[thelist] Email Marketing - client keeps getting account suspended

[Chris Dempsey]

Hi All,

We have a client for whom we setup a Constant Contact account to handle
their mailing list.

They have a lot of old email addresses in amongst the list of 10, 000 in
their account.  Some are known to be poor quality as our client ran some
promotions where people handed over their email address in return for
something free and it turns out many of the emails were nonexistent.

The first email sent to part of the list got their account suspended for
too many bounces and spam reports.

They cleaned it out some, got access back and were suspended again
following the second email.

They have emailed 60% of their list to expressly ask permission but are
not sure that this will be accepted by Constant Contact.

They are now loosing patience with Constant Contact although to be
honest I think Constant Contact are being pretty fair having finally
supplied some guidance on cleaning out the list and getting their
account access back.  Constant Contact's policy is to suspend accounts
with a spam report rate of greater than 1 in 1000 emails.

Can anyone offer some suggestions on the following points:

- would any other legitimate email marketing provider such as Vertical
Response behave any differently - their website suggests a pretty much
identical policy to Constant Contact
- is it an option to run their own list using phpList or similar?  What
are the implications for the server it's installed on in the event of a
load of spam reports
- any other comments or suggestions?

Thanks,

Chris