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. 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 of 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 from being sent. I have taken it up with them, and their attitude is “Your problem, not ours.”
First, thank the spammers. 🙁 Because of them, email services — the ones you use to send as well as those used by your intended recipients — have been forced to make this more difficult than it should be.
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!
Email services are more likely to treat your email as spam as a result. Why? Because it’s something spammers do. My example above has only 10 recipients, but some services prevent you from sending to that many at once, and even if they do allow it, 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 varies from email service to email service. I start to get concerned when the number of recipients exceeds five.
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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 sidestep 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 — you, the sender, sees and fills out the Bcc: line — but that line is hidden from all the recipients. It’s better email etiquette because you’re not exposing everyone’s email addresses to all the recipients, which is considered both rude and a violation of everyone’s privacy.
Even using Bcc:, though, two problems remain.
- Your email provider still sees that you’re sending a single message to many recipients at once, and may restrict your ability to do so.
- The recipients’ 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 (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. A lot of 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. Services have made it more difficult for spammers to create large numbers of accounts they 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 two alternatives 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 with 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 can 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
The best response to the questions above is a newsletter, whether it’s 1500 people getting periodic emails from an organization or a collection of friends getting periodic updates from someone traveling.
Newsletter-sending services 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 the solution you eventually take, there are some important rules to follow when you start mass mailing people. Most of these are common sense, and all are important to avoid being labeled 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 want to be on your list is to use a confirmed opt-in process, which 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 for email on a certain topic, and then you send other unrelated messages, that 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 keep more subscribers by making it difficult to leave, 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 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 think it through and do it right.
Do this
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.
In fact, you can experience that last one right now! Subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week.
For small mailing lists, MailChimp offera a free tier. The limits are 1,000 emails per month or 500 per day. It’s quite restricted, but technically you could open multiple accounts if you need more capacity.