what are the risk of running ur own autoresponder?

Doing it yourself can be tough.

You got to see the rules on where you are hosted with. For instance I think hostgator is only 500 emails an hour.

Then you have to hope that it gets to them and not in their spam folder which can be complicated with shared hosting.

Well it really isn't that risky at all, I run my own. I use a plug-in called WP-Responders and it works like a CHAMP, as for my emails going to the spam folder, you need to look at your hosting service.

I host with JustHost and I'm getting an great deliverable of my emails, it is extreamly rare when one of my emails gets marked as spam, and i know because I survey my list about it little too much.

The only thing you really needs to be concerted about is your hosting hourly limit for sent emails, Justhost is 500, so I set my to 350. All this means is the amount of emails that can be sent within a hour. If you keep it decently under the hosting hourly limit, then you will never run in to a problem.

You will have to check with your own hosting service to find out yours. That is all I can help with, becuase I am not in the dating niche. But I do run my own auto responder service, becuase I am a control freak.

Mark

thanks guys,

i will check the WP-Responders and see how much i am allowed on my hosting service.

i just need to make sure i wont be blamed for any spam.

thx
mubb

The risks really depend on your host and your list. How they react to you. lots of folks think the spam complaint button equals the unsubscribe button and that's where you can get into the most trouble. Either complaints to your hosting provider or to your registrar (heaven forbid its godaddy - you can get your registration locked pretty quickly if you get enough complaints.

If you don't lose the account then you have to worry about the spam blockers out there that will report your IP as a spammer. Many MTAs use these lists to just drop emails automatically - before they even get to a users mail box and its filter. There are services that can monitor this or you can do it your self. If you get on one then the fun begins to get off the black list. Aweber, iContact etc have entire departments of people dedicated to getting their company off these lists - and yes, aweber et all get put on them all the time.

Next as others have said here your hosting provider can limit the number of emails you can send per hour/per day etc. If you're going to run you're own ar then you really should consider either a dedicated server or at least a VPS - with its own ip etc.

There are MTA (mail transport authorities) service providers like smtp.com and sendgrid.com that can handle a lot of email services - but they are not autoresponse companies per sae - like aweber. An aweber/icontact type company could use the services to create one though.

Finally - if you're looking for a solution to run on your own server - check out autoresponse plus - I've used it in the past and its a great product created by a fellow warrior - though I think he's since sold it to another well known marketer.

good luck,
--Jack

We have found Aweber to be invaluable at managing lists, email campaigns and building straight forward opt in forms for a reasonable monthly fee. Extremely easy to copy existing lists - so a fast and efficient way of working. I'd suggest trying it for a trial period and finding out if its meets your needs. This would save you creating your own and let you spend your precious time somewhere else.

Hope that was of help.

D & L

It's not so much the risk...it's the work involved.

For starters, you need to know the max number of emails per hour, and set your autoresponder (tip: get one that offers throttling as a feature) to send about half of that.

Then you have to establish relationships with all the people in the email business such as AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. This is so they send you copies of the spam complaints for removal...instead of just either blocklisting you, or contacting your isp and getting you shut down.

Now, every time you send an email, it's a guarantee emails are going to 'bounce'. Sometimes it's due to an email address not existing, and those you need to remove from your list asap. Too many of those, and they assume you are using a harvested list, and declare you to be a spammer.

As you can see, it's a ton of work, and here's the reason for it: ISP's are required by law to keep backups of each and every email sent to them in perpetuitity, which basically means they have every email ever sent to them in the history of the company backed up on a hard drive (thank trial lawyers for this btw). It's expensive to do so, and unsolicited emails drives that cost up exponentially.

This is why almost anyone who is in marketing (except for a few who don't either understand or don't mind the work involved) tells you to get an autoresponder account. And more are abandoning the self hosted for the service each and every day.

hmmm. yes it does look like it is too much work and risk in it.

i am happy with Aweber but they refuse to allow my dating niche newsletter to go through them.

i suppose i have to market this niche without any 'list building' maybe just SEO and articles which is a shame cause i am sure i will loose money here since i am marketing more then one website and it would have been handy to use a list to do so.

thank you guys for your replies,

mubb