Creating a mass communication System

Adamthenewbie

I am creating a mass email communication system in PHP. Sending out email from my own server is causing emails to go into peoples spam folder (or the server is completely getting black listed) because of too many emails being sent out. Does anyone have any suggestions to a company which you can send out emails through their server and they take care of making sure they don't get black listed, etc? So I want to build the website framework on my own server then send out emails with PHP which get sent out through another more reliable email server?

Sorry if this isn't the right place to post this since it's not technically a PHP problem... Hope someone can help!

planetphp

If you are sending out bulk emails that are spammy the sending IP is going to get blacklisted regardless. If you are sending out genuine emails then you can apply to get whitelisted with some of the bigger mail hosts.

Are you using the php mail() funtion? If so this is likely to get blocked as spam quite frequently. You will be far better off using an SMTP mailer class.

bradgrafelman

planetphp;10994984 wrote:
Are you using the php mail() funtion? If so this is likely to get blocked as spam quite frequently. You will be far better off using an SMTP mailer class.

Nonsense; mail servers can't tell whether you called mail() or used a 3rd party SMTP class.

What they can tell, however, is whether your e-mail looks legitimate based on a) who it's coming from (IP of your outgoing mail server), and b) the headers contained within the message. Thus if you're sending bad headers (e.g. using user-supplied e-mail addresses for the 'From' header without specifying a 'Sender' header that points to an address on your own domain), then you can expect the messages to be considered spam (regardless of how you generated/sent them).

Krik

Spam blocking techniques usually entail looking for a series of things to be wrong after a certain number of "red flags" it marks it as spam. And if an email server gets too many messages from a single IP that are spam they may blacklist your IP address. So as bradgrafelman pointed out, make sure you're not doing things that will get you flagged.

I should note, being blacklisted may not always be caused by you. I have worked on websites, with shared hosting plans, where someone else on that server had been spamming and that caused the other websites on that server to get blacklisted. Also the reverse maybe something you should worry about, be considerate of your virtual neighbors your activity could hurt them. If you're sending a lot of emails maybe having your own IP would be the right thing to do for the other websites that share your server.

Also for blacklists there are several companies that provide the blacklist. You may want to check into whether they have techniques or recommendations for getting off and/or staying off their list.