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The black Arts of sending email

Posted: Fri Feb 05, 2010 10:27 pm
by yacahuma
Hello,

Users of one of my site are running around 6K, I sent one mailing and paid using mailchimp. But if I keep using it, it will get expensive in a hurry. I am afraid of using my own domain since , I think, now a days companies may use some black arts to decide to pass or not an email.

Should I try sending my own emails? or leave it to the pros?? When I try sending myself, I know I cannot get to many yahoo's users.

Any words of wisdom??

Re: The black Arts of sending email

Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2010 12:25 am
by DrTom
Kinda depends how often you're sending and how you're sending. Yahoo is by far the most aggressive. They keep huge amounts of data on every server that they receive mail from.

Couple things that I found with yahoo and most applies to other providers

1) Everytime a user reports something a spam, it counts against the server that sent that message "reputation". So don't send to people who don't want it. However this still won't help as eventually it'll happen and you'll be re-iping machines. Another note is that many providers appear to do reputation by blocks of ips..
2) Clean your lists. Repeated bounces coutn against your rep. Make sure you handle them and do not send them more than once or twice. Make sure to handle soft and hard bounces
3) From: header and the mail-from and reverse DNS should match.
4) Respect the proper SMTP responses.. If you get a 400 error, retry.. If you get rejected for another reason, stop sending. The more times you try bad emails, the more it counts against your "reputation". Also at many places it appears that NOT retrying when you should counts against you.
5) Make sure your emails don't look shady. No links to IPs in them. No weird HTTP ports in the urls.

I wouldn't recommend sending your own, it's one of the most frustrating things I've ever had to deal with. For obvious reasons, there is limited visibility into what the various providers use so everything comes down to setting up good stat tracking, and trial and error.

Re: The black Arts of sending email

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 4:31 pm
by bnther
Forgive my ignorance, but as I try and generate business through email, it's fairly important to me. I've been using my email through my GoDaddy account to contact potential clients. If people start marking me as spam, is that going to cause me grief?

Re: The black Arts of sending email

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 5:44 pm
by yacahuma
Yes.

I decided to use mailchimp for $30 a month. Is just not worth it trying to deliver email to some domains.

I started thinking aboout a nice class auction suit. Think about it. Big domains can control who gets in and who gets out. People that dont have the resources and have to host their site on a share hosting, most likely will get out. Why do I need to pay to send email? What if yahoo makes a deal with mail chimp, mailchimp pays money to yahoo to get their email in. Maybe this is happening, maybe not. The truth is that email is the most unreliable way to communicate. And it seems there is nothing we can do about it.

Re: The black Arts of sending email

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 11:40 pm
by xjake88x
I would take a look at php pear or codeigniters mail libraries.

You want to go SMTP for sure, using PHP! (Not the native mail function)

Re: The black Arts of sending email

Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 5:09 pm
by josh
If you take into account everything in the RFCs an email system is relatively straight forward. 99% of people EHLO as localhost or get themselves listed in the SBL and slam their head on the desk and give up. :banghead: