Prevent getting marked as spammer

[CVMichael]

Where I work, we send e-mails to our customers when they checkmark "Send me e-mail about this..." on our web-sites.

We have quite a few web-sites & customers, and a lot of people want us to send them e-mail about our products etc.

Our system admin told me that we got marked as spammers and he had to talk with our ISP to remove us from the spammers list.

My question is: How to prevent getting marked as spammer ?

I tried to google this, but all I find is how to prevent getting spam e-mails, but nothing about sending e-mails.

[Hypermommy]

First off, LOVE! the Stitch!!!! That little guy rocks!!

As for spam, I'm not 100% sure of the answer but I know most of the websites I've signed up for email in the past several years have text on there advising me to put XXXXXXXX (whatever the email addy that sends mail) in my address book so the mail gets through. As I understand it, a lot of ISPs and mail filtering programs use a logic that filters out unknown emails, but if you put the sender's addy in your addybook it lets the mail through.

There may be a better way but I've noticed those getting more prevalent over the last several years, so it seems like it might be something to try.

[CVMichael]

What you are talking about is on the client side, we don't want to control that because they always get through.

The problem is that some SMTP e-mail servers (or our ISP ?) blocks ALL our e-mails to get through once we get marked as spammer.

So, it's not on the user level

[Hypermommy]

Oh, okay... I see. Well, sorry I couldn't be more help. Maybe I get an "A" for effort and my badness level can be reduced a tiny bit?

[visualAd]

Type the domain or IP into the DNS Blacklist lookup: http://www.dnsbl.info/dnsbl-database-check.php

This will direct you toward which ISPs are blocking the mail. Another blacklist to check is SORBS.

Another place to check: http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/

Many ISPs (including your own), will automatically blacklist your public IP (or dynamic address) unless you contact them. This mass block approach is taken because the majority of ISP users will simply use web mail or relay their messages through a intermediate server.

[vbcode1980]

My question is: How to prevent getting marked as spammer ?
I tried to google this, but all I find is how to prevent getting spam e-mails, but nothing about sending e-mails.

If there was such a thing, all the spammers would use it too

I'm afraid there's no such thing as a registry of honest mailing companies.
If you send too much suspicious spam, you'll get blacklisted.
(Even Gmail got blacklisted once by my ISP, so it doesn't matter who you are)

And I don't think your ISP will tell you how their spam filter works either.

The only thing I can think of is sending the mail in smaller batches.

[visualAd]

If there was such a thing, all the spammers would use it too

I'm afraid there's no such thing as a registry of honest mailing companies.
If you send too much suspicious spam, you'll get blacklisted.
(Even Gmail got blacklisted once by my ISP, so it doesn't matter who you are)

And I don't think your ISP will tell you how their spam filter works either.

The only thing I can think of is sending the mail in smaller batches.

Thats simply not correct. /you can get yourself removed from spam blacklists if you contact your ISP and are able to prove you have a legitimate business purpose for sending large quantities of mail.

[CVMichael]

The e-mail sending program that I made, can send ~50 e-mails per second. But because of this problem I had to slow it down to 1 email every 3 seconds. Our admin told me to slow it down by this much until we find out how to fix this problem.

They are planning to get a faster internet connection (something optical), but I don't think it's gonna solve the problem because that still does not stop other servers to block our IP...

[vbcode1980]

Thats simply not correct. /you can get yourself removed from spam blacklists if you contact your ISP and are able to prove you have a legitimate business purpose for sending large quantities of mail.

At my previous place of employement (quite a large organisation) we had to stop using e-mail for these kinds of things because the ISP would block it. They couldn't be pursueded to release the block..

[CVMichael]

Type the domain or IP into the DNS Blacklist lookup: http://www.dnsbl.info/dnsbl-database-check.php

This will direct you toward which ISPs are blocking the mail. Another blacklist to check is SORBS.

Another place to check: http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/
...

I checked with both links, and we are green everywhere (i.e. not blocked)

Thanks for the links visualAd

[visualAd]

At my previous place of employement (quite a large organisation) we had to stop using e-mail for these kinds of things because the ISP would block it. They couldn't be pursueded to release the block..

The solution to that problem is simple; find another ISP or upgrade the service :P. Large organisations generate huge volumes of email traffic, whether it be from individual employees or as part of a marketing campaign.

I would not be surprised that if the service an organisation is paying for does not include an agreement to host such mass mailing events, then they will be blocked from doing so.

[stanav]

If you just Google for "avoid being flagged as spam", you should find a lot of tips for it. As for your ISP, if you can prove that your bussiness is legitimate and sending out a lot of emails is part of it, I beleive they will remove you from their black list.

[CVMichael]

I guess "flagged" was the keyword here...

I already read some articles, they are pretty good.

Thanks

[Lord Orwell]

have you tried just sending one email with multiple addressees? BCC them and they won't see the other email addresses in their email.