Avoid being blocked by web mail companies for mass/bulk emailing ?

Question

Our company is sending out a lot of emails per day and planning to send even more in future. (thousands) Also there are mass mailouts as well in the ten thousands every now and then.

Anybody has experience with hotmail, yahoo (web.de, gmx.net) and similar webmail companies blocking your emails because "too many from the same source in a period of time" have been sent to them?

What can be done about it? Spreading email mailouts over a whole day/night? At what rate?

(we are talking about legal emailing just to make sure...)

Answer 1

If you want to do this you're getting into some of the same techniques spammers use. Spreading email mailouts over a day or night could be a way to do it. I don't think anyone knows the 'right' rate to do this because varies per mail-provider and they probably adjust this over time. You could try spreading the emails sent to a single provider. If you've got a lot of mail for hotmail.com for example then don't send it all at the same time.

Maybe it would be a good idea to look at pull media instead of push media for your application. You could put the content of the mass mailings up on a website and notify interested readers with an rss feed for example. This has a lower risk of irritating potential customer. And your company has a lower risk of being sued for spamming.

---

You're right, rss is not really accessible for all users. But as you'll probably need to create a webpage-alternative to the mailings anyway for people who can't read html-mail. You might as well provide an rss feed to those pages as an alternative for the users who do want to use it. This might reduce the volumes for the mailings enough to make your job a bit easier.

Answer 2

Trying using a service like AuthSMTP. Typically the major free mail providers like Yahoo, Gmail will limit the amount of e-mails you can send per day and people on the receiving end might end up reporting them as spam.

Answer 3

How do big companies do that? I'm thinking amazon. They must send gazillion of emails every day...

Answer 4

I had to send out several thousand a week (all opt in) for a coupon site, I just figured out how many seconds there were in the given time period I needed to send them, and generated a random number of seconds between 0 and that number, added the random number to my "SendAt" date in my queue.

Not perfect but it worked. I do agree that ultimately it's a flawed concept, if you really HAVE to send thousands a day you'll need to contact a mail service. http://www.streamsend.com/

BTW, you need to be very careful about not getting added to any of the blacklists http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

Answer 5

Most of these provider have some form of "white-lists". Contact them directly, and see their requirements to be put on the list.

Answer 6

You want to look at the following:

• add a bulk-header to your outgoing email (Precedence: bulk)
• look into SPF
• look into SenderID
• look into DomainKeys or DKIM
• setup and handle email to abuse@
• build relationships with the important providers
• monitor the usual spam lists, work with them when you are on them

Also, most providers have pages setup where they explain how they want "bulk" email to look like when you are sending it to their customers. That general includes requirements for double opt-in, etc..

Answer 7

Here is some good advice about the headers for bulk emails, the likes of companies like constant contact use.

http://old.openspf.org/esps.html

To add to the list of good practices least likely to get you blacklisted,

If you follow guidelines for double-opt-in / unsubscribe links on every email / handling abuse reports this will improve the recipients not marking your email as spam - because if enough people within gmail/yahoo/hotmail mark your email as spam, it will go into the spam folder by default sometimes even if other good practices are being followed. So double-opt in makes sure the recipient only gets email they are expecting, reducing the chance of spam reports.

And to add to the managed email queue idea - do not just unintelligently process and send emails as fast as your CPU/memory will allow, create your own queue system as others have suggested that trickle over time and shuffle the order of email provider you are sending to (@gmail.com, @yahoo.com etc).