[ILUG] Sending bulk email as reliably as possible

[Niall O Broin]

On 20 Dec 2007, at 09:52, Justin Mason wrote:

> Niall O Broin writes:
>> I'm about to start sending lots of email on behalf of customers. The
>> emails will have sender addresses like YADAYADA
>> +CUSTID at notspamnonotatall.com. What mechanisms can I use to maximise
>> the chance of receiving servers accepting that these messages are not
>> spam (which, in fact, they're not, but there may be many thousands of
>> them going to ONE address, and that's sure going to look like spam).
>
> !
>
> good luck getting that through....

Indeed. Being realistic, I don't expect these mails to go through,  
but there's politics afoot here which I can't go into in detail. The  
email addresses to which the information is to be sent are intended  
to receive such emails, but they probably didn't expect the volumes  
I'm talking about. It IS possible to receive the information in a  
much more efficient way, but some organisations are refusing to  
accept that. Accordingly, the alternative is to send email to the  
appropriate address.

>> So, I want to make sure we have Domain Keys, and SPF records set up.
>> Is there any other sender certification mechanism we could use that
>> I'm missing?
>>
>> Note that because of the volumes of emails (hundreds of thousands)
>> and because the sender is a not for profit, a mechanism with a per
>> email charge, no matter how small, is not acceptable , but a one off
>> fee for certification would probably be acceptable, provided it's
>> worthwhile.
>
> Habeas and/or Bonded Sender are the two we support in SpamAssassin.
> They are reliable in terms of *not* being abused by spammers.

I'll look into those.

> - sign up for the AOL feedback loop.
>
> - I think Gmail have one too.
>
> - ensure your SPF record is Hotmail-compatible, and submit it to their
>   systems.  this is kind of pointless, as Hotmail's filtering is so  
> broken
>   nowadays that you're not likely to get anything through... :(

Thankfully, I don't have to care about Hotmail, or AOL or Yahoo - the  
emails will all be going TO big organisations who either will have  
their own email infrastructure, or will have it handed off to an ESP  
- but they won't be using AOL or Hotmail.  What's really important  
here is that I have everything reasonable done so that a reasonable  
person could assume that these mails are not spam - and then when  
they start to block or drop the mails, we can make noise.

> - ensure rDNS is set up and sensible for the SMTP emitters.

Of course.

> - use the same domain (at least) for From and SMTP MAIL FROM  
> addresses.

Now that's one I wouldn't necessarily have thought to check - thanks.




Niall