Using CF to send bulk email.

[ehaemmerle]

We have collected about 30,000 emails over the years from our opt-in form on our e-commerce website. We have never really done anything with them and now we want to start sending out newsletters. We have looked into various services but they are pretty expensive considering I know that technically we can do it with Fusion, especially Fusion 8 which we have. My question is, what are the caveats if any. I'm mostly concerned with the emails getting flagged as SPAM or our IP address getting blacklisted. The email will have our contact information, phone number address etc. Are there headers that I need to force? Or anything else I need to do to not have the emails flagged as SPAM?

THANKS

[DongerNeedFood]

For starters:

* Make sure you have an SPF record set up in your DNS setup for your domain.
* Make sure to include both mailparts (plain and html).
* Make sure to include an unsubscribe link in the newsletter.
* Make sure the unsubscribe link doesn't display their email address on the page if they do unsubscribe.

That should get you rolling.

[ehaemmerle]

OK so I got all that except the SPF record. Whats that? I do have access to my domain setup to do that though.

[DongerNeedFood]

Here's what I did. It seemed to make google and aol happy...

I added 2 txt records in my domain:

txt record #1 -
Name: @
Value: v=spf1 mx ip4:0.0.0.0 ~all
TTL: 1day

txt Record #2 -
Name: mail
Value: v=spf1 a ip4:0.0.0.0 -all
TTL: 1day

NOTE: "0.0.0.0" should represent the IP address of the mail server you will be sending from for the domain.

How you will set up txt records within your domain settings will depend on your provider.

You can google setting up a SPF record for more specifics.

[ehaemmerle]

OK so I read up on SPF records and figured out what mine should be. Now I cant figure out where to actually put the SPF record. Basically here is how we are setup. We have two dedicated servers at a hosting company. So the website in question is on one box, but we will be sending the email from the other box because we will be using Fusion 8 which is on the other box. I have RDP access to both boxes and full admin rights. Do I add the SPF record on the machine that is sending the email? Or is this something our hosting company does somewhere on their end. I cant find the "DNS manager" on the server and I'm ignorant to how any of that works anyway. FYI it is a Windows 2003 server.

THANKS

[Fetch]

SPF records are actually text (TXT) records added to the DNS zone of the domain name that is used in the sending. For example, if I was adding an SPF record for my company, HostMySite.com, I would have to find the nameservers that domain uses (ns1.lnhi.net, ns2.lnhi.net, ns3.lnhi.net) then use whatever method my host provides for editing my zone file for HostMySite.com on those nameservers.

If you're using a managed webhost or one with decent support they should be able to help you figure out exactly what your SPF record should look like in your case and help you with adding it (and it may be that they restrict access so they have to add it themselves).

Now, having said that, let's go back to the original question. I know that you said you don't want to pay a lot of money for this, however I think you should be able to find a bulk mailing service that could cheaply, or your host may have some method of doing this as well that would let the messages be sent from THEIR servers rather than yours. While using SPF records help in keeping yourself from being blacklisted, it's not a final solution else spammers would simply use them as well. Each ISP and major email provider has it's own definition of what they consider 'spam' and how they receive bulk mail. AOL, for instance, will terminate any SMTP session formed to deliver mail if you try to deliver to 20 or so invalid addresses in one shot. That's AOL's way of saying "If you don't know that you've got this many bad addresses in your list, you're obviously a spammer". Also, AOL users can report your messages as spam, and if they do so then AOL will consider you a spammer regardless of whether or not your list is actually valid. In short, if their users think you're spamming them, then that's good enough for AOL.

In short, I would definitely AVOID doing this yourself via your own box - you'll have a greater chance at successful delivery to all your recipients if you use an established service, and you won't have to worry about as many ill effects if your messages do get considered spam for whatever reason.

[ehaemmerle]

Awesome Jamie. Thanks for the advice. The funny thing is that our dedicated servers are AT HostMySite.com lol. Small world. :-) We love hostmysite. We host about 50 sites or so there. Anyway, I agree, I think I'll just find a service to handle this. Sounds like its too much of a headache.

THANKS

[Fetch]

Oh, well that simplifies things dramatically. HMS has a few list servers that we allow clients to relay mail from, so you could still do this in CF and just bounce the message off the list servers (using them in this fashion is called SMTP relay).

Contact support and they'll help out with this.

[BKBK]

Search the web for the pros and cons of outsourcing e-mail.