For email on my domains, I generally use google apps. But for one domain, I intend to use a mailserver on my linode. I set up postfix with PHPLIST and just tested it out and tweaking it at this time. I have previously used icontact to manage the mailing list, and I want to be as sure as I can be that everything runs smoothly as I transition to minimize inconvenience to subscribers.

I just ran across the posting here about avoiding hotmail blocking by registering the domain and spf record with microsoft. That was something I had not heard about before and some of my subscribers use a hotmail address so I was glad to register it now before I even start sending live newsletters.

That made me think it would be a good idea to summarize what else I've done and ask if there is anything else that those that have been through this would recommend.

(1) I've looked carefully at Google's suggestions for bulk mailing and believe all the suggestions are implemented with the caveat with regard to list-unsubscribe mentioned below: https://mail.google.com/support/bin/ans ... swer=81126.

I was able to add dkim and spf to my mail server. I also implemented a patch to phplist to add the recommended list-unsubscribe and bulk precedence headers. However, the list-unsubscribe implemented by the phplist patch is for an http unsubscribe link and gmail list unsubscribe handling is looking for a mailto link so it seems to ignore html links in this header. May see about whether I can modify phplist to handle mailto. I would think it should be able to be handled very much like a bounce. Any suggestions or existing code in this area would be appreciated. I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

PHPLIST handles the opt in subscribes, embedded unsubscribe links, bounce handling so this should work although I think the bounce handling seems to require some trial and error regular expression rule generation rather than being pre-configured. Anyone use this and have a set of rules that work?

Mail goes out at news@domain.com and replies and email that comes in at news@domain.com gets routed to the MX pointers to google apps. For bounce handling, I set up a subdomain with MX record that points to the local mail server and use: bounces@mail.domain.com. I will route the list-unsubscribe mailto to this subdomain as well.

I registered my domain at abuse.net and set up mail to handle abuse@domain.com emails. I made sure the reverse dns for the mail server ip points to the mail server domain name.

(2) BLACKLISTS: I checked my ip at several blacklist checking sites (see below) to make sure that my ip is not blacklisted because of a previous user of the ip. Any other places I should check in this regard?

http://www.myiptest.com/staticpages/ind ... d-IP-DNSBL
http://www.mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx ... =blacklist:
http://www.mailradar.com/rbl/

(3) REGISTERING WITH PRIMARY MAIL DOMAINS? As I mentioned, I submitted the domain/spf info in the hotmail form provided in another post so that I can start off on the right foot with them. Any other suggestions with the big email providers (such as gmail, yahoo, hotmail, aol, comcast, etc.) which undoubtedly have or will have some representation on my mailing list... Which ones are better / worse than others in terms of accepting bulk email from personal servers like mine that follow best practices...

According to this link from an email marketing service http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/wp-conten ... omains.png those 5 domains make up almost 50% of their mail traffic.

(4) UNIVERSITY / CORPORATE MAIL SERVERS Any specific advice about staying on the good side of university mail servers (many of my subscribers use alumni forwarding addresses), and corporate email systems. I think I will continue to suggest to subscribers to use their lifetime email address at gmail, yahoo, etc. and skip the forwarding address because this is just an unnecessary potential point of failure in getting mail to them.

Anything else I should do or look into?

Alex

One non-technical suggestion: send e-mail that your subscribers want. This way, they will be motivated to complain to their e-mail provider if messages aren't delivered.

I saw a problem once with our discussion lists where Google was delaying (not blocking) delivery with a vague message about suspected spam. I asked any gmail users to click the "this is not spam" link on messages from the list if they didn't want to be cut off from it.

The problem went away ~1 week afterward; don't know exactly the reason, but I figure enlisting the users didn't hurt.

Yes, the google post mentions that if any of your email is clicked as "not spam" in the spam inbox that is used as a factor in classifying your emails. But I can imagine that not everyone checks gmail spam regularly (partly because they are so good at spam filtering I don't see many false positives) so that they may never actually review it.

In this case you may not know which users failed to get the email and they may not know they failed to receive an email. How did you reliably contact these users to let them know to check the spam box?

Another method they suggest is making sure subscribers add your from address to their contact list - this whitelists that email address. I always include a section in my emails reminding subscribers to do this.

Any other ideas?

Another issue is sending frequency. PHPLIST has the ability to throttle the sending to a particular message rate. Apparently its maximum speed is 3000 personalized and 5000 non personalized messages per hour. Also there is an experimental feature to throttle the messages sent to any particular domain in a period. See link below.

http://docs.phplist.com/PhpListConfigSendRate

I assume there are no limits imposed at linode regarding sending limits, my concern is more about the receiving end and whether there are any rates that might trigger a spam filter or other unwanted behavior?

Anyone have any input regarding this? Any recommendations with regarding to setting these throttle settings?

I use PHPList for a mailing list that I run for a non-profit, from a Linode and have never had any problems with throttling. Now, these are infrequent mailings that go out, but the list is 2000+ and PHPList usually chews through it (non-customized emails) in about 25 minutes. Have verified that the server I run is not on any blacklists, etc.

Doesn't look like Linode has any limit on the number of emails sent, other than the speed at which your server can spit them out:

http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4414

Paul

please could you help me with an external smtp server to use on my mail sender software to send bulk mailings?

Try Thunderbird.
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