Re: [PLUG] How to avoid spam blacklists?...

[Fred Stluka <fred@bristle.com>]

Tim,

Good idea about batching and self-throttling.

About 20 years ago, I wrote my own custom mailer, that I've evolved
over the years.  It loads my favorite editor with a message template
and all of my mailing lists, allows me to compose, then sends the
message off to each recipient separately (instead of one big BCC),
adding info about which list(s) it was sent to, how to unsubscribe,
etc.  It already does things like various levels of timeout and
retry, in case of wireless LAN errors when sending from the garden
via my laptop, logs the outgoing message, recipients, timestamps,
retries, error messages, etc.

I'm not doing massive mailings.  I'm currently more of a boutique
tip-of-the-day service, only sending to hundreds or a thousand
recipients per day, all of whom asked to be on the lists.  Still,
that's probably enough traffic to hit some ISP limits.

Should be easy to have it send in smaller batches with delays.

Thanks,
--Fred
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Fred Stluka -- mailto:fred@bristle.com -- http://bristle.com/~fred/
Bristle Software, Inc -- http://bristle.com -- Glad to be of service!
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Tim Allen wrote:
> I've done a fair amount of work with throttling. Many hosts (such as
> Dreamhost) have built in limits, and will silently discard legitimate
> emails if you hit a limit. Dreamhost's default, for example, is 200
> per hour. Be sure you check your ISP (if you're using one) before you
> start. Being part of a larger ISP with such a policy will help prevent
> getting blacklisted, but also means more upfront work.
>
> With Dreamhost, you can get that raised to 500 per hour if you have
> opt-in sign up with confirmation. This means, if someone signs up for
> an email list, they are sent an email with a confirmation link they
> much click to confirm... and you must record the time and IP address
> in a DB. This is a best practice anyway, and will go a long way to
> showing you're being responsible if you ever have to get off of a
> list.
>
> We store all of our outgoing emails in a DB, one per row, with
> prioritization. Then a cron job runs every 6 minutes, and sends out 50
> each time.
>
> Just my two cents / experience.
>
> Regards,
>
> -Tim
> ___________________________________________________________________________
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