Newsletter help required

[ohlson]

We are Estate Agents living in Spain with a list of just over 4000 people who have subscribed to our newsletter.

All our mail is sent out via our ADSL line with the local telephone company which is Telefonica. We seem to be having an increasing problem with the system as this week we have had returned to us the unbelievable figure of just over 3000 of the newsletters as being non-sendable. The message that comes back with these e-mails is:
Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender

Amongst our e-mails we do have just over 900 subscribers with aol addresses and over the last few months they have always been sent back as non-sendable. It would appear that aol and Telefonica are in dispute with each other and small companies like us, are caught in the centre.

But what we desperately need to find out, is there any other system where we could - without being charged - send our legitimate weekly newsletter to our subscribers, without having most of them sent back to us.

The few people that we have spoken to here in Spain, all put it down to the Telefonica system, but surely out there somewhere there must be a way of getting our newsletter out to our people.

After all we are plagued by all the spammers from across the World who seem to be able to get all their unwanted e-mails through to everybody. So how come a legitimate company cannot do it????

Anybody that could help, we would really love to hear from you as we really are getting very p****d off about this.

With Kindest Regards
Ian

[RegDCP]

Set up a email list program on your webserver, (http://www.ibasics.biz is a good free autoresponder), or use a professional service like www.aweber.com or www.constantcontact.com

Reg

[loki]

telefónica does have ongoing problems with aol, but as i understand it, aol has the same problems with many others.

(but don't brand me an apologist for telefónica!)

[stevealmond]

Hi Ian,

When any email message is returned the subject usually is Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender. Within the body of the message is the reason why the message has bounced. It would help if you could provide more details of these bounced messages so that the people on this forum can give you a more informed explanation.

Anyway, I use Telefonica myself for my ADSL connection, but use a Canadian company for my webhosting and email services. So personally I have no problem with Telefonica. However I do not have any experience with their webhosting and email services.

I don't know how your webhosting is set up. However if you are using the free hosting space supplied with your Telefonica account, or in particular their free email services that they provide, you will find that there will be restrictions on the volume of mass mailing that you will be able to carry out.

What will happen, for example, if their limit is 1000 emails and you send 4000, the first 1000 will be sent and the remaining 3000 will be returned to you. I did experience similar problems with my free terra.es account when I was using their email services about six years ago. At that time their limit for addressees was 50, any more than that were returned!

Even if you are paying for your Telefonica webhosting plan and the email services associated with the account, you will find that their are restrictions on the amount of bulk mail that you can send. If you check out the terms and conditions of the account that you have signed up for, you will find out what you are able to do and what not to do.

There are webmail services that specialise in sending bulk mail, signing up with one of these may be the answer to your problem.

Regards

Steve

[Kate Lennon]

You have our sympathies. We went through a 3-year nightmare dealing with Telefonica when we established our property company here in Granada. First of all, updates to our server (inc property listings) didn't appear online for several days. Turned out Telefonica was saving money on bandwidth by caching content and uploading it on certain days only. It took us over a year to get this sorted out, as Telefonica at first refused to acknowledged the problem, and then dragged their heels about doing something about it (we had to hire overseas experts to produce evidence proving what Telefonica was doing).
Then our phone line began to be disconnected for "non payment" of our bill. In fact no bills ever arrived, so for almost 2 years our phone was disconnected at the end of each month. We then had to ring Telefonica to find out the exact amount, and pay it into the Banesto bank (Telefonica have no offices, so all disputes have to be dealt with over the phone).
Whenever we had to ring their "customer service" - which was often - their sales personnel were extremely rude, often hanging up on us in the middle of conversations. They refused to give their names so that it was not possible for us to lodge complaints against them.
Then the bills themselves were outrageous. When we demanded itemized bills, they said "no problem - we'll send them to you"; but they never arrived.
The complaints forms we requested (numerous times) also never arrived.
On one occasion when we complained about the fact that it was takling four or five days for uploaded files to go live, they sent out a technician. He checked the speed of *our* computer and announced that it was normal. We explained that this wasn't the problem, and that the problem was that files were being cached by Telefonica. He said this had nothing to do with him, and left. A few days later we received a 600 Euro bill from Telefonica for his "services".
I could go on, but you get the picture. Telefonica made our lives hell - and they are still doing it! When Auna became available (cable internet connection) we immediately cancelled our Telefonica account and sign up with Auna. No more Telefonica! Or so we thought. Then, several months ago we received a solicitor's letter threatening to take us to court if we didn't pay an "outstanding" bill of almost 2,000 Euros owed to Telefonica. We rang the solicitor and explained that the bill had to be wrong, as we had switched to Auna a year previously. The bill was for the 3 month period AFTER we switched to Auna. Obviously we could not owe Telefonica anything for this period, since we had closed our account with them three months earlier and no longer had a Telefonica connection. We demanded an itemised bill. The solicitor said he's be happy to send it. Needless to say, it never arrived, and last week we received a notification informing us that Telefonica was in the process of obtaining a legal order allowing them to take the amount they claim we owe them directly from our bank account! When we rang the solicitor again, he told us he wasn't interested in discussing the issue, and, as far as he was concerned - regardless of the fact that the bill was for a period 3 months after we had switched to a different company! - we could either pay the amount Telefonica claimed we owe them, or have it taken directly from our bank account, including an additional penalty fee.
So I'm afraid I can't really offer you any advice except to strongly advise you to avoid Telefonica like the plague. They are nothing but a gang of crooks.

[Weedy Lady]

Whatever your problems are with your service provider, you would do well to look at http://www.yourmailinglistprovider.com/ as a company to deal with in sending your newsletter. I went through all kinds of work and grief using a free newsletter program on my hosting company servers (a very good program) and jumped through all the hoops to get AOL whitelist status and it still was a pain in the toosh.

Now I design my newsletter, log on, copy and paste it and off it goes. No hassle. Bounces are processed properly and automatically with my having the option to restore any of them to the list.

The cost: A few bucks a month. Incredibly low for so much! And, no, I don't get a penny for referring people to them.

[Duncan Pollock]

I agree with the comments you've received. You need to switch to a recognized and established e-mail host. Constant Contact is one, IntelliContactPro is another, and there are at least three or four other firms you could choose from.
Admittedly, they're all US based, but I'm sure they could handle an overseas (to them) account like yours. It will of course cost you something, although it won't be anything exhorbitant, but it will be a lot less expensive than having your newsletter not reaching its intended recipients.

Duncan

PS. And while it's wrong, wrong, wrong, you probably are better to simply pay Telefonica's bill and chalk it up as an addition to your misfortune with them.

[espectations]

This might be a little bit off-topic but take it into consideration as there are good indications that RSS feeds will replace traditional email newsletters soon.

I am already giving my clients the option to either subscribe to my RSS feeds or traditional email newsletters.

The negative about RSS feeds at this stage is that we cannot track who is subscribing and who not but it will soon reach a stage where we could track subscribers - I believe experts are working on it.

For an example of how I set up my subscribe page, you could take a look at this Subscribe page

I live in South Africa and am also hosting outside the country using an ISP in North America. Their service is excellent and they are dirt cheap compared to what we pay in good 'ol RSA for hosting.

Over here we pay through our noses for everything while a lot of the services such as mailing list managers are included in their hosting packages.

[TrafficProducer]

subscribers with aol addresses

I have heard that AOL is generally problematic with users.

AOL also has spam filters, (as do other services), and this may have something to do with it.

Are you sure users have signed up with a genuine
email account?

Users may feel like your news letter is Spam and block it.

[ohlson]

We would like to say thank you to all the replies and really are very surprised that with all this modern technology going on, that there is not a really simple answer to our problem ie of sending out a genuine Newsletter to our clients on a weekly basis.

There must be many many hundreds of businesses who would take up this option of regularly updating clients if they had the availability to do so.

The web in many ways is a fast moving forward thinking operation, but if we - the prople who operate up here - can't communicate with the people who wish to communicate with us on a regular basis, what future does the web hold?

It is all very well finding companies that will charge us for the serve of sending out our own e-mails, that is not what anyone wants. We just need to click a button and send when a new - as in our instance - property arrives. But it seems at the moment, technology will now allow us to do this. Yet, the spammers are having a w o n d e r f u l time aren't they????? In our instance our company receives over a thousand spam e-mails per day.

Anyway we are now having listened to some of the words of wisdom from various people, breaking down our newsletter list into smaller sections, ie by the first letter of the alphabet, and am trying a test to see if we get past the powers that be in sending this.

In answer to the question "Are these genuine people that have requested a newsletter" - the answer is a POSITIVE Yes. We are under no circumstances interested people being on our books that are a waste of time.

If anyone else has any more brilliant brainwaves of how we can get round this problem of sending out a mundane weekly newsletter, we would be most interested in hearing back from you.

Regards
Ian

[bockereyer]

This is a excellent e-mail specialist. They can send your e-mail and checking the "spam score" of your newsletter.

http://www.emailgarage.com/

[bockereyer]

Didn't read your last posting but at http://www.emailgarage.com you find many good information. Do subscribe to their newsletter and get every week a valuable tip in your mailbox. You also get access to their article archive.

Hope this get's your problems out of the way.

[wallmann]

Try Gmail, I use it for my newsletter (Stocks2Watch). I just sent you an invitation to try it and it's completely free.

Larry

For a FREE report on HOW TO TRADE FAST:

http://lb.bcentral.com/ex/manage/sub...stomerid=12826

[wallmann]

I just sent you an invitation to try Gmail which is completely free,

There is another solution that allows you by pass emailing:

With it, you can send text and HTML messages directly to your customers' desktops -- instantly, reliably, and electronically -- without wrestling with e-mail filters, bounce backs, or competition.

That means you have a constant, private communication channel that is NOT filled with other people's messages and is NOT interrupted by third-party "filters" or "blockers" -- so your messages get read every time... guaranteed!

http://www.marketingtips.com/desktop/t/862721/

Larry Potter @ Stocks2Watch

[eddster]

Okay guys, this seems to match a problem we've seen several times before.

It's down to the host records for your domain and your ISP. Sometimes they won't let you relay across their servers if your sending from your own domain from your own mail server. If this is the case, either register your domain with your ISP or deliver mail directly via DNS. Delivering via DNS however causes more problems because, unless to originating server has a matching a record on the internet, AOL seems to reject the mails whereas they would accept them if relayed over your ISP's legitimate mail relays. They simply think it's an open relay being used for spam.

If anyone wants to have a more detailed overview or help with this, drop me a line. If there's enough of you asking, I'll write it up in a technote.

Hope that helps!

[colr]

We recently took out a dedicated server and from day 1 we were unable to email AOL. After further research, it seemes that our IP address was being rejected by AOL - if you try and telnet into one of the AOL mail servers, you might see something like "AOL have banned your IP...".

Since in our case it was a brand new server, we contacted AOL and got them to remove the ban (took about 2 weeks in total). I then setup what AOl call a 'feedback loop' whereby they alert us every time an email is sent to AOl from our server and one of their users reports it as spam. This has proven highly successful and allowed us to strip out those recipients, who even though they siugned up for newslertters, were reporting them as spam.

Unfortiunately AOL is extremely parenoid about the email they leet through their system. As such, I wouldnt reccomend AOL to anyone running a business. But since a lot of the consumer market use it, you will have to contact AOl and setup some kind ofd workaround.

colr__

[eddster]

If you have a reverse DNS entry for you mail server which matches to domain being used by your mail server this should stop the problem (see my above post). You shouldn't then need to register anything with AOL.

[Weedy Lady]

Ah, but you do have to go through the whole long process of "registering" with AOL or they will bounce your newsletter even if no one reports it as spam.

I have been there. Had reverse DNS. My IP was not banned by anyone. Still had to go through the whole process. It is all done on line and yes, it takes close to 2 weeks to get it through and you have to fill out a long form on line.

And yes, AOL people who signed up for your newsletter will report it as spam even if they don't mean to do that. And it will cause you grief.

Since using Your Mailing List Provider which is located in The Netherlands I have had no problems with e mails going to AOL. And I have a couple thousand AOL names on my mailing list.

[eddster]

Here's the FAQ from the UK AOL site.

http://www.aol.co.uk/about/spam/guidelines.adp

Hope it helps.