Risks in sending out high volume of emails over SMTP

Question

Hi,

What are the risks, if any, of sending out massive amounts of emails over SMTP? Specifically, this question is regarding the risks of being labelled/blacklisted as spammers of spoofers.

Our mails are legitimate, however. Our system needs to send out reminders to our corporate users on a daily basis, which may number into the thousands, say. Our worry is that with such a setup, our domain might end up being blacklisted by the receiving organisation, thus rendering our reminder service useless.

Does anyone have any information on what might be a "safe" volume of emails to send out to avoid being blacklisted? Or can we just churn out emails with abandon?

Answer 1

You may be able to contract a third-party organization to take care of this for you. I know there's a lot of "direct marketing" companies that will let you use their API to send mass email (newsletters, etc). They can do the work of negotiating to get off blacklists - that's what you pay them for.

I haven't used Sendloop and don't know if it has the functionality you want, but it's probably a good example.

Answer 2

See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/526235/how-to-conduct-legitimate-email-campaigns

In your reminder service, just follow some basic spam guidelines. Identify where the message came from, why the user got it, the link to "opt-out" or discontinue the reminders, and you'll be fine. Any blacklists you do get on will certainly remove you if you have this information in your messages.

Additionally, should you get blacklisted for some reason, have another server on a different network that you can use as a backup should your primary server get blacklisted temporarily for any reason.

Oh, and one final note - usually your entire "domain" (i.e. whatever.com) doesn't get blacklisted. Specific IP addresses or specific servers are usually what get blacklisted.