Why do email newsletter systems cost so much?
Why do email newsletter systems cost so much?
Once upon a time the World Wide Web was a much less regulated area. You could get a system that would send out thousands of emails for very little. Today there are new laws that prohibit unsolicited email for good reason. We’re all tired of spammers. This has increased server management costs significantly.
Along with new anti-spam laws came a new group of private internet companies policing the web. Companies like Spam Haus, Spam Cop and hundreds of others have opened. Here is a sample page for the results on Google with DNSStuff.com (a paid service but you get several free lookups) http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/ip4r.ch?&ip=google.com
As you can see there are tons of resources that can be subscribed to by Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) like Comcast, Verizon etc. You never know which company uses which resource. If the server your website resides on gets listed as a spammer for sending out unwanted emails everyone on that server or I.P. address is usually affected. That means your email may get through to Comcast email customers but not to Verizon email customers, depending on which resource the ISP uses.
Worse yet there are no rules that all these listing agencies must live by. Some set spam traps others require a certain I.P. address receive a certain number of complaints before they blacklist or blocklist the server. Online email interfaces like Comcast Browser Based Email systems put the Report as SPAM button very close to the Delete button causing some emails to be erroneously reported as SPAM. I have not seen the AOL interface but I was once told they had the same problem.
The first indication a server is black or blocklisted is usually a complaint from a client trying to send email from their domain name email address. When notified we start an investigation to find out which agency has black or blocklisted us and begin the process of getting unblocked. It can take days to get the server unblocked. Therefore, your email and email newsletters are not guaranteed to go through.
In the event one of our servers is black or blocklisted and you are affected (even though you are affected collaterally) we will make every attempt to get our affected server off the black or blocklist as soon as possible. However, we are not in control of this procedure and are at the whim of the listing agency. We will also make every attempt to find the offending party and remove them from our server so you are not affected again.
There is much more to it than these few paragraphs can describe. If you are not using an email newsletter system and encounter this problem you should set up your Outlook / Express, Thunderbird etc to have the Outgoing SMTP set to that of your ISP instead of your domain name. Click here to learn how.
