Without looking like a spammer, that is.
1: I have been working on figuring out how to send emails to a large group of people at a time for a few weeks. I have an organization, and would like to send weekly emails out to them. Right now I have 1500 people, but am actively signing people up and expect to have several times more over the next couple months.
2: When I travel, I send e-mails to a selection of friends (all of whom have explicitly asked to be on the list of recipients, and who presumably therefore do not mark them as spam). But my ISP sees multiple addressees and an overseas IP address, assumes spam, and prevents it being sent. I have taken it up with them and their attitude is “your problem. not ours”.
First, thank spammers. Because of them email services — both the ones you might use to send, as well as those used by your intended recipients — make this more difficult than we might want.
What we might do without thinking about it too hard makes us look like spammers. Hence, our messages don’t get through — either bouncing, landing in spam folders, or just disappearing entirely.
And yes … it’s our problem, not the email service’s.
Email to many
Sending email to many people isn’t as easy as it looks. Using To:, Cc:, or even Bcc: can make you look like a spammer. The safer path is using groups or newsletter services like Google Groups, Groups.io, or AWeber. Always get permission, keep promises, and make unsubscribing simple.
Don’t #1: multiple recipients at once
If we want to send a single message to a group of people, it’s tempting to just … send a message to a group of people. By that I mean, fire up your email, and list everyone in the To: or Cc: lines.
From: Ask Leo! <leo@askleo.com> To: tom@askleoexample.com, dick@askleoexample.com, harry@askleoexample.com, mary@askleoexample.com, george@askleoexample.com, josie@askleoexample.com, fred@askleoexample.com, marcia@askleoexample.com, maxine@askleoexample.com, norma@askleoexample.com Subject: My awesome vacation pics!
You might consider using Cc: instead of throwing everyone on the To: line, but the net effect is the same: you’re sending to a lot of people at once.
Email services see this and are more likely to treat your email as spam as a result. Why? Because it’s something spammers do often. My example above has only 10 recipients, but some services will prevent you from sending to that many at once, and even if they do, the receiving service may notice the number and toss the email in the spam bucket. The actual number may be less than 10, or more; it’ll vary from email service to email service. I start to get concerned when the number of recipients exceeds five.
This is also bad form because you’re exposing everyone’s email addresses to all the recipients. That’s considered both rude and a violation of everyone’s privacy.
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Related
Why Does Email with a Lot of BCC’ed Recipients Bounce?
BCC is good for many things. Sending to many people at once isn't really one of them.#28292
Don’t #2: BCC multiple recipients
One way to side-step the privacy issue is to use Bcc instead.
From: Ask Leo! <leo@askleo.com>
To: Leo <leo@anexampleisp.com>
Bcc: tom@askleoexample.com, dick@askleoexample.com, harry@askleoexample.com,
mary@askleoexample.com, george@askleoexample.com, josie@askleoexample.com,
fred@askleoexample.com, marcia@askleoexample.com, maxine@askleoexample.com,
norma@askleoexample.com
Subject: My awesome vacation pics!
In this case, the email is still sent to all the recipients, but who it was sent to is hidden from them all.
Two problems remain:
- The email provider you’re using still sees that you’re sending a single message to many recipients at once, and may restrict your ability to do so.
- The recipient email services may not see who else you’re sending to, specifically, since Bcc hides that. Notice, however, that all the recipients in this example are at the same email service (askleoexample.com). THAT email service may notice a sudden flood of identical messages to several of its accounts. That looks like spam. If a large number of real life recipients share the same email provider (say, perhaps, Gmail, or a Microsoft-related email address) then those services will see it as a flood as well.
In short, Bcc doesn’t help when it comes to getting your email delivered, and can even hurt.
Related
Why Am I Being Labeled a Spammer?
Possibly being labeled a spammer is another reason not to forward political and other emails. Do it enough, and your normal email may not get delivered.#4783
Avoid: Free email services
Sending email using a free email service puts you at a disadvantage right away. Much spam originates from them, and as a result, if you use one, it acts as a kind of strike against you, particularly if you’re sending to a large number of people.
Things have gotten better over the years. Those services have made it more difficult for spammers to create large numbers of accounts they might use to spam, but it’s still an issue.
I know you love your free email, and you likely rarely see any problems, but it’s important to realize that there can be disadvantages, particularly for sending large quantities of email.
Painful workaround: smaller batches
One of the solutions people have suggested is to send your email in multiple, smaller batches. For example:
From: Ask Leo! <leo@askleo.com> To: Leo <leo@anexampleisp.com> Bcc: tom@askleoexample.com, dick@askleoexample.com, harry@askleoexample.com Subject: My awesome vacation pics!
Followed after some delay by:
From: Ask Leo! <leo@askleo.com> To: Leo <leo@anexampleisp.com> Bcc: mary@askleoexample.com, george@askleoexample.com, josie@askleoexample.com Subject: My awesome vacation pics!
And, again, followed after some delay by:
From: Ask Leo! <leo@askleo.com> To: Leo <leo@anexampleisp.com> Bcc: fred@askleoexample.com, marcia@askleoexample.com, maxine@askleoexample.com, norma@askleoexample.com Subject: My awesome vacation pics!
Rather than one email to 10 people, it’s three emails sent to three or four.
Does the delay matter? Maybe. If you send several emails in rapid succession, that, too, can look like a spammer at work. Whether or not it factors in is unclear, and almost certainly varies depending on the email providers involved.
It’s crude, but it can be effective. If this is something you’re doing rarely, it’s a solution at your disposal right now.
Effective solution: Groups
Yahoo Groups is no more, but there are two alternatives that can be used to the same effect:
- Google Groups
- Groups.io (created, as I understand it, by the engineers behind Yahoo Groups)
In both cases, you create a group comprising the email addresses of the individuals you want to get your messages. They may have to confirm that they want to receive your messages, but that’s just good practice to prevent being labeled a spammer.
You then send a single message to the group email address.
The service then sends single messages to each of the members of the group.
Because it’s opt-in by the recipients, and because it’s from a service with a good reputation, and because individual emails are sent one-to-one rather than one-to-many, the chances of getting delivered are significantly higher.
Google Groups is free, and Groups.io has a free plan. Both have an array of additional features you might find useful for your message, such as archives, photo storage and more.
Advanced solution: mailing list services
What the questions above really sound like to me are newsletters.
- 1500 people getting periodic email from an organization.
- A collection of friends getting periodic updates from someone travelling.
As a result, another solution targeting that exact scenario is newsletter sending services. These are ideal for periodic broadcast emails to many recipients.
There are many. I’m partial to AWeber, which I’ve been using for Ask Leo! from the start, close to 20 years ago. MailChimp is another you’ve probably heard of. Even something like Substack can be used for this, assuming you don’t mind your content being posted publicly.
Some rules
Regardless of what solution you eventually take, there are some important rules that you need to follow when you start mass mailing people. Most of these are common sense and are important ways to avoid being called a spammer. Others are actually legal requirements, at least in the U.S..
- Don’t add people to your list without their permission. This is the definition of spam. The best way to make sure that they actually want to be on your list is to use a confirmed opt-in process. That’s the scenario that requires them to send some kind of confirmation email before being added to your list.
- Send them what you promised and nothing else. If people sign up, even using confirmed opt-in, for email on a certain topic, and then you send other unrelated messages, that too is another definition of spam.
- Make it easy to leave. One-click unsubscribe might be required if your list is commercial. While it’s tempting to want to make it difficult to leave, to keep more subscribers, it increases the chances that they will start reporting your email as spam. Besides, do you really want to be pestering people who don’t want to hear from you?
- Be clear in each message about who the message is from. If people don’t recognize the email, it is once again, just spam to them.
Sending bulk email, email newsletters, hosting discussion lists, and anything that results in “messages to many people at once” requires special consideration. I encourage you to take the time to think it through and do it right.
Do this
When thinking about which solution you want to take on, here are some examples of which solutions I use, and under what conditions.
- When sending to many people, I avoid doing it manually on the To:, Cc:, or Bcc: lines. This path leads to spam.
- I use a Google group for a list of people who’ve asked to be notified of local Corgi-related events. I’m also on a couple of Google Groups for local ham radio operators.
- I manage several groups on Groups.io; one is a large Corgi discussion list, and others include a set of discussion and notification lists for a non-profit I support.
- I use a formal newsletter sending service — Aweber — to send my Ask Leo! and other newsletters.
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