5 ms·

> I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail to, say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at a high rate? I would love to learn

by dijit 4y ago

> I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail to, say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at a high rate? I would love to learn if I'm wrong though. You can do this, I have done this, but honestly it's annoyingly painful and you're always one bad ad campaign away from being nuked to death by people marking your emails as spam. There's a lot of rules to follow and even when you follow them you need to ensure that you start emailing a low volume for each new sending IP until the reputation grows over time.

Breza 4y ago
This is the correct answer. I work at a company that sends millions of emails every week from our self-hosted IP range. If you have a high quality list of recipients who actually want to hear from you and warm up your IPs gradually, you can be successful.
Nextgrid 4y ago
To be fair, if people are marking your emails as spam frequently enough to get your IPs/domains blacklisted then it suggests the system is working as designed and you shouldn’t be sending whatever you’re sending to those people.
- dijit 4y ago
  Nah, about 2% of my "Thank you for ordering, here is your receipt" mails also get marked as spam. Some number of people just smack the "spam" button for nearly everything that is automated, and those "spam" buttons seem to work on absolute numbers not percentages; so if you have a high number of people in the pool then you will be false flagged eventually. We had a very explicit double opt-in system, made it super easy to unsubscribe, emailed once a month at most; and we had people still marking our communications as spam. I'm not sure what else we could have done to weed out the people who just smack the spam button honestly. That said, there was a lot of variance, emoji in the headline was the campaign that caused 9% of people to mark spam and 20% to unsubscribe, but it was enough to have us blackholed for 2.5 months. I think a major issue is that people don't want to even check how to unsubscribe and they see the “mark as spam” button as a “just make this go away” button.
  - supertrope 4y ago
    I assume you have transactional and marketing emails coming from separate email addresses. If the email ecosystem made it easier for bulk senders, this would just shift the burden onto recipients. Right now the common enemy of illegal spammers externalize the costs of their business onto email providers and users. For every dollar they take they impose 100x that in spam filtering costs. >99.9% of raw email traffic is spam. Blame spammers who offer fake unsubscribe links. Or companies who violate CAN-SPAM by requiring login to unsubscribe instead of one click opt-out. Marking as spam always works.
  - rationalist 4y ago
    How do you prevent people from entering in the wrong address, and thus a random person receiving your emails? If it's just a one-off receipt, I'll delete it. If that business I never had any business with starts spamming me, then I mark it as spam. Second receipt, pisses me off, a third receipt from the same company gets marked as spam etc. If you want to send more than one email, ask for permission. Unfortunately I have a few technology-challenged acquaintances still using my common-ish firslast@ gmail, but once I get them switched over, everything that inbox receives will automatically be marked as spam.
    - dijit 4y ago
      > How do you prevent people from entering in the wrong address, and thus a random person receiving your emails? Double opt-in. You cant just enter an email address to subscribe, I used to send you an email with a link to click to complete the process. For transactional email this would be handled by getting people to either create an account or use Paypal for guest checkout. (this was 2012)
  - ChainOfFools 4y ago
    People who mark things as junk mail or spam typically have no idea that this action can have an upstream impact on spam filtering algorithms. They typically have no idea how any of this stuff works and just assume that the purpose of marking something is spam is to prevent them from seeing any more of it, personally, in the future. It doesn't occur to them that their preference thus exerts a small influence over the experience of potentially millions of other people. In the decades past, when preferences weren't so tightly linked to each other among otherwise unaffiliated users, the simple definition of spam as " stuff I'm not interested in seeing in my inbox" was completely sufficient to inform a user's decisions about using the spam button. But today that definition is something closer to "stuff I'm not interested in seeing and that I am fairly certain few if any other people are interested in seeing, either."
- monsieurbanana 4y ago
  Could be, or it could be that those systems are so aggressively tuned that newcomers have no chance to not be labeled spam while established players are whitelisted. (I truly don't know, but I don't think it's as simple as you're saying)
  - nottathrowaway3 4y ago
    Email delivery is not purely a protection racket. People use Gmail because they legitimately want to filter out the unsolicited spam, marketing, etc. To an anonymous attacker, there is no cost to send these emails. Middlemen like MailChimp and Sendgrid play the role of converting email from a free, publicly exploitable channel into a paid, KYC one. Email fbfw is the de facto standard communication channel for almost everything, but by design a single computer can send an unlimited number of emails to other addresses. This maybe was a good enough design originally, but now the role of email has grown so much that, today, it should be a paid KYC channel. What is the alternative to spam filtering? Everyone maintains their own allowlist of good senders?
    - me-vs-cat 4y ago
      > What is the alternative to spam filtering? Make sending email cost the sender. No, I don't know how. The best ideas I've heard (1) make the sender store the message and (2) have no hope of being widely adopted.
- safety1st 4y ago
  Is that the "Just So" story that people who don't work with email at scale believe? Email deliverability is a full time job. There are so many "potential spam" markers that are interpreted differently (and opaquely) by different ESPs. Getting your email delivered to a lot of people is essentially non deterministic. Including a link to a Google Doc in your message body is enough to get you blacklisted by some email providers if you don't have a prior history with them. Yes, there will usually be some process to get off the blacklists and doing it will mostly stick even if you continue to email Google Docs to people. But the key word there is mostly. As I said, deliverability (at least at scale) is a full time job.
- gscott 4y ago
  It's been my experience that people can't tell the difference between the delete button and the spam button.
- IncRnd 4y ago
  Except, that's not a fair take. It only takes a moment for a single person to get your ip or domain balacklisted, not a concerted campaign. There are many blacklists that accept direct submissions from any unauthenticated person for any target domain/ip. What's difficult is not to get onto a blacklist but to get off of a blacklist.
- mrmattyboy 4y ago
  One thing to say to this.. I work at a company and have personally setup quite a few mail servers for mass email sending and warming up IPs.. not fun.. (these are all legitimate interest emails) I was in a meeting with a couple of people from the team and a QA engineer mentioned that everytime he's done with an email in gmail, he spams it off... _wut_.. Whilst yes, we have been blacklisted a handful of times and, based on spam reports (feedback loops), people do mark emails as spam for completely nonsensical reasons... e.g. users signing up, (getting and using the activation email), using the service and then spamming the activation email. Edit: I definitely think there's a bell curve for sending your own emails: * If you have a very small platform (at least in my experience), reputation doesn't mean that much, emails are generally accepted by providers (assuming IPs that you used haven't been previously used for spammy activity), so self-hosting might make some sense (though a third-party probably wouldn't be too expensive if you did want to). * If you start sending 100s-1000s of emails/day, I guess some third party solution would make sense, since running dedicated IPs/domains and servers just for sending emails might not be beneficial. * As you go to sending 100K+ emails a day, personally, I think setting up servers starts making more sense
- samstave 4y ago
  See my other comment below on how IP blocks for IPv4 went through the roof on price and availabilty... The global spam market is what caused the hockey-stick rise in IPv4 "shortage"
capableweb 4y ago
+ unsurprisingly, lots of hosting providers disable SMTP/block port 25/ban you if any email sending is being detected coming from your instances, legitimate or not, as the problem with hosting IPs that are sending spam is so annoying (and even illegal in some places).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
djbusby 4y ago
How does one even know that message are being tagged as spam?
- dijit 4y ago
  Depending on the provider you can receive a “bounce” response. Yahoo and Hotmail do this, Google was a little more opaque if memory serves.
- aendruk 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email)
Thaxll 4y ago
You can't just send 100k emails with a good delivery rate, if you're a nobody Gmail will never trust you. You can follow all the rules the want ( dkim, spf etc .. ) somehow it will no be delivered because you don't know exaclty how they rate your IP.

by dijit 4y ago

Breza 4y ago

This is the correct answer. I work at a company that sends millions of emails every week from our self-hosted IP range. If you have a high quality list of recipients who actually want to hear from you and warm up your IPs gradually, you can be successful.

Nextgrid 4y ago

To be fair, if people are marking your emails as spam frequently enough to get your IPs/domains blacklisted then it suggests the system is working as designed and you shouldn’t be sending whatever you’re sending to those people.

dijit 4y ago
Nah, about 2% of my "Thank you for ordering, here is your receipt" mails also get marked as spam. Some number of people just smack the "spam" button for nearly everything that is automated, and those "spam" buttons seem to work on absolute numbers not percentages; so if you have a high number of people in the pool then you will be false flagged eventually. We had a very explicit double opt-in system, made it super easy to unsubscribe, emailed once a month at most; and we had people still marking our communications as spam. I'm not sure what else we could have done to weed out the people who just smack the spam button honestly. That said, there was a lot of variance, emoji in the headline was the campaign that caused 9% of people to mark spam and 20% to unsubscribe, but it was enough to have us blackholed for 2.5 months. I think a major issue is that people don't want to even check how to unsubscribe and they see the “mark as spam” button as a “just make this go away” button.
- supertrope 4y ago
  I assume you have transactional and marketing emails coming from separate email addresses. If the email ecosystem made it easier for bulk senders, this would just shift the burden onto recipients. Right now the common enemy of illegal spammers externalize the costs of their business onto email providers and users. For every dollar they take they impose 100x that in spam filtering costs. >99.9% of raw email traffic is spam. Blame spammers who offer fake unsubscribe links. Or companies who violate CAN-SPAM by requiring login to unsubscribe instead of one click opt-out. Marking as spam always works.
- rationalist 4y ago
  How do you prevent people from entering in the wrong address, and thus a random person receiving your emails? If it's just a one-off receipt, I'll delete it. If that business I never had any business with starts spamming me, then I mark it as spam. Second receipt, pisses me off, a third receipt from the same company gets marked as spam etc. If you want to send more than one email, ask for permission. Unfortunately I have a few technology-challenged acquaintances still using my common-ish firslast@ gmail, but once I get them switched over, everything that inbox receives will automatically be marked as spam.
  - dijit 4y ago
    > How do you prevent people from entering in the wrong address, and thus a random person receiving your emails? Double opt-in. You cant just enter an email address to subscribe, I used to send you an email with a link to click to complete the process. For transactional email this would be handled by getting people to either create an account or use Paypal for guest checkout. (this was 2012)
- ChainOfFools 4y ago
  People who mark things as junk mail or spam typically have no idea that this action can have an upstream impact on spam filtering algorithms. They typically have no idea how any of this stuff works and just assume that the purpose of marking something is spam is to prevent them from seeing any more of it, personally, in the future. It doesn't occur to them that their preference thus exerts a small influence over the experience of potentially millions of other people. In the decades past, when preferences weren't so tightly linked to each other among otherwise unaffiliated users, the simple definition of spam as " stuff I'm not interested in seeing in my inbox" was completely sufficient to inform a user's decisions about using the spam button. But today that definition is something closer to "stuff I'm not interested in seeing and that I am fairly certain few if any other people are interested in seeing, either."
monsieurbanana 4y ago
Could be, or it could be that those systems are so aggressively tuned that newcomers have no chance to not be labeled spam while established players are whitelisted. (I truly don't know, but I don't think it's as simple as you're saying)
- nottathrowaway3 4y ago
  Email delivery is not purely a protection racket. People use Gmail because they legitimately want to filter out the unsolicited spam, marketing, etc. To an anonymous attacker, there is no cost to send these emails. Middlemen like MailChimp and Sendgrid play the role of converting email from a free, publicly exploitable channel into a paid, KYC one. Email fbfw is the de facto standard communication channel for almost everything, but by design a single computer can send an unlimited number of emails to other addresses. This maybe was a good enough design originally, but now the role of email has grown so much that, today, it should be a paid KYC channel. What is the alternative to spam filtering? Everyone maintains their own allowlist of good senders?
  - me-vs-cat 4y ago
    > What is the alternative to spam filtering? Make sending email cost the sender. No, I don't know how. The best ideas I've heard (1) make the sender store the message and (2) have no hope of being widely adopted.
safety1st 4y ago
Is that the "Just So" story that people who don't work with email at scale believe? Email deliverability is a full time job. There are so many "potential spam" markers that are interpreted differently (and opaquely) by different ESPs. Getting your email delivered to a lot of people is essentially non deterministic. Including a link to a Google Doc in your message body is enough to get you blacklisted by some email providers if you don't have a prior history with them. Yes, there will usually be some process to get off the blacklists and doing it will mostly stick even if you continue to email Google Docs to people. But the key word there is mostly. As I said, deliverability (at least at scale) is a full time job.
gscott 4y ago
It's been my experience that people can't tell the difference between the delete button and the spam button.
IncRnd 4y ago
Except, that's not a fair take. It only takes a moment for a single person to get your ip or domain balacklisted, not a concerted campaign. There are many blacklists that accept direct submissions from any unauthenticated person for any target domain/ip. What's difficult is not to get onto a blacklist but to get off of a blacklist.
mrmattyboy 4y ago
One thing to say to this.. I work at a company and have personally setup quite a few mail servers for mass email sending and warming up IPs.. not fun.. (these are all legitimate interest emails) I was in a meeting with a couple of people from the team and a QA engineer mentioned that everytime he's done with an email in gmail, he spams it off... _wut_.. Whilst yes, we have been blacklisted a handful of times and, based on spam reports (feedback loops), people do mark emails as spam for completely nonsensical reasons... e.g. users signing up, (getting and using the activation email), using the service and then spamming the activation email. Edit: I definitely think there's a bell curve for sending your own emails: * If you have a very small platform (at least in my experience), reputation doesn't mean that much, emails are generally accepted by providers (assuming IPs that you used haven't been previously used for spammy activity), so self-hosting might make some sense (though a third-party probably wouldn't be too expensive if you did want to). * If you start sending 100s-1000s of emails/day, I guess some third party solution would make sense, since running dedicated IPs/domains and servers just for sending emails might not be beneficial. * As you go to sending 100K+ emails a day, personally, I think setting up servers starts making more sense
samstave 4y ago
See my other comment below on how IP blocks for IPv4 went through the roof on price and availabilty... The global spam market is what caused the hockey-stick rise in IPv4 "shortage"

capableweb 4y ago

+ unsurprisingly, lots of hosting providers disable SMTP/block port 25/ban you if any email sending is being detected coming from your instances, legitimate or not, as the problem with hosting IPs that are sending spam is so annoying (and even illegal in some places).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

djbusby 4y ago

How does one even know that message are being tagged as spam?

dijit 4y ago
Depending on the provider you can receive a “bounce” response. Yahoo and Hotmail do this, Google was a little more opaque if memory serves.
aendruk 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email)

Thaxll 4y ago

You can't just send 100k emails with a good delivery rate, if you're a nobody Gmail will never trust you. You can follow all the rules the want ( dkim, spf etc .. ) somehow it will no be delivered because you don't know exaclty how they rate your IP.