In the modern world, SPAM has become a significant issue for the Internet Providers and users alike. A lot of Internet Providers want to minimize amount of spam emails going through their systems and thus most of them follow a standard pattern for all users. Not that this is any standard at all, but when fighting spam, this has become a common practice and most Internet Providers are using these techniques to fight spam in their systems. Here is what they do:
In the modern world, SPAM has become a significant issue for the Internet Providers and users alike. A lot of Internet Providers want to minimize amount of spam emails going through their systems and thus most of them follow a standard pattern for all users. Not that this is any standard at all, but when fighting spam, this has become a common practice and most Internet Providers are using these techniques to fight spam in their systems. Here is what they do:
- Usually, most of the Internet Providers will completely close any access on port 25 to any host, except to their own SMTP server. This is done, so that you can only use their SMTP server to send any email messages at all. The thought behind this is, your Internet Provider can control and easily filter out spam going in and out on one server as opposed to filtering it on their entire network.
- Not all of the providers are that harsh, some will allow their clients to send email messages directly, but will put all of their dynamically allocated IP addresses on a dynamic black lists. This would mean, that about 99% of your messages will be rejected by a target servers, because most of them already use dynamic black lists as a first line of defense. The thought behind this is that it is easier for Internet Providers, because spam filtering is done by somebody else. Other SMTP servers who subscribe to dynamic black lists are doing most of the work for them.
- Very often, even if you are using their own servers to send email messages, there are limitations on how many messages you can send per hour or per day. Usually this number is not very high, it ranges between 200-500 messages a day. After you send that many messages, any additional messages will be rejected and you have to wait until next day to send more. The thought behind this is that most home and small business users, 200 messages a day is way above their average limit. Imaging writing 200 messages every day. This limit is actually too big for a home user and is totally unacceptable for a mass mailing where you would start well above 1000 messages a day.
I would like to emphasize, that there is no evil plot against small businesses. Internet Providers like any other companies want to maximize their profit, while minimizing the cost and spam costs a lot of money to them.
Now back to the question of how do you go about mailing your legitimate customers your messages. This is actually much easier than it sounds. All you have to do, is get a static IP address, that is not listed on any black lists and has a valid Reverse DNS resolution. Most of the Internet Providers do provide this, you simply need to justify this to them. Most will charge some small monthly amounts for this extra service. I have seen this done free of charge in some cases (rarely) or our clients been charged ranging from $5 – $10 per month for a static IP.
Static IP is like your own private telephone number and will allow you to send any number of emails a day using our software. With this one step, most of your problems are resolved and it becomes very cheap to run your own legitimate mailing.
I would like to emphasize here, that you should only plan on doing this, if you know you have a good, verified list of clients and they have all expressly gave their consent to receive your messages. If you do not, not only will you violate our Software licenses, but you will also be banned by your Internet Provider after a day or two of spamming and you will be subject to a very unpleasant investigations and in some cases even legal actions.