The topic of outbound email comes up often with new and prospective email hosting clients. We often hear questions like “Can I send bulk messages?” or “Can we use the service to send newsletters?”, and the answer is always no.
Email hosting is designed and optimized for businesses, groups, families and individuals to send normal, back and forth communications. So what exactly is “normal sending” and what do we look for to ensure customers are in compliance?
First, normal sending means messages should be non-bulk in nature — no marketing blasts or newsletters, no sending of statements or reports to multiple customers, no streams of transactional messages.
Second, we monitor for repeated patterns in the body of messages to make sure customers are not sending messages that would result in the recipient server(s) blocking or throttling messages from our servers.
Lastly, we monitor IP activity and look for unusual increases in sending and logins which may indicate a mailbox is compromised and spamming.
Bulk email sending is a complicated area and there are different types of bulk sending — marketing, transactional and utility emails should all be identified and relayed through separate systems. This ensures that those messages are sent through servers that are optimized for bulk delivery without affecting normal business and personal emails.
A normal message would be one that is sent, forwarded or replied to a single or reasonable number of recipients and is not sent repeatedly to other recipients in the same or subsequent communications. As long as you operate within these guidelines, your email hosting outbound service will be more than adequate and reliable for your message sending.