How do you send out legit/legal newsletters without getting blacklisted?
 

And what hosts allow sending bulk email to double opt-ins?

Edit: just talked to certified hosting's live support, they say as long as it is double opt in and an opt out they allow 200 mails/hr for shared plans and unlimited for dedicated. What about keeping your newsletter out of google/yahoo/etc's spam folders?

i use aweber

Good question, Jakez.

use russian mailbombers?

I'm trying to run a legit newsletter not some spam BS :upsidedow

aweber is your best bet

We have the same problem. We can't even send out our legitimate activation emails FFS. It's not my fault our site is so hot we have so many signups per day!!

We have been battling to get whitelisted with AOL for about a month. Finally got it done and then no shit - yesterday we discover we are on Yahoo's blacklist.

And so it goes on.

Spammers have fucked the legit use of email.

I send out 150K emails every 3 days. I couldn't imaging sending 200 emails an hour... it would take all year I think.

I check the blacklist and immediately contact them saying it's my members and not spam. I have been blacklisted from barracuda and it was removed almost immediately. Also a couple privately owned lists which I contacted as well and was removed.

First, very important: is the guy you talked to at Certified Hosting the SAME guy you always talk to? I use them, too (they're great) but it doesn't matter if I call Support at four pm or four am, or noon, or midnight, the SAME guy ALWAYS answers. I picture this lonely guy, in a roomful of servers, in his pajamas, eagerly anticipating tech "problems" only HE can help with! He's Super-Support-Man! I think this because he ALWAYS sounds soooo disappoionted whenever I thank him and try to hang up. "Oh? Oh....um, okay then.... um....bye for now." SO SAD!!!!

Okay, second: Fellucia Blow has over 6,000 subscribers to her weekly newsletter. We have an opt-out in the email notifcation we send out. That's how we do it - we just send out a simple, plain email saying 'the new issue of the newsletter can be found here, thank you' with a link. Then that HTML page has an opt-out link. People are also instructed to bookmark their Confirmation Email because it also contains an opt-out so they can do so at any time without hassle. About forty subscribers opt-out a week. So: as long as you make it convenient to find and don't piss off anyone you should be fine. Good luck!
:pimp

Ah, aol. Their fucking idiot users flag my double opt-in newsletters as spam rather than clicking the prominent fucking unsubscribe link in the footer, I just love getting those moronic spam complaints from redacted.

Barracuda - they've now blacklisted me, is the only way to get off that blacklist by paying the blackmail fee to 'verify you own the domain etc'?

Sorry that barracuda question was for mmcfadden :)

Our office uses aweber combined with email stats (www.emailstats.com) so that we know who opens the email and what links they click ( very very usefull )

Every mainstream marketer seems to use aweber so I guess they have a good reputation with most of the majors such as yahoo,google etc.

On one of my free mainstream sites i have a ton of members and sending out any type of newsletter is a nightmare. Due to the amount of members and emails that we send out - Using another service to send them out such as aweber would cost an arm and a leg. Thus we been sending out emails from our own servers. We are using DKIM.

Most of our emails is going out to gmail/aol/yahoo and msn. We don't seem to have too many issues with gmail/msn but aol and yahoo will occasionally defer our email messages.

We haven't able to get whitelisted at yahoo or aol.


Curious if anyone is using http://www.certifiedemail.net/ or returnpath?

yahoo will ban you for not using DKIM and we have problems all of the time with different services blacklisting us. We have rDNS setup and the proper SPF setup and everything... it's a struggle... some just ban you for being hosted in the same IP range as someone else that is blacklisted.

SMTP was never intended for today's uses... it's like building a car with a chassis from 1930... it's going to be a broken model no matter how many patches and upgrades you give it.

The protocol needs to be overhauled and rolled out with new security features that specifically work to build on private trust and automatically distrust anything public. That way spamming becomes almost obsolete overnight, why spam? No one will ever see it anyways....

Right now it's just a numbers game, and the cost of spamming is still lower than the revenue it generates. :2 cents:

I know a few people on this board who would disagree with that statement.

send true Chinese proxy

No matter how legit you are, you're always going to get blacklisted somewhere.

So true. So sad but so true.

i use aweber and icontact...

My thoughts exactly.

It's 2009 for fucks sake. Where is the new email protocol????

.

Yahoogroups email doesn't get into yahoo's spam folders. But it's not a very flexible option for newsletters though.

That is so frustrating for a double opt-in list. I don't get why people do that. And, of course, although it is redacted in the headers, as every email has an unsubscribe link, it is obvious who did it. A lot of people do the spam complaint without unsubscribing, so I tell my people to always check that, and to ask why the user flagged something they subscribed to and confirmed as spam. The AOL users usually claim they did not make a spam complaint, but I can't see why AOL would say they did if they did not.

yes, but if you use a closed loop confirmation system like aweber, you dont have to worry about that..

As has been noted already, in all the web email clients I am certain surfers just click "report as spam" because it is easier than unsubscribing. One click and they see the mail gone. The don't understand the problems they cause for us -the legitimate site owners trying to communicate with them. This is the big problem.

No matter how easy we make it for them to unsubscribe, we can't compete with that easy option.

IMHO all web mail clients should remove that button.

Email lists is a hard, tricky business.