How to blast thousands of emails and not get shut down by ISP

[Core20]

I have MS Outlook 2007 Enterprise Edition with BCM loaded; currently have
about 3000 records. I have several Windows Live and a Hotmail email account
setup through Outlook Connector.

I am about to start blasting emails to my records for various campaigns on a
regular basis; so the solution here has to be one that will work over and
over.
I have another database in ACT! with another 16,000 records I will be
mapping in shortly. The import will add another 4000 emails; bringing my
total to 7,000.
I’m expecting two critical issues to cause me problems when I start this.

First, I suspect my ISP will flag my broadband connection as a possible
spammer if I send 7000 emails at a time every 5 days. What is the simplest
work-around to do this and not have the ISP issue?

I will try to use BCM to do this but wonder if it would help me to build an
SMTP server, use an Exchange server, or even a third party program like
AtomPark for some reason to manage blasting 7000 emails, regularly – and
avoiding issues with my ISP.

My old ACT! program had a nifty way to stay off the radar with large emails
blasts. It would send an email blast like this, one record at a time, an
email every 1.5 seconds. This one by one email blast spaced 1.5 seconds apart
went un-noticed by my ISP.

Second question is that currently I only have a free email account from
Windows Live and Hotmail to use for my return email…and as my SMTP server.
Will MS allow me to send 7000 emails through my free Windows Live or Hotmail
accounts without causing me issues on this front?

And “No,†I’m not spamming these 7000 emails. They are my clients.

Thank you in Advance!

 

[James Fiennes]

The first thing is to familiarise yourself with the CANSPAM act (Mr Google will be able to advise here). One of your major stumbling blocks will be the fact that you are working off a freebee email account - with 7000 active clients you might consider a company email account - there are many hosting companies out there (you mention AtomPark) , but I can recommend MBD Solutions (www.mbdsolutions.com). These hosted email companies will have registered their servers with the main ISPs etc.

A very good guide to email marketing can be found courtesy of MailChimp. (http://www.mailchimp.com/articles/email_marketing_guide/). They are reasonably priced and I find their style refreshingly approachable.

I should probably add here that there are a zillion companies out their offering these services. I use both the companies mentioned above but have no form of affiliate program in place. As with all things in life, do you own research and take you own responsibilities.

Hope this helps

James