Legitimate mass mailing solution

[Maxou]

Hi there,

I am a professional advisor and I need to send personalised emails to 3,000 of my professional contacts regularly (not commercial emails). I know all of these people personally. There are several companies out there that offer mass emailing like mailchimp, but they don't address my needs:
- each email has to be personalised with the first name of my contact and their company mentioned
- AND each email has to be looking like a real email (no fancy html templates and no unsubscribe link) because my contact might not appreciate not being contacted directly

Is there a solution that you know that could that could help me to deliver my messages (without being blacklisted as spam), either cloud-based or desktop based?

xoxo

[jeffpan]

you need programming it. 3000 is a small size, try fastmail or pobox etc.

[kijinbear]

You don't have to use a fancy template with MailChimp. You can make it look as "manually typed out" as you want, and have each contact's name inserted at the right location so that each email reads "Dear John," "Dear Mike," etc.

Similar services include Mailgun, SendGrid, SparkPost, etc. Take a look at each and see if they have what you need.

[EmailDude69]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhVeRkAxg8I

[Maxou]

Originally Posted by jeffpan

you need programming it. 3000 is a small size, try fastmail or pobox etc.

Hi Jeffpan,

3000 is for me, to day but it might grow to 5000 and then 10000 depending if I also have to handle sending our bills on behalf of the rest of the team.

We use hosted Exchange provided by microsoft. Fastmail and Pobox seem to be other email hosting services. If we go with them (if they offer what are looking for) it would mean migrating our email system to theirs and loosing the benefit of exchange, right?

What does programming mean in this context and how would we do it?

[Maxou]

Originally Posted by kijinbear

You don't have to use a fancy template with MailChimp. You can make it look as "manually typed out" as you want, and have each contact's name inserted at the right location so that each email reads "Dear John," "Dear Mike," etc.

Similar services include Mailgun, SendGrid, SparkPost, etc. Take a look at each and see if they have what you need.

Hi Kijinbear,

I created an account with mailchimp and found the raw text template. Problem is that it looks too "raw" vs an email sent from outlook. And the simplest html template with just text looks too much like it was sent in bulk because the text remain in a kind of artificial column.

But the worst is that they oblige you to have "unsubscribe" at the bottom of your email because of a law.

The other services you mentioned seem direct competitors to Mailchimp with the same limitations.

[Maxou]

I investigated further and maybe the solution is the following:

Using the mail merge function of Outlook / Apple mail to personalise the content, and send the emails with a pro smtp provider such as smtp2go.com or serversmtp.com instead of the smtp provided by Microsoft Exchange?

It is maybe not the most elegant solution, but apparently each email will be sent like a "normal" email from my usual software, and I will unlikely be blacklisted a spammer because these providers are in charge of sending the emails like a Mailchimp would do, right?

What do you think?

[kijinbear]

Originally Posted by Maxou

I created an account with mailchimp and found the raw text template. Problem is that it looks too "raw" vs an email sent from outlook. And the simplest html template with just text looks too much like it was sent in bulk because the text remain in a kind of artificial column.

You are not limited to the templates they have on their website. They are just samples to give you an idea of the kinds of things that you can do. You can create your own custom template and tell Mailchimp (or one of their competitors) to use it.