[ale] OT volume email question

[Ken Price]

> I'm working on an email campaign today and I have a question about doing
> this 
> on a personal email account. For good reasons, gmail has a daily send
> limit. 
> Does anyone know whether ISPs typically put similar limits on email
> accounts 
> and in particular does earthlink? I can't locate a policy page on their
> site. 

Not sure about Earthlink in particular, but most put daily limits on
outgoing email.  Most ISP's also block port 25 on residential accounts to
prevent you from hosting your own SMTP server.  You really shouldn't be
doing this on a personal account.

> How do organizations send out bulk email without getting flagged as
> spammers?
> 

They either setup their own server.  Taking special care to unsubscribe
bounce-backs, automatically process unsubscription requests, conform to all
CAN-SPAM guidelines, throttle outgoing mailings so no one destination
server gets DoS'ed, and on, and on, and on.  Or they outsource it to a
company who specializes in mailings.


I'd recommend you go with a mass mailing service such as iContact.com or
ConstantContact.com and let them deal with all the technical stuff.  You'll
find they're reasonably priced.

-Ken