Noobs Guide On How To Start Sending Bulk eMail

Introduction

I have noticed that there are not currently any sticky threads in the email marketing section about getting started sending bulk email which tends to lead to the same questions being asked over and over again about how to mail so I thought I would write this mini tutorial to help all the Noobs who need to get started sending mail and try to answer most of the most basic of questions.

How do I send X number of email a day?

There are many different ways to send email in bulk some have advantages over others, ill attempt and listing and categorising them here. You have two options you can either go for a desktop based solution which will require you have proxy's or you can go for a hosted solution, and host and send from your web server. Which method you want to go for also depends on what it is your mailing and how many people it will piss off. A lot of complaints are going to get your IP's blacklisted more quickly. If this is the case and you have a hosted solution you will need to have access to a cheap source of fresh IP's.

Hosted Solution

If you are mailing craigs list emails that have responded to an ad you have placed your probably better going with a self hosted web based solution as if your sending only 5 – 10K emails a day to people who contacted you first this is really low profile and you shouldn't expect to have too much trouble with your IP unless your doing something to really annoy them all.

You should use a VPS for mailing you can rent one from anywhere between $45 - $200 a month. I would NOT recommend using Hostgator or any of the other popular hosting company's on their normal shared hosting accounts as even if your just mailing craigs list emails that have responded to your ad you will probably be suspended within month when they find out.

You can try and get some bullet proof hosting this is where the host does not care that you send UBE (Unsolicited Bulk Email) and will keep your sites and servers running and ignore all spam complaints.

The alternative is to get a VPS with an offshore company preferably Malaysia or some where else where they don't have any laws regarding this kind of stuff. Most of them will have it in there terms and conditions that you cannot spam form there servers but in reality they rarely care and will leave you alone as long as you keep paying for the service.

Be aware that about half the people you will meet offering you BP (Bullet Proof) services are probably doing it this way as well and the provider knows nothing of the spam so you can probably save your self some money doing it this way. But one last piece of advice on this is to make sure if your getting a Linux VPS make sure it comes with WHM even if they charge you more a month as if you don't you may find that you have to communicate to your sever by terminal and Linux commands are not Noob friendly!

Software That You Can Use:
There are literally tons of software you can use for this ill just list some to get you started

Interspire (www.Interspire.com)
This you will find talked about a lot on this forum, it is a paid piece of software that sells for over a few hundred dollars or so, it is very good and supports a lot of features.

PHPlist (www.phplist.com)
This is a very nice PHP script and is open source, supports a lot of good features that you need in a mailing software such as tracking the clicks of links within emails etc, you cant go wrong with this just go to there site and download it for free and read there instructions to install it on your server.

PoMMo – (www.pommo.org)
Not as advanced as the scripts above but it is very easy to install so if your having a hard time getting the other two working on your server maybe you could settle for PoMMo. It has a very nice clean interface, de dupes emails for your and other good stuff you can find a working demo of it on there site so go check it out if you want.

Desktop Solution

So you want to mail from the convenience of your desktop heh? Well no problem there are a number of ways to do this some are better than other depending on what your mailing if you don't need 100% inbox rates you can go with sending via proxys, if the emails your mailing are valuable you may want to go with a free email account chaining program that will be able to send though multiple free accounts with the like of Google mail which if done right can get 100% delivery to inbox.

Software For Sending Via Proxy
I will only list the two most popular here these by the way have been around since the dawn of spam and earlier versions existed way before the can spam act

Send Safe (www.send-safe.com)
You have 2 options for desktop mailing here you can buy send safe credits the cheapest is 50 Euro for 400,000 credits (1 credit = 1 email) and you can mail away or you can buy a copy of there software for about 599 Euro and use your own proxys. Now before you get too excited I will say these things about this software as I have used it. First of the sending with there credits sucks even on valid emails you get a 10% - 30% sent rate that's not inbox or spam box but sent out successfully this is only really suitable if you have a big list you just want to rinse and you don't care the other advantage it gives you is that it keep you anonymous while mailing as it routs though proxy servers to cover your tracks.

Dark Mailer (http://www.darkmailer.info/)
This is another classic maybe not as user friendly as send safe and requires a bit of knowledge if you want to forge your own email heads but you buy proxy's to mail form and email headers from the site above it achieves the same thing as send-safe and work out a little cheaper if you mail by your own proxy's.

Free Email Account Chaining Program
You will have to spend a lump of money to get a decent one of these but the inbox rate can be 100% once you have done some tweaking to find out some basic filter evasion you may have seen people offering to sell 1000 gmail accounts for $xx, well this is what you would use them in, I have seen applications for available for gmail, yahoo, and hotmail and others may exist as well I wont give you the names of any specific software as I know a lot of people on this forum sell there own and don't want to be claiming one to better than the other you can find them on the buy and sell part of the forum if your interested in getting one. The basic concept is that they will take your list of accounts and log into each one and send a limited number of emails per account some of the higher end software can send up to 1000 mails a minute this way. You will again need proxys for this not to send from but for logging into each account so that it looks like different people are logging in rather than one person sending from 1000 accounts which will get the accounts banned fast.

There are many places you can get proxys I would not recommend getting any from free sites as they are usually rubbish or banned by most places you can rent them for a decent price here is a site that you can get them from, I heard someone in the forum recommend them once not sure who it was but you can search the forum to find some other recommendations and I take no responsibility for any bad experiences if you try them as I have not used them my self this is just to get you started.