Sending Bulk Email

[#1]

I know this topic has already been aired but that was some time ago, and the response didn't help with my problem. I'm the honorary secretary of a club. I have a bulk email list of 172 members and have sent out bulk emails before using this list with no problems. The problem I have now is that although the emails show as "sent" I don't believe they are, owing to the number of people who I've contacted who've told me they haven't received it. I'm usiing Mozilla Thunderbird. Anyone else had the same problem, or can offer advice?

[#2]

@Hill-Dweller 

You could easily be being treated a potential "spammer" with that number of addresses.

Are you placing everyones email address in the To: line (hope not that would breach the GDPR rules). You should ideally use the BCC (Blind carbon Copy) Its an option in Thunderbird and every other email client. means the person receiving the email only sees their email  address.

When i did regular monthly mailings to a group. I send them out in smaller batches (not sure what the limit is currently on PlusNet). But I did them in smaller batches and they all got through. But you also need to be aware the anti-spam systems will monitor for too many batches within about 5 mins.

[#3]

Hi Wakeman. Thanks for responsding but yes, I'm putting everyone's email addresses in the To: line and being well acquainted with GPDR, am using BCC. I was hoping for a solution to avoid having to split the emailing list up, as that's going to be both tedious and time consuming!

[#4]

 @Hill-Dweller 

A warm welcome to the forums.

Elsewhere the advice is 1000 addressees per hour with a maximum of 200 addressees per item.

[#5]

Hi Townman. Thanks for the welcome. If you can tell me how I can send a measly (in the scheme of things) 172 emails en bloc, that would make my day!

[#6]

You need to 'profile' the problem.

In the first instance I would send your emails with "Delivery confirmation" and "Read confirmation" requests set.  Most other email systems will confirm receipt of emails.  Such notifications will be recieved as a collection of discreet emails from the target email service providers.  You should the be able to assemble a list of confirmed deliveries.

Thereafter have those who say they have not received the email, for which you find you have a delivery confirmation, to check their spam folders.

Many spam filtering services determine what is and is not spam by what other people deem to be spam.  So if a person joined a mailing list and then decided that the did not want to receive those emails, so instead of removing themselves from that mailing list (or just ignoring the emails) they systematically marked them as spam - that action could cause the sender to be profiled as a source of spam, thereby leading to people who do want the emails having them filtered by their spam tools.

The first step in fixing this issue is by quantifying it using delivery confirmation requests.  In the absence of non-delivery reports, I would lean towards the emails having been sent and delivered, just the user cannot find them in their mailbox.  The search functions in many email clients can help find 'lost' emails.

[#7]

Thanks for your detailed suggestion, which was much appreciated. I finally narrowed it down to a handful of problematic email addresses which were not sending/preventing the rest from sending. I removed them from the list then to save further problems caved in and split my list into four, as to be honest I can’t be bothered to spend any more time faffing about with it. Having done that I finally managed to get my email successfully sent, albeit in four separate blocks. Happy days!