Help with Mailing List Hosting
I could use some help with finding a host for my monthly newsletter, Crypto-Gram. My old setup just wasn’t reliable enough. I had a move planned, but that fell through when the new host’s bounce processing system turned out to be buggy and they admitted the problem might never be fixed.
Clearly I need something a lot more serious. My criteria include subscriber privacy, reasonable cost, and a proven track record of reliability with large mailing lists. (I would use MailChimp, but it has mandatory click tracking for new accounts.)
One complication is that SpamCop, a popular anti-spam service, tells me I have at least one of their “spamtrap” addresses on the list. Spamtraps are addresses that—in theory—have never been used, so they shouldn’t be on any legitimate list. I don’t know how they got on my list, since I make people confirm their subscriptions by replying to an e-mail or clicking on an e-mailed link. But I used to make rare exceptions for people who just asked to join, so maybe a bad address or two got on that way. Spamtraps don’t work if you tell people what they are, so I can’t just find and remove them. And this has caused no end of problems for subscribers who use SpamCop’s blacklist.
At a minimum, I need to be sure that a new host won’t kick me out for couple of spamtraps. And if the solution to this problem involves making all 100,000 people on the list reconfirm their subscriptions, then that has to be as simple and user-friendly a process as possible.
If you can recommend a host that would work, I’m interested. Even better would be talking to an expert with lots of experience running large mailing lists who can guide me. If you know a person like that, or if you are one, please leave a comment or e-mail me at the address on my Contact page.
Marnix Petrarca • August 3, 2015 6:10 AM
Heya Bruce, why don’t you ask Gordon Lyon (Fyodor) of Insecure.org? He certainly will know something about it with his hackers lists, and good sense of privacy?
Regards,
Marnix
NL