mass mailings

[frank_ironport]

Typically our company uses 3rd parties to send out mass mailings, but some of our divisions want to do that in-house. We just found out that they were piping all that through exchange but now that their mailing list has grown to about 4,000 recipients, its too slow for them. They want to pipe that straight to our Ironport servers and expect that list to grow by at least 6 times what they're sending now. So I added a poll to this topic to see what most people are doing with mass mailings, same servers as corporate email or dedicated servers? These mailing lists are monthly so if we were to go with dedicated servers, they would be idle for days. On the opposite side, sending mass mailings from corporate servers could hurt SBRS scores and get corporate mail servers blacklisted. If anyone would like to elaborate on why they've doing things one way or another, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks,
Frank

[jasongurtz]

If you do this you are taking a fairly massive gamble with regards to your corporate email deliverability. Can your folks provide proof of confirmed opt-in on demand? Can they handle unsubscribe requests? There's a lot more too and if they're sending from your regular system they're putting your deliverability in peril.

Of course it depends somewhat on the exact nature of the bulk email. Is it customer notifications, marketing, transactional etc...? How about volume? But keep in mind that all it takes is one bad apple marketeer to ruin the rest of your days while you attempt to salvage your IP's reputation. In fact it's really a good idea to have the email sent from a completely different network.

The people that are doing the mailings would probably appreciate the analytic features that an ESP provides anyway. Have them check out Constant Contact etc...

[frank_ironport]

I'm with you on that, but I seem to be explaining this every day to people and the same request keeps coming in. They are on cost-cutting missions and think we can leverage the corporate mail servers for that traffic. I'm sure they believe I'm paranoid. But at least I have someone else who agrees with me.

[mychrislo_ironport]

I'm with you on that, but I seem to be explaining this every day to people and the same request keeps coming in.  They are on cost-cutting missions and think we can leverage the corporate mail servers for that traffic.  I'm sure they believe I'm paranoid.  But at least I have someone else who agrees with me.

Sending legitimate eDM is fine with a separate ironport applicance.
We do that on a C100, using rotating outbound listeners (Network->Listeners). In particular, you can group your corporate outbound into 1 to 2 listeners (using filter) and eDM on the other 2 (max is 4, as I understand).

We also impose outgoing destination rate policy for big ISP, such as hotmail, yahoo.com and some sensitive recipient domains.

Essentially you also need to take care of bounce nicely, set proper return-path and clean your outgoing list from time to time.

Chris

[chhaag]

You might be interested to know that we used to send customer technical notifications using a home grown script but have used a SaaS vendor for the last 2 years. Our marketing group has always used a vendor. Cisco uses a vendor to send mailings to employees.

The reasons we switched were many - ability for non technical resources to send the email, automatic opt-out tracking, automatic bounce and NDR tracking and the ability to have different HTML templates for different notification types. We are in the process of synchronizing the opt-outs back into our internal customer database.

While yes you can do this in house, you end up having to dedicate an IP address for this purpose and coding and maintaining a fairly complex app to achieve all of the features I've listed above.

One challenge is finding a vendor with a good SBRS score. As any of you who receive our new release notifications can easily determine, we use Vertical Response. Though they do a pretty good job of banning disreputable senders, they still end up with medium SBRS scores. I think it is in the nature of the business - hard to have a perfect SBRS score if you are sending mailings. Even reputable mailings will annoy some recipients enough to submit the message to Spam Cop.

There is no perfect answer here, it is a challenge.

Good Luck!

Chris Haag
Manager, Technical Support

[thatbloke_ironport]

We use a home-grown app to relay directly to our Ironport C350s. On the Ironports we use the Virtual Gateway feature to split mail into Corporate / Newsletter / transactional type mails based on sender address - each type goes via dedicated IP. This way, if we have problems with rate limiting / delivery problems to a domain, it will only affect one type of mail.

See the help for 'Virtual Gateway technology'. It does require the use of multiple IP addresses for email, but for us thankfully that is not a problem.

Ultimately it depends on your situation, we went for the above approach because it suits us (email is a big part of our business) but that will not be the case for everyone.

[santoshkumar]

similiar kind of problem is faced by us, that our corporate mail & mass mail are deliverd from a single ip & and at one day our public ip get blacklisted,
after it i defined ironport virtual gateway technology and & define 7 virtual gateway,after it till now we never face such kind of blacklisting issue,
thanks to ironport virtual gateway technology. :lol: :D