Ask HN: How to avoid spam block when emailing 1k consenting users on new site?

2 points by james-revisoai 3y ago ↗ HN

I've set up a live product which has collected a few thousand emails through account registrations. They have consented for marketing emails, but never been sent them.

The emails are on Supabase and could be easily exproted - but what sort of things should I look out for reguarding getting spam blocked?

We've done a major major feature change that active users love, but a lot of older 2022 users don't know about it! Hence we want to kick up a newsletter, once every few months. Is there things to look out for regarding SMTP, or avoiding spam blockers these days? I remember sending emails back in the day with PHP just fine, but understand a bulk email to 1k emails with half of them on gmail would probably be spam-blocked en-masse these days. Is that true, and if so, is it at all avoidable, given it's not a sale/promo newsletter, but quite a big feature change?

3 comments

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sp332 3y ago ↗

Are you sending them from your own email server, or a service like Constant Contact? You'll have better luck if the server is known to the spam checkers and has a good reputation.

james-revisoai 3y ago ↗

We don't mind and haven't decided yet, so long as it is secure and private.

Do you have any suggestions?

We don't anticipate any personalised emails at the moment and would rather keep personal data of users (besides the email) as far from 3rd parties as possible, if there's anything like that you know of?

I’m not an expert, just maybe ramp up slowly instead of starting all several thousand at once. See if you can break down your open rate by server to see if gmail, outlook.com etc are blocking you.