I want to send a few thousand emails. any advice?

[httpwebwitch]

I have a site where a whole pile of people have signed up for the newsletter. Now I have some news I want to send out to these people, so - it's mailout time!

The last time I did a mass-mailout was over 6 years ago; I used some silly shareware I found on tucows. The mail started flowing out, then I got flagged by my ISP as a spammer and they shut down my connection! My phone rang about 10 minutes later and I had to explain what I was doing to some 17-year old geek at their downtown office.

I want to do this the right way. Any advice?

[JS_Harris]

Ask your host, every host manages their business differently.

Since your list is several thousand large consider using the services of a newsletter delivery service, they specialize in it.

If neither of those helps, break the list down into batches and send them out over time. Shared hosting means neighbors and complaints to your host if you tax the server for an extended period.

[piatkow]

Don't send batches out in quick succession. I used to have four mailing lists which were based on overlapping interest. Typically they all got the same newsletter with one paragraph changed.

At first it was OK then suddenly AOL decided that multiple batches from the same source must be spam and only delivered to their addresses in the first batch received.

The other thing that I learned was NOT to use my ISP for the mailings. There were caps on the number of addresses in a mailing and I regularly had things bounced as spam because of abuse by other customers. I managed my own list but subsequently used my web hosts SMTP server for sending.

A third party service provider may be a good alternative but before parting with any money check if they will accept your existing mailing list "as is" or if they will require everybody to confirm their opt-in. That will have a very high attrition rate.