Bulk email senders

[goldengob]

Can anyone give me any confidence in this bulk email sender I purchased. It is supposed to send directly bypassing my ISP. Ok! Thats fine if it works. The first day I got it I thought I'd check it out and send an email to a few of my friends and relatives. I followed the instructions word for word. Out of the 17 emails I sent, not one of them got there. So I repeated the process to make sure I hadn't screwed up and...nothing! 0 out of 17 ain't a very good percentage.
Its ok that it boast 80'000 emails an hour, but how many will actually get there?
Am I better just to break them down in to smaller groups and just use my outlook?
Can anyone offer any advice?
Or can anyone tell me of a bulk email sender that they know actually delivers?

Much appreciated!

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I must confess to not knowing a lot about this but how can it bypass your ISP?

[12inch]

It is possible you're settings of your program are not correct. Try and change your primary and secondary DNS of your ISP. It doens't use the SMTP server of your ISP, but only the DNS servers to resolve names.

You can also try another program, HotCast Mass Mailer. This works very good. I use it to send HTML newsletters to customers. You get instant feedback of the delivery of your messages. You can download a trial of HotCast and try it out.

I've written an article how to create and send HTML e-mail [anandgraves.com] and an article how to use HotCast Mass Mailer [anandgraves.com]. Perhaps this can help you further.

[Romeo]

> but how many will actually get there?

The answer to this question may depend on several factors:

-1- if the local config of your mail program is not OK:
--none--

-2- if your ISP does filter port 25 (SMTP) [Some large ISPs are said to do so to NOT let you bypass their own mail servers to prevent virus spreading and spamming from 0wned windows zombie PCs]:
--none--

-3- if your target receipients (or their ISPs) operate DNSBL black hole lists filtering you for apparently sending mail directly from a DUL (dynamic IP address of a dial-up-line or similar):
-- some but not all --

If none of your test mails got through, but the program didn't report any errors -- well, this could be bad programming or the program may have found itself stuck with option -2- described above (however, it should have shown at least some timeout errors).

Sending bulk mails is not that easy today ...

Regards,
R.