Cloaking email headers - how to?

[paulyboy]

Some here may find this post a little annoying at first, but please read through it before you form an opinion.

I run a huge site with almost 200,000 members. We send a monthly newsletter to all of the opt in mambers (about 150,000).

The problem is that regardless of whether they opted in, a small percentage report us to blacklists whenever an email is sent. To hazard a guess, they have probably forgotten that they signed up a few years previously, or their partner etc uses their computer.

It's a very small percentage (usually about 5-10 users from 150,000 users).

We are a bit stuck as to how to handle this as we can't send emails out to those who actually want them. Some of these emails are warnings about dangerous products (FDA Alerts) etc.

Any solutions out there?

[thing3b]

Personally, I think that it is the blacklists problem. If you are on a specific blacklist, try to talk to the manager of the blacklist about it.

Make sure that there is an easy to use, one click method of unsubscribing from the emails, and that you try to include proof (eg ip) that they did sign up.

[jomaxx]

I don't see how cloaking comes into it. Do you send emails to this opt-in list anonymously?

[paulyboy]

Well, I was wondering if we could cloak the sender ip, therefore avoid being blacklisted?

Someone suggested using an smtp relay that builds a new header as opposed to just appending to the original source.

So, we send it to an smtp relay on another server (therefore new IP) and it looks like it comes direct from that server. Anybody know of an smtp server capable of it?

But either way, that still doesn't really solve the problem.

[kovacs]

LOL last time I checked, this wasn't the "learn how to spam" forum.

[paulyboy]

At the end of the day, there are probably a helluva lot of genuine sites in the same predicament.

Problem is, any solution I can think of is going to benefit spammers. Of course, they have probably already though of it.

[jomaxx]

It seems to me any legit ISP will have heavy penalties (i.e. immediate shutdown) for sending email with forged headers. Also, some antispam legislation also specifically singles out the use of forged email origin. It doesn't seem like something you'd want to mess around with.

Have you considered outsourcing it to a mailing list management service?