

Startups can do email marketing for free, from CakeMail - zoyth
http://www.cakemail.com/startupoffer.html
CakeMail offers free email marketing accounts to startups, up to 25,000 emails per month.
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SwellJoe
I guess sending large volumes of mail must be difficult...somehow. There are
several services like this (and sure it's cool that it's free and all), but
I've never been able to understand what's so hard about sending a few
thousands emails. I've built bulk mail senders on a whim on several
occasions...when we re-launched our website, and the passwords had to change
because of different encryption, I sent out 5000 messages by writing a 25-ish
line perl script to pull addresses from the database and queue up the
messages. Put a 1 second sleep after each message, and things never get out of
hand, as far as server load or bandwidth usage--in fact, it was completely
unnoticeable and the system was in service the whole time as both our web
server and email server. I've done the same with as many as 20000 recipients
and multiple sending SMTP servers. It's just such a simple task that it wasn't
even worth looking on the web for an off-the-shelf solution.

What is it about sending out a large volume of mail in one burst that
frightens people so much? I'm sincerely curious...I see it brought up quite
frequently among startup founders as a serious problem worth spending money
on. If your list isn't a spam list--e.g. 90% bounces and errors--sending out
mail is trivial, right? I guess if we're talking about a million
recipients...but, I can only think of a few companies that could possibly send
to a million recipients without it being unsolicited (and those folks are
dropping it into mailboxes on their own systems in a large percentage of
cases...Google to gmail, Yahoo to @yahoo.com, MS to hotmail.com, etc.). Heck,
many of our non-technical users use off-the-shelf stuff, like PHPList, to send
out newsletters to a few hundred or thousand users, without giving it a second
thought.

What am I missing?

~~~
zoyth
Sending emails is not rocket science. But it begins to be more complicated
when you want to serious about it:

First, you’ll want to automate bounce processing. There is typically a 2.5%
churn rate per month on average on a list. You'll start to be blocked at 10%
at many ISP.

Second, you’ll want to be authenticated if you don't want to be tagged as a
spam. Think of configuring SPF, SenderID, DomainKey and DKIM.

You'll also want to remove recipients that will tag your email as spam, and
that will happen, no matter what. For that you'll need to have your feedback
loops configured at major ISP, and unsubscribe the plaintiffs as you get the
reports.

And we’re still not talking about calculating open-rates, click-rates and
reporting them in a way that is efficient and gives you insights about your
marketing operations.

It all depends on how your value your time. We think you have better to do
than tweak yourself an email marketing solution.

~~~
SwellJoe
"First, you’ll want to automate bounce processing."

Good reason, and something I've never had to deal with. Every mass-mailing
I've ever done has been a one-off.

"Think of configuring SPF, SenderID, DomainKey and DKIM."

You have to have (most of) this stuff, anyway, if you send ANY amount of
email. It's not limited to mass senders--if you're sending mail as part of
your business, you have to deal with spam prevention schemes of many types.
SPF being the most widely implemented at this time.

I guess it comes down to regular mass emailing, which is something I've never
done. So, I can see value in handling those problems.

Consider question answered, and point conceded. (I don't foresee needing this
kind of service, since we don't do mass mailings on any regular basis, but I
can imagine folks who would.)

------
mixmax
Does this have something to do with this thing they call "spam" that is
supposedly a problem for a lot of people on those intertubes?

~~~
zoyth
Of course not. It's called newsletters, like to one you can subscribe to here:
<http://www.37signals.com/>

~~~
mixmax
Aaah I see. I have to learn about those newsletter things sometime. Maybe
that's why I get so much mail everyday.

