Here’s the deal: I work for a small company that regularly sends out an “opt-in” (meaning that the email is NOT unsolicited) newsletter. This is sent out monthly to roughly 40,000 subscribers. We had been simply sending it from the office here, which uses DSL for its connection to the Internet. We realized that this was probably not the best way to do it, but assumed we would be contacted by the ISP if it was a problem.
Anyway. The last time we sent out a mass email, somebody complained to our ISP about receiving it. I understand peoples zealousness when it comes to fighting back against spam, and I am all for it. However, the ISP sent us a form letter telling us that we were not allowed to use their mail servers for any sort of broadcast mailing.
So I submit to you: How do most people handle large, mailing-list type mailings? I’m assuming the best way would be to use majordomo or a similar mailing list manager, but this is not a discussion list, merely a monthly newsletter. Are there online services that are designed specifically for this purpose?
There are also several ways to “opt-in” to the mailing list (sending mail to a certain address, filling out a web form), so any piece of software that can process such things would be extremely useful.
Here is a document that sets out a standard for managing non-spam, opt-in mailing lists. Most ISPs follow these standards. If you very carefully follow them and document rigorously that you do, you should be able to justify your ISP that you are not a spammer. Of course, you should contact your ISP and provided them with a written copy of the policies your organization uses when sending mass emails before sending the mailing to be sure that you won’t have any problems. Then when someone complains to them about your mailing, you should be able to provide proof that they opted-in (not failed to opt-out, there is an important distinction) to your newsletter.
There are indeed many many policies on this regarding ISP and spamming. As MinkMan said you should thoroughly investigate your ISP’s particular policy, chances are if you are as clean as you claim then you should be able to work out a solution.
There are also online solutions to this through companies such as Postmaster General and Cheetahmail. They tend to not be cheap, although I’m not sure if they have more affordable options for your scale.
Most websites who handle large user based mailings, simply run it using sendmail (or the Microsoft equivalent) on the webserver. Assuming you use Apache server, since its a small business, its fairly easy to set it up to do permission mailing from your webserver, entirely bypassing the ISP’s mailservers. It is these mailservers which the ISP actively monitor for spam. All this will take a certain degree of technical knowhow to manage and configure, but once its set up theres not much in the way of ongoing maintence.