Comfy Computing Ltd

This article is for clients who use mailing lists to increase their business. It's very important to ensure your e-mails reach your clients and don't end up classified as Spam. Worse still, you might be classified- officially- as a Spammer. Comfy is developing a soution to this but here is a brief outine of what you might encounter if you send a few e-mails out via some sort of mailing list. NB if you have a mailing lists with a combined total of say 100 members, don't worry.

I have been in touch with a number of clients about this but if you are interested and Sue or I haven't spoken to you, please get in touch. I will then make sure you are kept up to date when final details of the Comfy Computing Mailing List services are available.

In the meantime, here is a brief background note about SPAM.

 In March 2009, Kaspersky Labs estimated that Spam made up 82% of the total e-mail traffic. Obviously this means annoyance to all, and expenses borne by ISP's (and ultimately by you, the user.) So Draconian action is justified. One such type of action is "Blacklisting" Here is what one of my suppliers says:

By default, the maximum number of e-mails that can be sent per hour is 100.  Additionally, on our shared hosting platform, the maximum mailing list size we can support is about 1000-1500 addresses in total.

This is because of the danger of an anti-spam blacklisting being implemented against one of our shared servers.  Even if the mailing list is entirely legitimate, such a blacklisting can be put in place in response to a complaint from one of the recipients of the e-mail in question.

Such a blacklisting can result in none of the customers on the server in question being able to send e-mails succesfully to 90%+ of destination addresses.

As this would be highly disruptive for our customers, it is something we must avoid at all costs.

If an anti-spam complaint is filed against your domain, we can try to have it removed but without the appropriate proof this is usually a futile exercise and the only option available is to terminate the account in question (i.e. yours) so that mail service for the server as a whole can be restored.

The anti-spamming organisation will require to see proof that the e-mail address in question signed up to the list, via a double-opt in (COI - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opt_in_e-mail) mechanism.  And it has to be a double-opt in mechanism - anything less than that will not be accepted.

You can read more on this topic at one of the anti-spamming organisations: http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/answers.lasso?section=Marketing%20FAQs

The links get a bit technical, by the way.

THE COMFY SOLUTION is on its way. We will update this article when matters have been finalised but our pilot project is looking good.