Am I Spamming
Am I spamming?
We have had a few customers who clearly did not understand the definition of spam or its guidelines. The following is an example of three cases, hopefully this will help you understand about spam before you send it. Websites are taken offline when the hosting company receives a complaint from a spam authority. They work directly with the customer to resolve the issue or they terminate your services. Usually they will terminate your services if you don’t understand what you are doing and how to prevent it from happening again.
Forum mail blast
Customer has a forum with 2000 active members. Once a month they send out a newsletter to their members. They send it from an unmonitored email address. They called their hosting complaining that their email ere not getting to some members who had an account with a particular email provider. The web hosting company found out that they had an RBL report for the server sending out spam because of this domain.
Bought a mailing list
One customer called to buy services and asked how many emails could he send at one time. We stated 250 an hour. He sounded frustrated, so I asked him why he needed to send so many at one time. He stated he had bought a list of email addresses from a company and wanted to send his newsletter.
Get your own addresses, directly from visitors from your site. You can also work with another newsletter to get your information to the same types of customers, this is called vertical marketing. You can have tehm put a link on thier newsletter to sign up for yours, or you can have them include some of your newsletter in thiers.
Third party spamvertising
One company didn’t want to send out emails directly and started using a third party to have them send out their newsletter which included a little information about their company and a link to their website. These emails were sent through the third party email server so that they could monitor bounce backs, complaints and take people off their mailing list when the subscribers requested.
Here are some ways to prevent being blocked as spam
Monitor mailboxes
People get into trouble the most when they dont monitor the email box they are sending thier emails from. People usually request to get removed from yrou list if they cannot find the way to do it, once they recieve a second email from you when they already requested to be removed they file a complaint with thier ISP who in turn contacts your hsoting company with the complaint.This will also help you keep track of email addresses that have been closed down and remove them from your list.
Double opt-in
I tell my cusotmers put your unsubscribe links at the top and the bottom of your newletter. Don’t hide them you want people to see them. Also, use a double opt-in system. People request to be on your mailing list, they recieve an email to confirm this. If they do not confirm it they never get a newsletter.
Check the RBLs.
If your email server is listed on an RBL, chances are that your carefully crafted messages aren’t actually getting through to some of your subscribers. RBL stands for Realtime Blackhole List, a list of IP addresses known to have distributed spam emails. email server is listed on an RBL, chances are that your carefully crafted messages aren’t actually getting through to some of your subscribers. RBL stands for Realtime Blackhole List, a list of IP addresses known to have distributed spam emails.
There are hundreds of RBLs and it would take forever to check each one manually. Fortunately there are plenty of online services that allow you to check multiple lists at once. Simply visit any of these sites, enter your IP address and click submit. In moments you’ll know whether your server is listed, and where. It’s a good idea to check more than one service, to cover the most possible RBLs.
Check your IP Address at:
- RBLS.org
- Moensted.dk
- Open RBL
- MAPS, the original mail abuse prevention system.
Related Posts
By: solarbluseth
web hosting guru
