Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 14 years 9 months 25 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
We’ve had another web hosting customer screw things up for everyone else on their shared mail server by sending unsolicited e-mail, which is against our terms of service.
I’ve written about this before, more than once, and this user has received no warnings, gets no second chances, and their web hosting account, including all e-mail service has been permanently removed from our system.
What Happened?
A user on a shared hosting account innocently sent out an email message to their customer list. At least one of their customers at a Comcast account, and one at a Hotmail account, reported the message as spam.
The big email providers act quickly, so now one of our mail server IP addresses has been “spam flagged” by both Microsoft and Comcast. They are not letting mail from that particular server through to their users.
A typical bounce message is something like this:
What has been done?
On our end, the problem has been resolved, and we’ve proven to them that we have taken the necessary corrective measures, and now it’s just a matter of time, up to 48 hours, before our mail is again allowed to come through to their services. This time delay is unavoidable, and we are sorry for the inconvenience.
How can you send to your mailing list?
As a reminder, you should never send bulk e-mail to your own mailing list through your own web hosting account.
It doesn’t matter if your users have agreed to accept your messages or not, because all it takes is one person to complain to their ISP that you send them spam, and our mail server gets blocked.
This causes a huge inconvenience to any other users that may be on that particular mail server, so therefore it is our policy here at PDXTC (and at most web hosts) to not allow any bulk e-mail messages to be sent from your account.
Instead, you should use a third-party service, like Icontact which begins at just $10 per month.
They have industry-leading deliverability, and a third-party company, called Pivotal Veracity, scores their email deliverability rates between 98%-99%.
You can track the performance of all emails sent at a glance with charts and graphs that are populated in real time.
They offer 250 professionally designed email newsletter templates or you can use one of your own for your email marketing campaign, and it’s easy to set up, organize, and upload or import your contacts. They offer advanced features, like surveys, autoresponders, and RSS feeds in their easy-to-use all-inclusive product.
