How to be a spammer? (But not an evil one)
 

Here's the deal. We have a nice little 5000 +/- opt-in list of clients, potential clients, and past clients. And we used to send them an email every day. 90% of the emails weren't even advertising our product.

But every month or so somebody on the list complained that we were spamming them, and our ISP would pounce on us, threaten to disconnect us and demand records showing that the compainer really did opt-in. We just didn't have the time or energy to deal with it. So we stopped the program all together.

But the fact is, we sell stuff. And our competitors sell stuff. And most of our competitors send out bulk-email/SPAM/whatever you want to call it advertising the stuff for sale. And it works. We lost three big deals this year because somebody responded to our competitors SPAM before we reached them by non-spam means.

SOOOOO... I want a mail server that doesn't care if I send SPAM. I see a few advertised. Can you make any suggestions? Are most of these servers automatically blocked by other providers? Some of them must work, because my competitors get their email through.

Am I going to send Nigerian penis-enlarging Viagra lottery tickets emails? No. Am I going put my products in front of people who are in the industry? Hopefully.

Any ISP that is seen as spam-tolerent will be blacklisted. I would sugguest you participate in something like bonded sender, and make sure you are using confirmed opt-in. Problem is, the numbers you mention probably don't justify that, bonded sender is $1,000/year. There's not much you can do besides making sure you keep good records, and make sure your recipiants know that they subsribed. If you are sending mass mail to people who didn't subscribe explicitly, then you are a spammer, and deserve to be kicked off the net, and I don't care what you are advertising..

Please not that I run spam filters at a small ISP. I really do not like spam.