We regularly email to around 3000 members of our organization. Normally we use MS Word to create a mail merge from an Excel spreadsheet of addresses. They all go out over our 512K pipe in about an hour or two. We consider 40k the size limit that bogs down our internet connection. But we target for messages under 30K.
We limit connections to 10per domain to keep *some* spam engines from flagging the message as bulk, and we limit the number of concurrent connections overall to 20 to keep the pipe from filling up. Since we use a mail merge, the emails usually aren't the same, so most SPAM filters usually aren't triggered by *that*. If you aren't sending more than a couple of addresses in any particular domain, you aren't likely to trigger spam traps based on it simply being bulk. We used to just BCC the addresses by copying and pasting addresses from excel, but that flagged us as spam from all the domains that had more than a few recipients. We track all our bounces and usually stay under 4%. For you, that would only be about 40 folks to check up on. Of course, we don't get bounces from most emails that are tagged as spam and just dropped. But we feel we have a pretty good penetration. However, unless you request a response or use a service that can track when the emails are opened, you won't really know how many actually get slurped up by spam filters. Based on our experiences, limiting the connections and using a mail merge had measurable increase in delivery rates. Bill Songstad -----Original Message----- From: Steve Hart [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 10:30 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Mass emailing? We're a printing company and we're facing a large increase in the price of paper, which is huge compenent of our costing. Our sales department has asked me to come up with a way to send an email to about 1000 of our biggest customers, explaining the increase and the price increases that will result. The recipients are all existing customers, but I'm concerned nonetheless with running afoul of spam lists and such. Is there a commonly accepted way to do this? We're on Exchange 2007. Steve ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~
