How to e-mail my existing customers a newsletter

without being considered a spammer by my host.

[wone]

Hi all,

I have less than 1000 customers I need to send a newsletter to but I'm having increasing problems with my host thinking I'm after sending spam! The newsletter is 100% legitamate and is only to my exisiting customers. What is the best way to do this?

Regards

[onlineleben]

Go with a professional email provider. Cannot name the services here, there are 2 or 3 good ones around and all the big marketers use them.
Cost is about 20 USD/month for lots of features.

[topr8]

1000 people in a list is pretty small, you should be able to send that yourself i should have thought, i'd consider chnaging hosts.

[wone]

Thanks for your responce, I'll query my host again and investigate professional mail hosts.

Regards

[JollyK]

This may not be an option, but I made the source code for my mailing list subscription system available to my host, and am perfectly willing to provide them access to the signup records. Everything is double-opt-in, and the program records both the signup IP and the confirmation IP. I still have people forgetting they signed up (or their spouse, etc, signed up with their email), but I can prove to my host's satisfaction that I am doing due diligence to make sure that I only mail people who signed up *and* confirmed that they wanted to subscribe.

Every email contains both an "unsubscribe" link (takes you off the list with one click) and an "opt out forever" link (takes you off the list and blocks your address from ever signing up to any of my lists again). Both of these require no password, code, or confirmation. I'm not as worried about people fraudulently unsubscribing people as fraudulently subscribing them.

I have several lists ranging from 2000 or so members down to maybe 5. Not huge, by any means, but every so often someone does report me for spamming, so it's good to be able to prove that the complainer just an idiot. :-)

I agree that if your host just plain isn't willing to give you, the customer, the benefit of a doubt, look for a new host.

JK