How to get blacklisted by email marketing
There are two ways to do your email marketing; pay someone else to do it or do it yourself. More often than not you'll want to do it yourself so that's what my advice is going to be targetted towards. Once you've decided to do it yourself there are three further choices:
a) let an automated service handle it for you (RSS updates for example)
b) use an application from your desktop
c) use an application from your hosting
If you choose option a) you are safe; the content won't be questionable and if readers mark your email as spam, it won't blacklist anything but the server the company you chose uses - that's fine. But what about the other two?
b) desktop applications
The upside to these is that everything you need is done nice and quickly on your desktop; without the need to wait for files to be uploaded to a server etc. While this can make life easy, desktop applications are also riddled with problems.
Because you're doing the work locally, you'll be transmitting from your machine to an SMTP server which actually does the sending of the emails. The problem with this is that most ISP (Internet Service Providers) will take an active interest in what you're doing. It's quite likely that you'll get blacklisted by them for doing this - because most ISP's are doing their part to stop spam from being sent.
I wouldn't ever recommend using a desktop application for sending/managing your email marketing because it not only carries a negative stigma, it also increases the risk of your home/business being blacklisted by your ISP - which is a very bad thing indeed. Far far worse than the negative effects of using a server-based system.
c) A hosted application
The advantage of using a system you've got on a server means that you can access it from any machine in the world. In addition, they also tend to have the ability to broadcast emails rather than tying into an external SMTP server.
Using an application like Interspire's SendStudio as a basis for my comparison, you can manage subscriptions online (and have subscribers enter themselves directly into your mailing list), produce statistics and reports (as all opens are recorded directly to the server). If you have sensible hosting your data is backed up nightly (if not more) so in the eventuality of hardware failure you haven't lost all your subscribers (which isn't necessarily true for a desktop app).
So what is being blacklisted?
If you're blacklisted by your ISP for sending emails using a desktop application, you might just lose the ability send emails or they might revoke your Internet connection altogether - obviously neither of these are favourable.
Hosting an application elsewhere means that the worst that can happen is that emails sent from that domain will be ignored/marked as spam by individual vendors (such as Hotmail).
How do you get blacklisted with a hosted application?
You broadcast an email to 1,000 people. If a sufficient number of Gmail users flag your email as spam then Gmail will no longer accept emails sent from your domain - it's really that easy.
So that's how you get blacklisted - as always I highly recommend using either another company or a self-managed hosted solution to do your email marketing. Desktop applications are a bad idea and always will be - unless someone can convince me otherwise.
Enjoy this article? Why not subscribe to the full RSS feed?