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I own a mailserver that serves a couple of domains for their emails needs. For these domains, I set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for them so that they pass all the items in mailbox spam tests that I have control over. As a result, my domains score pretty well in sites like MXToolbox.com and Mail-Tester.com.

Since I have the tools to set up these policies on my server, and some PHP code lying around that can blast out emails, I've been looking at offering EDM design and blasting services to some of my clients. Naturally, the first thing I looked at was MailChimp, since they are the first alternative that comes to mind for 99% of my clients. One thing that really blew me away was that they are able to offer blasts of up a million emails per month! That averages to 30,000 emails a day!

I don't know much about the EDM industry, but I've heard that blasting out large numbers of emails will get your server blacklisted. That really scares me, as my mailserver is currently serving a couple of clients, and if I ruin my reputation with an email blast, my existing clients' emails will be affected too.

If I had to blast out MailChimp numbers of emails, what are some of the things I need to take note of, so that I avoid getting my server blacklisted?

John Doe
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  • *Suddenly* blasting out large amounts causes problems. Folks like Mailchimp are *always* and *reliably* blasting out large amounts. It takes time to build up a reputation, and relationships with the major email providers to maintain it. – ceejayoz Jan 10 '20 at 15:00

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There are a bazillion things to know, do and constantly have an eye on. Doing bulk email correctly today is not as easy as just a few ago.

It starts with checking backlink|backscatterhandling, monitoring/sharing mail egress data, reply to abuse reasonably fast, checking with dnsbl/uribl providers for whitebox entries, using safe sender lists, using different sending (ip-)adresses (larger pools) an so on.

That is why MailChimp or amazon SES (check out sendy) have a very good reason to exist - they just deal with all that stuff, at scale. A lot of MSPs do allow (more ore less internal) white- oder redlisting, so get in touch with them. Drink with them on conferences. If you want to do it by yourself, google's postmaster tools or microsoft's SDS are a good start. And always react quick on abuse mails from barracuda, sbl, sorbs and the other 'big five' everybody ist using today.

From the operations point of view, you seem to do everything right.

Source: My job was building/maintaining MTAs for bulk and enterprise. I don't want to go back.

bjoster
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One other thing to note is your sender score, the better it is the greater the deliverability of your mail will be. It is a great way to keep an eye on reputation. Once this score rises you will be able to pass more mail prior to being grey-listed by other MTAs.

When I did this, I prepared new blocks for 'production level' sending prior to making them live by slowly allotting more volume to them, and ramping it up from there while keeping an eye on the logs during a mail blast.

Yevhen Stasiv
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