Having moved the Silicon Valley Code Camp mailing list to a professional emailing service this year (SendGrid) I have learned quite a bit about mailing. For the first 7 years, I did all my own SMTP mailing. That is, when I would send an email, I would go directly through my own SMTP mail server. This meant I had to deal with lots of issues including things like both Google and Yahoo throttling my email. By that I mean that when I would send too many emails (like more than 100 I think) to the Gmail or Yahoo domains, both sites would start bouncing saying I was sending to many. My solution was to throttle those myself so that when I would send an email, I’d trickle out emails to duplicate domains. SendGrid, among other things, takes care of that by retrying all bounced email for reasons like throttling tens of times until it finally gets through. Basically, I did not have to change anything on my side besides the smtp port of my send to smtp.sendgrid.com.
The Unsubscribe is OK reason
So, on to the reason for this post.
I’ve learned that if I send people junk mail when they’ve asked to unsubscribe that those people report me and I’m guessing that many servers will then block my other email. In other words, as a sender, it is in my best interest to honor unsubscribes, otherwise the hurt will be worse than the gain. Below is what I see when I go to my sendgrid control panel and ask for how many people have reported me as spam. Luckily, it’s only 52 and considering my list is 13,000+, I think this is probably OK.
