[thelist] tips on avoiding "bcc"ing to avoid being a spammer

[Maximillian Schwanekamp]

>Don't forget it's not just large BCC lists that will get you blackholed by
>ISPs. Some count the number of emails coming into their domain by SMTP IP
>Address. And you if you bust through a certain threshold they will
>blackhole your IP for some arbitrary time.

No kidding!!  Back in the day (last year) I was Ops manager for
1ShoppingCart.com, a big part of whose service is autoresponder and
broadcast email functions; by early 2003 we averaged 200k emails per day.
In spite of a good relationship with AOL and MSN, we still had to throttle
our email rate to the big ISPs - and even then, sometimes the "door" would
slam shut arbitrarily.  But even when that happened, being able to track
individual messages' delivery status was crucial.  Not to mention the
unsubscribe headers as you mentioned earlier.  AFAIK a mail solution
requiring BCC does not allow that.

sbeam said:
>I have a client whose opt-in ML is starting to get to the size to
>trigger AOLs red lights. Who do you talk to to get on the good guys
>list? Was is a difficult process?

Not really.  Do a WHOIS on aol.com.  Call the # listed for Technical
Contact.  IFIRC they just want some business info, and will require that you
include full company contact info (address, phone, etc) on each email.

Maximillian Von Schwanekamp
Websites for Profitable Microbusiness
NeptuneWebworks.com
voice: 541-302-1438
fax: 208-730-6504


-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Baratta [mailto:Anthony at Baratta.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2004 11:07 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: RE: [thelist] tips on avoiding "bcc"ing to avoid being a
spammer


At 10:29 AM 2/26/2004, Maximillian Schwanekamp wrote:
> >thusly reducing outbound mail traffic...
>Ah.  That's the point that I missed.  Thanks for that.  Good to know.
>
> >Some mail servers may also be more optimized
> >when reading a single message
>Further means of reducing load on the sending server, then.  Another good
>point.
>
>Still, if you have even 1% (i.e. 100) of those 10000 messages get silently
>blackholed because they were BCC'd, it's time to  get a different bulk mail
>solution.  But thanks for the info!

Don't forget it's not just large BCC lists that will get you blackholed by
ISPs. Some count the number of emails coming into their domain by SMTP IP
Address. And you if you bust through a certain threshold they will
blackhole your IP for some arbitrary time.

So going to a single user : single email solution is not a full solution.

My client has a double opt-in list of 20K people. There are 4K AOL users,
12K Yahoo/Hotmail accounts. At this size we've had to work directly with
these ISPs to make sure our mail gets through. Even then, it gets dumped at
times because the end users don't understand what a white list is. Or are
too lame to remove themselves from a mailing list they signed up for and
report us to the ISPs abuse center.

It's a running battle and we are caught in the cross fire.

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