All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Question about bulk mailing
DrDirector
Member
Since 2013 I have multiplayer services for an old RTS game. Since it's 20th anniversary of the game release I decided to send the first ever newsletter to users that registered on the forum / multiplayer in the past. Such email would bring nostalgia, and generally remind them about the game, which could be good for the multiplayer activity. Nearly all (if not all) returning users are happy that everything is still working, and that we still have a small community after all these years.
The mail I am planning to send would only contain links to 1 domain, without any tracking. There's an unsubscribe link and all required information. Initial tests have shown that it's well constructed and isn't marked as spam by any providers (except hotmail of course, but fk them).
The only problem I expect would be a very high bounce rate. After all these years, many addresses are non existing. I made the initial clearing with DNS MX queries, checking if it's not a disposable address (from the list of 100000), and many, many other things. However, it's simply impossible to determine which addresses are active without sending an actual email.
I also own some VPS (some of them for over 6 years now). I noticed that their addresses are not blacklisted. However, obviously bulk mailing is forbidden by their TOS.
I generally don't need to send it, because I have no real profit from it, but I wanted good for the community.
So now I don't know how to deal with it... This would be a 1-time email, and the next ones possibly in a few years (but then I would at least know which addresses bounced back). The expensive bulk-mailing services are out of the question, as there are no funds for it.
What do you guys recommend in this case? Should I try to send a small amount of mails from every VPS I have, or the provider would know about unsuccessful deliveries? Or maybe some provider from lowendtalk could rent me a VPS for this purpose? Obviously I would show the email preview and provided more information.
Comments
Hey DrDirector, as long as you have the opt in info you should be fine sending out a email newly to your old contacts. That is the legal rudiment to keep in. But yes to get through 100k records I would suggest doing it slowly and over time so nothing gets blocked. Hope that helps a bit.
Thanks for the reply. The 100 000 I mentioned was the number of domains that I checked for disposable email match. I actually have around 45000 emails to send.
So in your opinion, I could use my existing VPS providers, even though their ToS mentions that bulk mailing is forbidden? So if I only sent X emails per day, it should be fine? They wouldn't care about the bounce rate, as it would go directly to me, correct?
I highly doubt that. ToS breaking can break the contract anytime and you won't even be able to contest that.
Sendy for mailing list software
Amazon SES to send
Send a little at a time, if the bounce rate is too high ses will suspend you. Sendy will help you track the bounces and remove them if you mail in the future.
I would just drop support a message letting them know that it isn't a virus sending out mail all of a sudden. Just depends how closely and the method they use to monitor your VPS. Worse that will happen is they will reply saying don't do that and prevent a bigger issue.
Ah ok sorry I mis-duplicated that. I would hit up your VPS provider just communicate what your doing. If your sending out random offers, then ya that might ruffle some feather. Sending to contacts you cultivated yourself and know is mostly fine.
Every day, I submit spam reports.
You won't believe how hard it is to enforce hosters to follow their own terms.
There are many third party providers that can do email address validation. I've previously used this one. https://clearout.io/email-verifier/ It's expensive, but works if you have a lot of addresses for verification.
If you're doing bulk mailing get SendGrid or Mailgun or another SMTP service.
Heck, these services are useful even for a personal email server with blacklisted IPs.
Do not stop. Do not stop ever! You are doing mans job.
what to do lol
It is amazing, many hosters want to know spam trap addresses, to share with their spamming clients, so they could exclude from spam lists.
A rare hoster follows their own terms.
As I mentioned earlier, I cannot pay for the Sendy, SendGrid as there are no funds for it. It would require my own investment.
I read that email address validation tools are quite scammy. If over 50% of the addresses I have are gmail, 30% hotmail, there is no way to verify if the address still exists after so many years using these tools. I already did the base MX validation, cleaning from the offensive words and such. I used the free checks of these email validation tools and they often address to be valid, even when I put something random, or when I knew they already expired.
Also lumrid can be used for free to do this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Emailmarketing/comments/1bijzuq/the_pricing_for_email_verification_is_a_scam/
Amazon SES refused my production access, because I was stupid enough to mention that I would expect the higher bounce rate... Lesson learnt not to tell the truth in the future
Mailgun requires bounce rate < 2%.
And yes, the VPS providers won't risk giving me permission, if I have some cheap Black Friday services.
Does anybody know how "Spam" reports are made? From what I understood, someone must click "Report Spam" button in their mail client (such as gmail), and then Google sends a report to the IP address owner (VPS Support?). What if the email is clearly non-commercial and informative? They don't validate that?
For the peace of mind, is there maybe some VPS provider on lowend that could offer a VPS for this purpose and verify the email I want to send? I'll still expect bounce rate of 5-10%, but is this a huge problem for the IP, or rather just for my domain reputation?
EDIT: I checked the Sendy costs now and it doesn't look that bad, but again, will they accept the high bouce rate, or suspend me?
Sendy is literally just the software you'll be sending the email(s) through. You still need to connect it to some SMTP server to send the emails out, such as SES, Mailgun, Sendgrid, etc.
Instead of Sendy I'd probably just recommend using Listmonk (free, open-source).
Can you make money doing that?
Try sending smaller batches from different VPSs, but keep an eye on the bounce rates. Ensure you’re not crossing any lines with your providers.
law enforcement
but it is offtop
by subject..
many many hosts protect their clients from abuse and help them conceal spam activity – what are we talking about..
Hey guys. You probably won't believe, but I was able to send ALL mails using mail.baby!
Initially there were some issues because I was a new user, or I triggered some systems, but the support is very quick to reply and fixed/adjusted everything for me. Thanks to this I was able to send with a bit higher bounce rate that it's normally allowed. So I'm very happy of how well it went with mail.baby
Seems overcomplicated to send a newsletter these days.
A lot of research to make this done!
Congrats anyway !
That's awesome, glad it worked out.
Totally get the nostalgia angle—sounds like a great initiative for the community! Since it's a one-time send, you might try throttling small batches over time from your VPS, just to stay under the radar. Make sure your SPF/DKIM/DMARC are set up right to avoid issues. Some providers might be lenient if you’re transparent about it being a clean, non-commercial email. Maybe even check the offers section—someone here might help with a short-term solution.