We are dumb - Which email sending service should we use?

Hi Sam.

i would suggest Mailloop for you, you have an already big number of customer. Mailloop handles unlimited and you just pay one time. not monthly. I beleive it will serve you well. Here is a review of Mailloop.

Hope this helps.

All service providers will say they're the best. Most of the top line folks spend a lot of time and money ensuring the highest deliverability rate possible, but it can never be 100% given the nature of email. Any provider claiming that is just outright lying, or has so many conditions on it to be laughable.

Most also provide a form of Spam Assassin to help you score your email to see if others will mark it as spam. There really is nothing you can do to ensure 100% deliverability.

To my knowledge they can't. But they can definitely react to a large number of complaints.

I have no idea here.

Several reasons - first many isps block sending emails from your desktop - so if you had a program on your desktop that sent emails directly they would never get through. Note - when you use Outlook or thunderbird or any other email client you are not sending the email from your computer - your program sends the email to a mail server (MTA) that then sends it on toward the final delivery address.

Earthlink use to do this as do others.

Other ISPs - like GoDaddy, limit the number of emails you can send per day (their smallest account starts off at 250/day). If you want to send more, you have to pay more. Some also throttle the number of emails you can send per hour - so if you have a large number of emails to send it could litterally take days to get them out.

Finally, ISPs are allocated IP addresses in various blocks. Its pretty simple to figure out if the IPs are meant for endusers or servers - not easy but doable. Some hosts take this into account when accepting email streams.


You can talk to them like the other providers do, but while they're the big players - they are not the only ones. I personally know folks at iContact and Brontomail - two local email service providers here in RTP - they maintain teams of folks who do this all day long. Its there job to monitor the black lists and respond to complaints of spammers etc. You can do the same - but you would need to build the relationship and spend the time on the phone.

And good luck getting the phone numbers for the black listers, you might be able to reach the ISPs, but several blacklists do not have phone numbers, and good luck arguing your case via email.

Can you do the work of 8-10 people as well as your other duties? This is one of the reasons I highly recommend going with a service provider - they have the infrastructure and people resources to do this that a one person shop doesn't.

Each provider has its own claims on deliver ability, most even pay outside auditing firms to track and report on this (at 10,s of thousands of $$$), but unless you have a small list, you're better off letting the pros do the delivering and spending your time on the message.

Now, as others have said here, if its been a long time since your last contact - many folks are simply going to have forgotten you. And the sad reality of email marketing is many folks think reporting an email as spam is just as good as hitting the un-subscribe button.

The more spam reports you get - the more likely either your service provider, or worse, your hosting/ISP provider, will simply shut down your access/account rather than spend the time to fix things or investigate the cause. You're very much guilty until you prove youre innocence. And for good reason - you're ISP is seldom the last link in your network, and if they get too many complaints, their upstream provider will shut them down. They can't really take the chance since one customer who is spamming can bring down their entire network for their other paying customers.

This is why so many professional spammers now use bot nets scattered around the world.

Good Luck.

HTH,
best,

--Jack

Wow, I'd love to know some of these answers too. Perhaps some of the email marketing experts on this site can help us both out. I hope so...

Can anyone shed light on these questions?

With all due respect Michael - that's not BS - its just a fact of life in email marketing. While running several different data centers I've personally had to deal with these issues on behalf of thousands of customers. Please don't do our fellow warriors a disservice by implying black listing doesn't happen. It does. Doesn't matter if you're self hosting the service or using others such as aWeber or iContact.

As for hosting your own scripts - use the search function here and lookup my thoughts on Neil's script - but I'll make it easy for folks - I too think its the best script for self hosting autoresponders. I in fact use it for small lists I have.

respectfully,
--Jack

When I first started back in 2001, I used Yahoo Groups because it was free - except that every message I sent included Yahoo's advertising.....and to switch away from Yahoo Groups, everyone on my list would have to resubscribe/re opt-in. So in my opinion, that's why you should really make this decision carefully and for the long-term so you don't have to switch later.