How Many Emails is Too Many?

When does high volume cross the line to spam?

[300m]

Hi-

Before I begin I want to emphasize I am not trying to spam.

We have around 1 million email addresses of customers. We want to start sending various email campaigns to larger groups. We have always had email campaigns going, but this would be more like a newsletter to a large segment of people.

Obviously I can’t send them all out at one time, but I can send them out in large chunks (many thousands) . How many is too many before ISP’s flag it? We use a program that allows for throttling on ISP servers so we don’t flood them, but I am trying to send out around 200,000 emails before the end of the week and do not want to get flagged. It would be our largest email in such a short notice, so I have been very conservative with sending them out.

I was hoping that some people might know what a cap limit should be. Please understand this is not spam, these are opt-in customers that can easily opt out.

Currently I am scheduling about 15k per day and that seems to be OK as its giving us the desired affect, but I really want to turn it up more so I can reach that goal, but I am concerned ISP’s will flag us as a spammer or something. I check email black lists and we are clean on every one of them. We have been in business for a decade, so we don’t want to ever tick off the ISP’s

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[piatkow]

I have never been involved with mailings of this order of magnitude but what I have found with partitioning a list is that some service providers will regard multiple mailings within a certain timeframe as spam.

[300m]

Thanks, we know places like AOL should be throttled between sending and others are not so stringent.

[piatkow]

AOL - excuse me while I spit!

[300m]

hehe, yeah beleive it or not there are still people that cling on to AOL accounts.

[rocknbil]

LOL @ piatkow . . . yes, I cringe at seeing this, but it's more than a few. More like millions, I think.

I would hit the potential mail server documentations. For example, I know Yahoo has a limitation on the number of messages that can be received from a given host per hour. I don't think this alone would get you blacklisted (undocumented,) but they would just refuse emails once it reaches the limit. Gmail is the same way, I think.

There are many more factors affecting mass mailings than just quantity.