The challenges of bulk e-mail via a SaaS filtering service alleviated
In the world of cloud based e-mail filtering one of the biggest challenges for the service provider is to ensure that the public facing IP addresses of the service do not fall victim to one of the many blacklists (RBL's) that feed a myriad of other solutions with details of what e-mail traffic to block.
In the world of cloud based e-mail filtering one of the biggest challenges for the service provider is to ensure that the public facing IP addresses of the service do not fall victim to one of the many blacklists (RBL's) that feed a myriad of other solutions with details of what e-mail traffic to block.
Having your public IP's blacklisted means not just one but all of the customers on your service could potentially have a major disruption to their e-mail. To this end many providers have adopted a zero tolerance policy on bulk e-mail. As a result, many credible bulk e-mail services have sprung up on the web such as MailChimp and ConstantContact ... yet customers still try and send thousands of e-mails from Outlook to a distribution list that is often obtained in less than scrupulous ways.
The operators of the e-mail filtering service react to this kind of bulk e-mail in various ways. Some of them will suspend your account and some of them will temporarily stop you from being able to send outbound mail (our preferred approach). The problem is that whilst we, as the operator, believe the right way to send bulk e-mail is via a proper bulk e-mail service, the mindset of the customers and the person wanting to send to the mailing list is very much different - because let's not forget no more than a few years ago it seemed perfectly acceptable to send a mass mailing from Outlook, via your own ISP.
In order to try and accommodate the needs of our customers to send bulk e-mail and at the same time protect our infrastructure from potential blacklisting, we are launching an additional feature for our MailSafe product that will alleviate the problem. Customers who need to send a bulk e-mail shot can now do so through the MailSafe service if they include a special keyword in the outbound e-mail (this can be hidden from the recipient). The keyword will be detected by our system and an "Unsubscribe" and "Report as spam" link will be automatically added to all the e-mails. This makes the outbound e-mails more compliant with bulk e-mail regulations and also provides the recipient with a means to opt-out of the messages. Opting out will prevent them receiving further bulk e-mail from the customer but it will not prevent them from receiving legitimate e-mail. There will still be a sending limit and we calculate this as 500 outbound e-mails per month plus 100 for every paid-for user on the system. So if you have an account with us for 25 mailboxes, that will allow you to send 3,000 bulk e-mail messages per month. You can raise this limit by contacting us or your reseller.
We believe this is a step in the right direction and it also paves the way for an upcoming e-mail marketing feature that we intend to add to the portal. This will provide full visibility and management of your e-mail campaigns and hopefully the added benefits will entice customers to move from simply e-mailing from Outlook to using a proper management system and all the benefits that system brings.
