Sending emails from Outlook

[reglarh]

I have written some VBA code to send a personalised email with a personalised PDF attachment to 500 members of an organisation. It works! However, I am concerned that the spam police will get involved and classify many or all of these as spam. Has anyone any ideas on whether this is likely to happen, and if so whether delaying each email by a set time will reduce the likelihood of this happening?

Two follow-ons. What delay would be required and how would this be implemented using VBA? I am using Access 2010 and Outlook 2010.

 

[pbaldy]

I leave the big questions, which are more appropriate to somebody with more bulk email knowledge. The delay can be done with:

http://www.theaccessweb.com/api/api0021.htm

I think it's a combination of how many recipients in your emails, how frequent, and what they contain that get the spam police's attention. I won't pretend to know the specifics.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

The spam police are not monolithic or uniform in nature. It will depend entirely on the organization's mail server settings, black list, white list, and source-limit thresholds. These are NOT predictable by ANYONE ANYWHERE except the security wonks at this organization that will be your target.

A delay will not stop spam declarations. I once got a single e-mail from Microsoft at work. It was not a mass mailout, but rather was directly addressed to me from a server in the Microsoft domain, complete with valid digital signatures. (It was the notification of my MVP status in 2008.) Sent directly from www.microsoft.com, a single e-mail went straight into the spam folder. So it ain't numbers, it ain't that they like you or don't like you. It is just the settings on the firewall and mail server.

You might be able to lay the groundwork for this intended mass mailing by sending a single e-mail to someone you know in that organization to find out how to get your site white-listed so that it won't be tracked as spam. Then, once you have obtained both acknowledgement and permission, you can blast away.

And if the person you contacted says "Don't bother" - take that advice too.

Oh... if the PDF contains ANY code fragments, you can bet the farm that it WILL get spaminated!

 

[Cronk]

I've taken a more proactive approach when confronted with this in the past. I contacted the ISP, explained the situation and requirements. If I haven't been able to have the limits increased, I have been able to establish the parameters.

 

[HiTechCoach]

I have written some VBA code to send a personalised email with a personalised PDF attachment to 500 members of an organisation. It works! However, I am concerned that the spam police will get involved and classify many or all of these as spam. Has anyone any ideas on whether this is likely to happen, and if so whether delaying each email by a set time will reduce the likelihood of this happening?

Two follow-ons. What delay would be required and how would this be implemented using VBA? I am using Access 2010 and Outlook 2010.

The SPAM police has many levels/departments/organizations. You have to get past all of the ones that are along the route to the inbox of the recipient.

1) [Sending] Your mail server host's SPAM police.

It is common for ISP's and web hosting providers to put an hourly limit to the number of email that can be sent.

This is when metering the rate you send emails is important. The delay will depend on how many emails you can send per hour. You will have to check with your provider.

2) [Receiving] The Recipient mail server's SPAM police.

There are several ways your recipient's mail server can determine if something is SPAM. Or they might not have anything in place.

3) [Delivery] The Recipient's Email Client application's SPAM police patrols.

Next there is the SPAM filtering the user can define. There are multiple ways this can be handled.

If you make it pass all these then you appear it he inbox.

Any of these level can get you flagged as a spammer.

You also have to deal with bounces, opt out, etc.

The SPAMMERs have made it difficult for legitimate sender to do it themselves. Unfortunately, using an Email Service Provider (ESP) is getting more important.

 

[reglarh]

Thanks to all the responders above. Not sure what I do to formally record thanks as there seems no button to click!

What I didn't mention is that once a month I send a email to all 500 by Mailchimp and this is generally successful. Even this fails to deliver on a reliable basis. Some recipients get every month, some 9 or 10 a year. However, the requirement I now have is to send a personalised email with a personalised PDF attachment to every member of the society. My code already divides recipients into 4 groups for seperate despatch but it sounds as is I will need to create even smaller groups and then suck it and see!

 

[The_Doc_Man]

For the record, the "Thanks" button is in the bottom right corner of each individual post in the thread if it is going to be anywhere at all.

As to breaking it up... try First Letter of Last Name to get (up to) 26 groupings. Hope you don't have TOO many Smiths.