If you have an interest in sending legitimate bulk email (e.g. double-opt-in, and more than 100 emails), please contact our sales team (sales@mediacatch.com) to identify a solution that works best for you. Don't just try sending it via a shared server account, as this will result in a terms of service violation, fail to complete your mailing, and will impact other customers due to degraded server performance or worse.
Here's why:
When sending bulk email, performance can be seriously impacted on shared servers, even though they are high-performance, multi-processor systems. That's because sending such a high amount of emails isn't just a oneway pumping action. The server tries to connect, handshakes, sends and confirms... there are chances of timeouts, mailbouncing, etc. So you should always keep in mind NEVER to send all of them in one go.
We've worked with customers in the past to send bulk mailings, by using specialized mailing software that sends no more than 5 messages per minute at non-peak hours. This worked temporarily on shared servers without causing performance issues for other customers, however, over time most of these customers disregarded or lost these settings, and went back to their original mail-pumping scripts. This caused server crashes, so the accounts then had to start using their own SMTP servers (local linux boxes), virtual private servers (VPS), or dedicated servers to send legitimate bulk mailings.
For this reason, and to protect server performance for all shared server customers, we strictly monitor the servers for all unauthorized mass mailings.
Quality mail software could potentially send 1000 emails successfully, if the mailing script specifies a reasonable time to mail, number to mail at one time, interval between mailings, and spreads the mailing out over a large period of time. Numbers higher than that would cause a lot of problems, as it becomes difficult to complete the mailing in an acceptable period of time without impacting the server's performance.
Mail process software also responds differently to bulk mailing, so some (e.g. Plesk/QMail) processors may handle it better than others (e.g. cPanel/Exim).
Usually, as a minimum, bulk mailing requires a VPS, with a good bulk-mail processor, at a rate of 600 mails/hr. or less - else it might still crash your hosting server.
Even a dedicated server can't support mass mailings that aren't rate-limited unless it's very low in web traffic.
Another concern when bulk mailing is that mail reported as spam (even by one customer) can get the entire server blacklisted, impacting many other customers. Because of the spam issue growing, companies have implemented more and more tools to stop spam. Unfortunately, these tools also impact legitimate bulk emailers. For example, many email processors now assume that more than 9 total addresses on the to, cc, or bcc lines indicates that the email is spam!
MediaCatch strongly recommends using our commercial bulk mail solution for customers with large email lists for simple, professional and automated management of their legitimate bulk mailings. This can avoid a lot of problems down the road.
Please contact sales@mediacatch.com if you have additional questions.
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