Email Newsletters, save our servers!
June 23, 2008 – 9:32 amOk, so you’ve got a hot new product, or some exciting news about your company that all your clients are going love to read about. I know, why not send a newsletter?
Well, it seems email newsletters are becoming ubiqitous, and why not! They are a great way to communicate with your clients and prospects alike and can really help raise awareness about your business.
You might be thinking from the title of this post that we’re against sending email newsletters, well actually we’re not, we love them, but only when they’re executed properly.
I’m sure we’re not the first web host to have seen this situation arise, and we won’t be the last. But we’ve had several clients just stepping into the world of email marketing who decide that the best way to reach 10,000 people is by creating an email in Outlook, sticking 10,000 email addresses in the bcc field and sending it off.
The problem with this approach is that creates a massive strain on a server that can literally shut it down (yes that means your website will go down right at the critical moment!), and when you’re on shared hosting it’s just not fair on everyone else.
From our point of view as a web host, this situation puts us in an uncomfortable position, let me explain why:
As a good, diligent web host, we have taken the time to install anti-spam and anti-virus software on our shared servers, we don’t want our clients having to suffer mailboxes full of viagra adverts and software that can destroy their computers. This software runs every time an email is received on our servers, it literally reads each and every email that comes onto our servers looking for emails you won’t want to receive.
When an email to 10,000 people reaches its destinations, many of the recipients will be out of the office, or will no-longer have the email address you have, or will simply be unreachable, resulting in ‘bounces’. A bounce is a message that gets returned to you when someones email address is unreachable.
If just 10% of 10,000 emails bounce back, that’s 1000 emails that land back on our servers in one go! That’s a lot of email by anyones standards! But that’s not even the end of it, each one of those 1000 emails then gets checked for viruses and spam before it’s delivered back to your mailbox, and it’s that which can bring down a server.
So what’s the solution? Well, it’s actually suprisingly simple: instead of using Outlook to send your 10,000 emails, use a dedicated email software provider such as Campaign Monitor to send your email, and, most importantly, do not put your real email address in the reply-to or from fields! Put something like no-reply@yourdomain.com so when the flood of emails bounce back, they can be discarded immediately by your lovely web host, saving your server and preventing your website from going down at the critical moment.
4 Responses to “Email Newsletters, save our servers!”
Update: we are actually going to be moving our anti-virus / anti-spam to a separate server all of it’s own over the next few months, so this should be less of a problem, but please still keep it in mind!
By admin on Jun 23, 2008
Good info and well presented, for more quality free info on pc security related issues have a look here.
By Internet Security on Jul 21, 2008