Looking For A Mailing List SMTP?
I know just how tempting it may be to think about managing the SMTP side of distributing mail shots to your mailing list yourself. But I would strongly suggest that you don’t, you could end up with some fairly serious issues to deal with and I can speak from first-hand experience with this.
I know there are people out there who want the easiest way of mailing to a list and think that either an open relay server or hosting their own SMTP is the best solution. How long do you think an open relay would remain open if it allowed people to send out mass mail shots? You want to know why 99.99% of SMTP servers require authentication these days – it’s for that very reason. Then there is the option of using your own computer or a server you have access to for your mailing list SMTP. Except unless you are very VERY careful you’ll find your IP getting blacklisted very quickly, accounts banned with hosts or even your PC crippled for hours on end. As people start to report messages as spam (with the very best will in the world there will always be a percentage of people who will mark messages as SPAM that they’ve actually agreed to receive). The consequences can vary from losing your hosting account to finding that every e-mail you send gets marked as SPAM. The best you can possibly hope for is that you’ll see ever decreasing delivery rates.
The Best Way Of Mailing A List
I’d strongly suggest that you use a dedicated service for managing and mailing your list like Aweber or Constant Contact. It’s their job to ensure high delivery rates and that you avoid the pitfalls associated with sending e-mails to a mailing list. In a cost vs benefit basis anybody bulk e-mailing to more than a couple of dozen people at a time on a regular basis it’s a no brainer. For most businesses you are looking at less than $20 a month.
A True Mailing List Story
I once worked for an online bookmaker who from day 1 had been building a mailing list. By the time I joined the company they had in excess of 150,000 people on their list and special offer e-mails were sent out a couple of times a week. In order to save some money they had decided the best way of doing this was to use the companies dedicated SMTP server and to send e-mails out in batches of 10,000, all scheduled using Outlook. I can’t even begin to explain how much of a pain this was to organise. However managing it wasn’t the real problem, getting the e-mail to people was. The very first e-mail I did for them had a bounce rate of over 30%...trust me that figure sticks in my head. This crippled the SMTP server and it took many hours to even send all the e-mails out. We had no way of measuring how many actually found their way into the inbox and not marked as Spam but I’d guess it wasn’t many…because another job that had to be done every few weeks was to apply to have our details removed from spam filtering blacklists! No amount of mailing list management software paid or otherwise would have solved this problem. Their mailing list was actually a hindrance rather than a useful marketing tool, all for the sake of a couple of hundred dollars a month.