Thread: ISP and mass mailing

You will be in danger of being marked as a spam relay if there are many addresses and you use the ISP to send them directly from your computer. It happened to me when I sent an email to a few dozen clients informing them of a change of address.

Easier to get your own webhost and use the email server they give you to send it instead of the ISP mail server. It is very cheap and easy to do.

^ How does that work ? What is the difference between a webhost and an ISP ?

That's the problem with being a freelance, no more computer department to help, have to do everything by yourself.

Originally Posted by Perota

How does that work ? What is the difference between a webhost and an ISP ?

An ISP gives you a connection to the net, a webhost gives you a place for your own personal website to live.

My understanding (and I could very well be wrong) is that when you send emails from your comp through the ISP then you are using their mail server to do it, so (as you correctly noted) it can trigger their email server to decide you are a spammer and since they will have 1000s or millions of customers it can be a pain to get it sorted out.

Even if you use gmail (and therefore google's mail server) their software may notice something odd and cause difficulties.

If you sign up with a registrar (godaddy.com or similar) and get (for example) perota.com and then sign up with a web hosting company then the web hosting package will include a few email addresses for perota.com and you can send emails using the mail server of the hosting company from perota@perota.com. All can be done for less than 30 US$.

Now you have choices: you can make a simple website, put the newsletters on it and send a link to the clients or you can simply send the newsletter direct. If the web host software decides you are a spammer you can contact them and are more likely to get the issue resolved quickly.

You could of course also just set up a blog for free but that would require the clients to remember to click on it regularly to get the newsletter unless you send them a reminder which takes you back to the original question.

If you have a spare computer and a lot of free time you could also skip the web hosting and set up your own server to give perota.com somewhere to live but it is quite a lot of work and given the low cost of hosting companies not really worth it unless the value of learning how to do it interests you.