Bulk Email Sending

Overview

Conetix places limits on the amount of email which can be sent through any of the managed services (such as shared hosting and managed email). These limits are set high enough to allow normal business usage but will limit email which is considered to be “bulk” or spam. This is to prevent the blacklisting of these services, which will affect the sending of your normal email as well.

Any direct email marketing (such as newsletters, promotions etc) should be sent through a managed, transactional mail service which will provide greater control and reporting. Systems such as MailChimp will integrate the mandatory unsubscribe option and also provide detailed reporting such as who opened the email and how many failed to deliver.

These systems also measure the rate of sending to the same domain or email platform to ensure they’re not flagged, which is critical to ensure the delivery of email to domains such as gmail.com, outlook.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com and any email address using Microsoft 365.

Businesses should also familiarise themselves with the Spam Act 2003 to ensure they’re compliant as well. Penalties of up to $1.1 million will apply to any business in breach of the Act.

Failure to follow the requirements of the Spam Act 2003 may result in your service with Conetix being suspended.

Recommended Systems

Here’s what we recommend:

Mailing Lists and Email Marketing

• MailChimp
• CampaignMonitor
• Sendinblue
• ActiveCampaign

All of these systems are easy to use and provide tools to manage your email lists as well as the templates for sending.

Bulk SMTP Sending

• SparkPost
• Amazon SES
• Maijlet

If you have an existing system or use a billing mailout, there are systems which allow you to directly integrate with minimal changes to your existing system.

Further tips to prevent issues

Avoid non-transactional SMTP services

It can be tempting to save money by using your gmail.com, your ISP or similar account to send these emails, but the chances are it will result in your gmail account (or similar service) being suspended as well.

Using your ISP or hosting for bulk email sending will result in a significantly reduced success rate, potentially tarnish your domain reputation and even result in your services being suspended.

You need a fully transactional email service, meaning each email out is tracked and if it bounces or is limited by the other end then further emails to that account or service will be halted automatically.

Ensure you have a valid return address

Many use an older method of noreply@<yourdomain> where the reply to an email simply goes to a non-existent mail account. This is now not only considered a bad practice but raises red flags with remote mail systems. Anti-spam measures are clever enough these days to test if the account exists and will simply block emails from systems where a fake address has been used.

Ensure the emails have an unsubscribe option

Again, modern anti-spam systems are able to detect if an email is a newsletter or bulk email and will look for the mandatory unsubscribe option. If you fail to include this, then it means there’s a high chance your emails will be blocked by thousands of mail systems.

Make sure you complete all of the setup steps

Sending bulk emails and newsletters is more complex compared to your basic email account setup if you want it to be successful. All of the systems recommended have setup guides and will triple check that you have the correct DNS settings and accounts setup so that you significantly reduce the chances of the emails failing.