Sending bulk e-mail

In My Humble Opinion
1

Calm down, I’m not asking how to spam. I have a opt-in list of about 2,000 people who have asked to received my monthly e-mail newsletter, and the methods I’ve used up till now aren’t working so well anymore. So I’m looking for advice on the best tools and services available. I’ve done some googling, but I’d like to get input from actual users.

The main problem I’m facing is that it seems that my two ISPs (Comcast and AT&T Global) are both blocking e-mails to multiple recipients if even one address is no good. So you cut half the names out and see if it’ll go through. Then you send half the remaining names, winnowing it down until you find the bad one(s). So instead of sending one message, you had to send a dozen or more. It’s time consuming and a pain in the butt.

My needs are not complex. I send one message each month to about 1,600 people, with a slightly different version going to the 400 or so subcribers of my print edition newsletter. Until recently I just cut and paste the e-mail addresses from my Access DB into the CC field of an Outlook message.

I’m going to experiment with the Mail Merge function in Outlook. I’m very familiar with Word’s merge function, but haven’t used Outlook’s. Anyone here know anything about it? Recommend it? Hate it?

What about other software products or service providers that will help me send mail without considering it to be spam?

Thanks.

2

Drop me a line. I do several thousand per week to an opt-in list. I’ll plug you into my provider. He’s cheap, reliable, and takes care of those ‘black hole’ issues through his company.

3

Thanks, JC, I’ll send you an e-mail when I get into the office tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, I’m interested in hearing from anyone else with recommendations or suggestions.

4

Only one suggestion here… never, **ever **do this! Putting them in “CC” makes everybodys address visible to everybody else. That’s just not cool. Instead if you’re doing something like this, send the messge to yourself (or a dead address) and “BCC” everybody else.

5

Sorry, I meant BCC. I send it to myself with the recipients in the BCC field.