bulk email problems

membership newsletters are being rejected (by mailservers?)

[steve_e]

Hi -

I have a site with about 1600 members. I use Invision forum software to provide the heart of my site which is community based. Until recently my monthly newsletter email to members was fairly trouble free - however now I'm getting lots of bounce back messages whenever I send a bulk email.

The individual ones are easy enough to understand - people change their email accounts and so on. But increasingly I'm getting mail server kind of emails which bounce loads of emails from a particular ISP - for example:

The addresses to which the message has not yet been delivered are:
****[e-mail]
Delay reason: Remote host smtp.ntlworld.com [62.253.162.40] closed connection after RCPT TO:<[e-mail]>

(this might be repeated for a hundred email addresses using NTLWorld.com)

or this kind of thing:

[e-mail]
SMTP error from remote mailer after RCPT TO:<[e-mail]>:
host mx2.hotmail.com [65.54.252.230]: 552 Too many recipients
[e-mail]
SMTP error from remote mailer after RCPT TO:<[e-mail]>:
host mx2.hotmail.com [65.54.252.230]: 552 Too many recipients

I don't have the skill to read the error messages and work out whether they originate from my host email server, from the server of the ultimate recipients, or from the forum software (or a mixture of these). But I know that a big percentage of members are apparently not receiving newsletters that I think they probably want.

Should I just expect large numbers of failed messages. Places like Webmasterworld presumably send out much bigger emails. Are there techniques I should be adopting - do for example ntlworld mailservers treat my emails as spam when they see a couple of hundred coming in?

Be grateful for any advice - or if I'm posting in the wrong area perhaps you could let me know?

Regards, Steve.

[jim_w]

Can you throttle back the outgoing emails? This may help with the hotmails. Check some of the spam lists to see if your host has gotten onto a ban list somewhere. I think it is spamcop that has links to such lists.

[steve_e]

Um. Does throttle back mean send them out in smaller batches? I don't know of any way to do this manually. My forum software is actually doing the clever stuff, via SMTP or PHP (I get the same results using both). I just press the send button...

[jim_w]

>>Does throttle back mean send them out in smaller batches<<

Yea. Some mail servers will start rejecting incoming mail if too many come in from one host in x number of minutes, etc. I send out mail in batches of 25 at one time and I wait 5 minutes between each batch. What I do in the down time is take the rejected mail, look at the error, and delete some, or if it is just a case of the mail server or router being down, I don't delete them.

Yes, it takes forever, but, since all my users are business people, I start on Friday night and go till I finish which is well before Monday AM.

OK, I admit, I sometimes jump up to 30 or 35 at a time.

[eWhisper]

As a receiver of a lot of email, that suddenly stopped last week. I called my ISP, and they had blanketed blocked several large domains.

According to them, this is becoming more and more common as people will sign up for emails, forget they signed up, and then complain to their ISP that they are getting spam.

The ISPs then use a detection software that if x emails are sent from the same domain to their users, all the email is bounced, and that place added to the block list.

My clients span 10 different ISPs for various things, 6 of them had ended up blocking Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and internet.com without even realizing it.

The problem has been corrected, because a customer complained, but I think it's something your customers also have to take remind the ISPs of as well.

[steve_e]

Thanks for the tips both of you! Jim - it seems a huge burden of time. You'd think there would be some clever mailer software that could be set to automate your batching of emails, so you can spend your weekend more enjoyably - or at least more profitably...

[hanuman]

You will never satisfy ALL the spam blocks with your list and ALWAYS loose some mail, as long as their is spam.

It is always good to:

1. Keep the newsletter text only and try not to exceed 20K per issue.
2. Reduce the number of emails that are being send by your server per connection block
3. Keep your list clean - with as little as possible bad addresses.
4. Run the list as double opt-in/opt-out

Always contact @postmaster and work with them to white list your IP if you experience delivery issues.

I had good results complaining and solving similar issues across aol and juno....

hth

[steve_e]

Thanks Hanuman -
My main problem is that there seems to be no way to get through to ntlworld, who are the main problem mail servers. If I send mail to [e-mail] I get automated messages giving me standard information and their standard support number. Phoning the standard support number gets me through to people who support domestic consumers with their internet connection problems. These people don't even understand the problem I'm trying to explain to them because it's not on their main menu of fault finding issues...

I'm grateful for these tips - thanks!

Regards, Steve.