

How to send 400,000 member-requested e-mails a week - vlad
http://blog.dogster.com/2006/11/29/sending-email-is-a-big-headache-for-popular-websites/

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shimon
Condensed version:

\- In the past year or two, email service providers have all gotten
significantly more aggressive at filtering spam.

\- Even a legitimate company sending a lot of user-requested email risks being
flagged as a spammer, for reasons as simple as a high send rate.

\- There are a multitude of different whitelists and policies that control
email delivery at ISPs. There is no standard bounce message format.

\- Despite that, you have to act on bounce messages. Dogster collects all
bounces into a database, presumably to help employees find and act upon the
most critical email blocks. These bounces might also be used to trigger
automated responses, such as a temporary slowdown in email to a particular
mailhost.

\- Some companies are appearing to serve this niche. One service is delivery-
testing: a company gets email accounts at a bunch of ISPs and lets you know
which ones are rejecting your emails. Others offer a mail-sending API, where
you use their (presumably ubiquitously whitelisted) servers to give your
emails that extra smidge of legitimacy. These services appear to be expensive
and nonstandardized so expect to do a lot of work either way.

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vlad
Quote: "While I used to be disgusted at AOL's and Yahoo's plan to start
charging email senders to deliver their messages, considering the money we
have to spend to stay in their good graces, we would now prefer to simply pay
in advance for our emails to be delivered and know that they will."

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chrisconley
this why i've had a harder than hell time reliably sending email to users

