emailing to a db of members - any tips?

[theotrain]

i have to send emails to a bunch of members in a database, probably in the neighborhood of 500-1000. in the past i have written simple cf scripts that just loop through all the emails and send them off.

while it works, a very high percentage of these emails go right in the bulk/trash folder, even though these people have signed up to receive the mail. realistically, very few people will ever go in and tell their email clients to accept mail from our domain ahead of time.

is there a better way? do professional bulk mail services do any better, or does their stuff wind up in the trash at about the same rate? (if they are better can you recommend one?)

are there any coding tricks to increase acceptance of the mail? i get newsletters from certain companies, like adobe, and they never wind up in the trash even though i never told my email client to specifically accept them. how the hell do they do that?

any tips or advice appreciated.

 

[GUJUm0deL]

Mails usually end up in the junk/spam folder based off the ip address or the domain name of the sender. Like, Hotmail or yahoo domain names have a higher percentage of being sent in the junk folder cause of the domain name. Most e-mail clients also block mails from ip addresses. Not much you can do there.

Just because your adobe mails make their way into the inbox and not the junk folder doesn't mean their doing something cool, just means you've been lucky. I have mails that come from adobe that sometimes end up in the junk folder. I have mails comes from youtube that make their way into the inbox and the junk folder.

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[theotrain]

thats about what i thought. i cant think of any reason why the IP would be blocked, and certainly not the domain... ive done this from several web host's servers (like jodohost) in the past and same thing mostly.

i guess what i dont understand is that i've received email plenty of times from unknown people, like people clients have referred to me and i nearly always get their mail. but bulk mail nearly always gets filtered out. overall, this is good... but how does the filter know the mail is sent by software and not by an individual? it seems like there must be a tip-off. or not?

it seems like none of the explanations ive heard explain sufficiently how mail sent by scripts seems to get junked, and mail sent by individuals with unfamiliar addresses usually gets through. i could be delusional, is this a real phenomena?

 

[jstreich]

Some e-mail clients put things in the spam box b/c they have to many people in the to line. Consider listing everyone in the bcc instead for 2 reasons.

First, anyone on the "To" will see the everyone else's e-mail on the To list and some people will get mad about privacy concerns.

Second, you won't get caught by having a super long to, and only IP and content filters will cause any type of problem.

You may also wish to add a mail list type prefix for filter purposes to the subject line to help people filter the mail properly into a folder dedicated to the list or group (e.g. "[Sample Group Name] News"). Often it's easier for people to white-list or filter on subject than it is on domain.

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