I just read today's SR feature article on e-mail marketing campaigns, and I'd like to pick your brain.

On my website, on almost every page is a little box, inside of which I tell shoppers that, if they'd like to receive notices of the arrival of new vintage jewelry, all they have to do is "click send". The link is set up with "subscribe" in the subject line. They click "send", and that's that. They're added to my list. So what's wrong?

Well, generally speaking, the internet, I believe, has over-reacted to "spam". A few years ago, users screamed, "Do Something!!". So the US gov't did. So browser's did. So e-mail programs did. So my server did. And now I'm s.o.l.

My server has warned me that if I send out one more announcement (which they have decided is "spam") to my clients, they will shut down my acc't, EVEN THOUGH the recipients have asked to subscribe.

AOL not only bounces my e-mails, but they contact my server and report me as a "spammer".

I don't feel I should have to spend money on new software to handle my e-mail campaigns. I've set up my address book so it works perfectly, automatically. Further, I only do about 3 such mailings a year. Total recipients, approx.1,200 each time. E-mails are short, and include only one link. CTR is excellent.

But the e-mail police are all over me. What's a white hat retailer to do?

I have sort of the same problem, my host only allows me to send 600 emails per hour and I've got closing in on 6,000 members for my site now.  So what I do is export the list to send the e-mails too and just send them manually with a VBA macro from my own home computer instead of from my webserver.  My home ISP doesn't allow me to CC a list that big, but the apparently have no problem with sending 6,000 emails one after the other.

If you have Microsoft Word or any Microsoft office product that supports Visual Basic For Applications, the macro to read the list and send the e-mail is pretty easy.

Many thanks, Muti,

I'll check that out!