We're a church and we have about 3,000 attenders that have signed up to get various email newsletters and announcements. We have about 25 different lists. We end up sending out about 30,000 emails a month.
I am trying to find the best way to send out mass emails to these various lists without being stopped by the limitations of our host provider, the spam flagging of various products, or being blacklisted. We don't have a lot of budget for this but want to be progressive in following CANSPAM directives. Every email marketing provider (such as verticalresponse.com or constantcontact.com) is too expensive for us. I've looked into AuthSMTP and they seem like they may be our best option.
Suggestions?
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Thanks midi152!
I've talked to my host provider with whom we have a VPS with a dedicated IP address. We can remove any email sending limits. Is there anything I should do to prevent that IP address from becoming blacklisted? I've heard that simply sending bulk email can cause you to become blacklisted and we have sent as much as 6,000 in one hour (although somewhat rare).
You should also go to http://member.dnsstuff.com
I think you may have to rethink your methods. This may not be a problem with your ISP only, but with the recipients' ISPs as well... If they receive a lot of messages from one originator in a short time, they may have filtering systems that react to this activity and close you out somehow. You may want to review the possibilities of a more spaced-out sending procedure or something.
/RID
You can still negotiate rates with these marketing service providers since you're operating as a non-profit organization. You'll need to show your 501(c)3 registration for that.
Have you thought about using a listserv? Hmm, that might be too expensive as well.
How about vBulletin or using Yahoo! Groups? With Y! Groups, you could setup the group so that membeship is restricted and that only the moderator (you) is able to send communications to the group.
pkpaul,
Just a few suggestions for your consideration;
1. If you have more than one computer behind your static IP address or assigned subnet, take measures to ensure you're blocking SMTP outbound access from any computers which don't specifically require it. If computers behind your network address become or are virus infected and send out spam then the credibility of your external IP is destroyed.
2. ensure you have an SPF record implemented in your DNS records. Oh, and ensure that your mail servers name (i.e. the name it uses in it's SMTP communication) matches your external MX record, so reverse lookups by third parties won't be a problem.
3. Check the composition of you mails to try and lower it's spam probability profile. If you manage to successfully send a mail to another external account, examine the full header of the mail as it MAY contain anti-apam filtration information which you can act upon.
4. You may wish to consider using a bonded sender program such as that found at http://www.senderscorecert
Just a few suggestions
Cheers
How much is "too expensive"?
SwiftPage charges a monthly fee that might be low enough for you - http://www.swiftpage.com/p
I don't know if they might also have a special price for non-profit, but might be worth asking.
They also support CANSPAM, OptOuts, etc
Hi,
If you've obtained your list legally then you shouldn't worry about spam. Most of the time if a member of a list was added without the user's consent he reports the offending email address as spam. If a spam database gets a lot of report on the same email address or domain it gets blocked and is added to a spam database. Make sure that your list has members that opted in willfully. It would also be safe to place an "opt out" link on your newsletter.
I used Atomic Email Sender because it is cheap and you could upload your list.
http://www.amailsender.com
Good Luck
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: midi152Posted on 2008-01-08 at 12:00:24ID: 20612096
I worked for an ISP at one point and we had customers inthe same boat. The best thing that we offered to the customer was for them to call in and we'd add them to a safe list persay for large mailings. So you could talk with your provider and see if they could remove that limitation for you. Most of the ISP, big and small, have that capability.