
IMHO sending emails to people who subscribed to a different startup is not okay. You could perhaps send a single "please opt in to our new venture" email to all those addresses, but not more than that.
You almost certainly want to look at mailing list handling services. Some examples (in random off the top of my head order):
MailChimp
Campaign Monitor
...
16
I've been in the email delivery software industry for years, and I can tell you that there is is no magic bullet for email deliverability.
First, you have to send email that people want to receive. This means email that people click, open, and use the email and that you get a low number of spam complaints. Confirmed opt-in is a great policy, and will gain ...
5
Use an existing newsletter service such as MailChimp.
Not only is it free for up to 2,000 subscribers (and 12,000 messages a month), but they offer sign up forms, click tracking, autoresponders, unsubscribe links, increased chance of delivery over hacked-together DIY solutions, and much more.
There's little reason to create your own email newsletter ...
4
Agreed with the guys above, opt in is opt in for a specific purpose. You need to be very careful about what and how you send...it can be a very expensive mistake if you don't follow all CANN-SPAM regs.
But to answer your email question, there are hosted STMP relays that you can purchase access to such as SocketLabs and SMTP.com. I prefer these to a ...
3
Perhaps there are hidden features to vCards that I'm not privy to since I primarily use Gmail, but I see no benefits in doing this.
vCards are primarily used for exchanging contact info (name, address, phone, email, company, title, url, etc.), which doesn't really apply to newsletters. Newsletters aren't contacts. Most users might put the email address of ...
3
It sounds like Gmail is picking up the word 'Unsubscribe' from the opening line of your email newsletter, then displaying that in the message preview to the right of the subject line.
The text I've outlined in red is the message preview in Gmail:
Here's where Gmail pulls that from within the email itself:
As you can see, the opening text of the email ...
3
You should probably just rate-limit.
For example, who generally invites more than 10 friends and family members a day? Give, as google does, a number of invites that gets used up, and then regenerates over time. And reward people who get other people to sign up on the site with more invites, people who send out invites that get no response don't get ...
3
Opt-in is always a good idea, regardless of the legalities, for one simple reason: people who actively opt in are more likely to open, read, and act on the emails you send to them.
People who are 'tricked' into receiving email from you through subclauses in the terms and conditions or pre-ticked boxes (i.e. the 'opt-out' system) aren't as likely to buy from ...
3
Yes you need to follow the rules outlined in the CAN-SPAM act.
http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business
Marketing emails must always follow these rules. Transactional emails are different, and follow a set of guidelines as to how an email is considered transactional.
Example of transactional: someone
orders a ...
3
As long as you're using a non-blocking SMTP server (in case it hits a bad DNS/SMTP server) then it is a matter of how many different domains are the emails destined for and what is the bandwidth (roughly speaking because the exceptions to the rule appear at the extremes). I would suspect the latter (bandwidth) due to you seeing similar results with an ...
3
While they may have been subscribers to "his last startup" - did they opt-in to receive e-mails from you? If they didn't, and/or they don't have a reasonable expectation that their e-mail addresses will be used for this new venture, it is spam. Just to get that out front.
As to your problem, if you aren't going to run your own server, you may want to look ...
2
As much as I love PHP, that is where your bottleneck is in your system. PHP just doesn't have the efficiency of other languages when it comes to text processing.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/603163/is-perl-a-good-option-for-heavy-text-processing
Perl is going to be a better choice for processing and sending emails. A few years back I had written a ...
2
With a mailing list that size you may want to consider using services like Constant Contact to handle your mailings. Sure, it's not free, but they can easily handle that kind of volume plus you get the benefit of all of the tools they offer including managing that list. They also handle spam law compliance issues and you don't have to worry about your server ...
2
There are a variety of reasons:-
Ceding control of email to a local part of the business e.g. someone@pl.microsoft.com, or a different section of the company for account management reasons.
A different business controlling email i.e. outsourced situation where the company can't/don't want to cede control of their primary web domain.
Denoting different ...
2
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. However, assuming you are in the US, if you otherwise follow the entirety of the CAN-SPAM act and put a warning on the refer a friend page ("Only refer people you know! Don't spam strangers!") then you should be ok, however, I would make sure to add a captcha or similar.
2
The laws and acts that governs data protection and emailing various from country to country, while a lot of them change from country to country most say among the same thing and you will need to learn the key points of these and its far to many to list but for example. Not keeping peoples data on file for more than 2 years, you are responsible for safe ...
1
An smpt relay service will solve the issue if either hostgator allows SMTP traffic out to 3rd party relays (this is usually done a different port than smtp 25 which they probably monitor), or if the relay service supports data coming in from a different port.
3 Good choices for transactional email are:
1. MailGun - Amazing API
2. SendGrid - The favorite for ...
1
I'm fairly certain it is not possible to throttle emails across many different scripts/programs that you have described on a shared server. You will likely not have access to any shell on the server or the ability to install any additional software and therefore this is not an option.
Another option is if for example you have a limit of 500 emails per hour ...
1
The main purpose of SpamCop.Net is to report spam sources, not web sites. If it reported your "website" and not an e-mail you sent, then that was merely as a convenience to you and your ISP to let you know that someone is "Spamvertizing" (also see this page) your web site. If the unlikely event that you have any control over whoever used your web site in ...
1
Your hosting provider may be filtering emails with SpamCop. Or someone forwarded an email they got from you to SpamCop who sent it to your hosting provider based on the email headers. You should ask for a copy of the email with complete headers attached so you can review it. I doubt you are sharing you email and hosting account with anyone so you'll ...
1
According to SPAMCop
Quick Tips for Mailing List Administrators
In order to avoid spamming, mailing lists must implement a secure opt-in procedure. Many so-called "opt-in" lists are nothing of the
sort. Beware of anyone who wants to sell you lists. You will be
disappointed.
However the initial sign up is accomplished, whether on a web ...
1
Had similar issues in the past. Doing every single thing I could do on AOL's Postmaster site seemed to help things a bit: http://postmaster.aol.com/
That's also the place to contact them about these issues. Maybe you've already gone through that site, but you hadn't mentioned it.
1
Usually speaking, you have only 600×100 pixels or less to convince a user to keep reading your email. So yes, you can take 600 as the width limitation.
There're also many other elements you need to take into consideration when designing an email template, such as images, links, contents, etc., here's an article that may help.
1
In your case I would suggest to go with dedicated type of server where you will have your own IP and mail server so you can send as many emails as you wish.
Such "dedicated" server could be:
Fully dedicated -- physical server with unique IP where all resources belongs to you. Can be quite expensive.
VPS (Virtual Private Server) -- few virtual servers can ...
1
I'd suggest a dedicated transactional email provider like SMTP.com, SendGrid, or Postmark. They provide the mailserver, sending API, and take steps to reduce the amount of mail that hits your users' spam folders for you by configuring things like DKIM, SPF records, and unique IP addresses.
When a site depends heavily on emails being delivered, it often pays ...
1
Mail server on your own box. That way you control it end to end. Make sure you have your email servers set up properly, don't put trigger words in the emails - like viagara - and have your users whitelist the email address.
Typically if you aren't sending spam, you shouldn't have a problem.
Google are notorious for not having much support when you need it.
...
1
If the email gateway rejects it as spam it may return it with SMTP code 571. For Google's Postini email service this means it thinks it's spam: http://www.google.com/support/appsecurity/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=134416
However 571 can be used for other reasons, like the email gateway thinks the incoming message has a virus.
1
You will never be able to add 40k email addresses to the BCC line of an email client. The developers purposes restrict size on this field to assist with spam control.
The best solution I have used and seen used on many big sites is MailChimp.
You could try breaking up the list of users into groups and send. Breakup or categorize alphabetically, or by ...
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