I currently run a website with 40,000 members, and I need to send them
all an email with site announcements. My privacy policy clearly states
that users may receive periodic announcements about the site, so there
shouldn't be a SPAM issue, right? My web host is concerned about being
blacklisted if I send the emails. Also, what is the best way/software
to send these emails? Do I need a separate mail server for both
security issues and performance? I'm sure sending 40,000 emails, not
to mention handling the number of bounces, is a resource hog. Thanks
for your answer.
Oh, the site is globaldust.com if you'd like to reference it. |
Request for Question Clarification by
leapinglizard-ga
on
26 Nov 2004 09:00 PST
It should be up to your webhost to decide whether he can allow you to
send mail to 40,000 members. Of course you can run a strictly opt-in
mailing list for which members sign up from your website, but with
that many members you are bound to end up with erroneous spam
complaints. This is largely a policy question, not a technology
question. What exactly can I do for you? Would you like me to give a
detailed account of how you can minimize the risk of incurring spam
complaints?
As for your performance and bandwidth concerns, you should find out
whether email usage counts against your traffic cap. In my webhosting
account it doesn't, but in many others it does. If it does in your
case, you can avoid the cost of purchasing additional bandwidth by
minimizing the size of each message. To do this, avoid HTML content
and images. Stick to plain ASCII text. To send 40,000 messages of 3000
characters each -- that's about 500 words -- would eat up 120 MB of
bandwidth. It's probable that only a small fraction of your members
would opt in to the mailing list, however, so your actual bandwidth
consumption would be much less
leapinglizard
|
