Delivering HTML Email

Many newbies make the mistake of setting up forwarding lists, or “CC’ing” copies of a
message to all their customers. This causes all sorts of problems, like when a customer
hits, “reply to all.” Plus, there’s no way to do any kind of individual tracking or
personalization when they CC: a big group like that. Finally, it just looks so
unprofessional and impersonal when recipients can see your entire list of other
recipients like that. Blech.
That’s why when an email marketing system (like MailChimp) sends your campaign, we
take your message and send it one at a time to each recipient on your list (really, really
fast). Unlike your work computer linked to your local ISP (which probably has a standard
monthly bandwidth limit), email marketing vendors like us use dedicated mail servers
that are capable of sending hundreds of thousands of emails (even millions, for larger
vendors) per hour.
Other factors you should consider when delivering HTML email campaigns:
• If you send from your own server, your ISP may throttle your outgoing emails or
shut your account down, if you send too much too fast (like more than 500 per
hour). They may also shut you down if you exceed your monthly bandwidth limit.
If you’ve ever sent an email campaign to a big list of recipients, and you attached
a giant PDF, this has probably happened to you before.
Email firewalls and ISPs who receive your emails don’t like receiving tons of
emails from one single IP address at once (unless they normally receive tons of
emails from that IP). So if you only send occasional email campaigns from your
IP, you may want to throttle your delivery, or spread them across multiple IPs, to
avoid accidental blocking. Email marketing services usually split your campaign
up into pieces and send it out over lots of different IP addresses.
• If you send emails from your desktop email program, chances are you’re
connecting through your local ISP. If you don’t have a dedicated IP address setup
with your ISP, you’re probably sending emails from a dynamic IP address. ISPs
and spam filters don’t like receiving lots of emails from a dynamic IP address,
because it looks like a hijacked home computer. You should always send from a
dedicated IP address, or use an email marketing vendor (like MailChimp).