Need help with a million-member list

3 replies
We bought a social networking site a few years ago, and it took us a few years to rebuild the site. The old code was simply a lot harder to work with than we realized, and the database size made things a bit unwieldy.

Anyway we now have a stable version and want to invite old members back. All 967,000 of them (after cutting out about a million more that created an account but never used it).

We "cleaned" the list with an online service, but we're still getting 30% bounce rates on our first 10,000 invites. We ARE finding that the old users are interested in coming back, if only for nostalgia's sake, which makes us want to continue, but no legit e-mail provider is going to let us send out another 950,000 e-mails with an average 30% bounce rate.

What we need to do is send out the 950,000 e-mails ONCE, and just kill the accounts with e-mail addresses that bounce - there's no point in paying to store their old stuff anyway.

Then moving forward we'd presumably have a semi-normal bounce rate of a few percent.

My question is: isn't there some service that appeals mostly to spammers that we could use? I mean I get spam every day - they're certainly getting high bounce rates and they can't be paying that much to sell me fake Rolex's or pipe fittings every day.

Is there any way to actually find an email provider that regularly works with spammers, just so I can do my one mass mailing with 30% bounce?
#email #list #millionmember #spam
  • Profile picture of the author DIABL0
    If your list is legit and not going to generate complaints, then just get a cheap mailer and put it on a VPS and make sure you have RDNS set up and send the mailing. It won't matter if it goes inbox or spam folder, you just want to collect the bounces. And make sure the IPs aren't blocked with any major domains or on any blacklists.

    Worst case you could strip out all the domains and dedupe them and then add like a 50 character cryptic username to each (which should all be undeliverable unless a catchall) and send them and see if they all bounce or you get some type of delivery error from any of the domains

    30% bounce rate after verification makes me wonder if they really verified the data. I have tools for doing this and I have never seen such afterwards, as long as the addresses are verifiable, as some domains like yahoo, make it not possible via smtp.
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  • I hope I'm not making a fool of myself by asking why not an autoresponder like Aweber? You could just send out a broadcast and get your message sent to everyone in one click. Aweber also has a "spam" scale that will tell you whether or not an email has a high risk of going to the email's spam folder. Idk, perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to do. I'm new to email marketing, so I'm also responding in hopes to verify this option, or learn something.
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  • Profile picture of the author rritz
    With a service like aweber you will have to import that list and, as far as I know, to do that the people on that list will get an email asking them to confirm their opt in or to opt in again anyway. So this will clean your list at once and probably reduce it to 10% or so.
    BUT 900K subs in aweber will probably cost the earth?
    I have never worked with them, but "my newsletter builder" must be a very spammy autoresponder, if I get spam from a list I never opted in to I can be sure it's sent with my newsletter builder. And they don't have a spam complaint button or anything. But even then it will cost a lot.
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