In the last few months I’ve received numerous calls or emails from customers complaining that they can not send BULK emails via GoldMine using their O365 or G-Suite email accounts. Some have had their email accounts shut down others say they receive an error message when trying to send.
Some of these customers had recently switched from using their own self hosted mail server or some had switched from a provider they had used for years but switched to O365 or G-Suite, etc. but now that they have switched have run into issues with sending BULK emails to their GoldMine contacts.
WHAT IS GOING ON?
Let me start by saying that you should NOT use your O365 or G-Suite accounts for sending BULK emails. It is clearly stated in their service agreement that you should not send BULK/MASS emails using O365 or G-Suite.
Here is Microsoft’s message/notice on this:
Recommendations for customers who want to send mass mailings through EOP. It’s difficult to strike a balance between customers who want to send a large volume of email vs. protecting the service from compromised accounts and bulk email senders with poor recipient acquisition practices. The cost of a Microsoft 365 email source landing on a third-party IP block list is greater than blocking a user who’s sending too much email.
As described in the Exchange Online Service Description, using EOP to send bulk email is not a supported use of the service, and is only permitted on a “best-effort” basis. For customers who do want to send bulk email, we recommend the following solutions:
- Send bulk email through on-premises email servers: Customers maintain their own email infrastructure for mass mailings.
- Use a third-party bulk email provider: There are several third-party bulk email solution providers that you can use to send mass mailings. These companies have a vested interest in working with customers to ensure good email sending practices.
Many customers have argued that “I’ve always been able to send BULK emails in the past with GoldMine with no problems”. As much as this maybe true, it does not apply to the situation when using a hosted email service provider such as 0365 or G-Suite, etc. They have to protect the integrity of their mail servers and the millions of other users that are using those mail servers to send emails. All it would take is one customer who does not properly manage/maintain a clean sending reputation to have one or several of those mail servers placed on an IP Block List and it would affect so many other businesses.
GoldMine does not have any sort of built in unsubscribe management feature, or hard bounce email removal feature, let alone the ability to track who opened, clicked on a link in your email, etc.
SO WHAT ARE GOLDMINE USERS TO DO?
Now let me also state, that just because you can’t and shouldn’t send BULK emails through your 0365 or G-Suite email accounts, doesn’t mean that you can’t/shouldn’t send BULK emails with GoldMine. What you should be doing is sending your BULK emails with a BULK email service provider, such as SendGrid.com or SMTP.com or any number of other BULK email service providers. As these service providers will work with you to maintain and clean your lists and ensure that you are performing good email sending practices.
I’ve posted several other posts, on this blog about integrations I have written between many of these other 3rd party solutions. If you don’t want to use GoldMine to send your BULK emails and instead prefer to send using an email marketing solution such as Constant Contact or Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor or any other number of email marketing service providers, I’ve written integrations for GoldMine and those as well.
So there you have it, that is the current state of email and email marketing with GoldMine in 2022. For many years customers have been able to just send and send and send without really having to manage and maintain a clean sending list, but those days are gone and users now more than ever must ensure they are using good email sending practices. ie Unsubscribe management, Hard bounce management, etc.
USING PURCHASED EMAIL MAREKTING LISTS
One of the other topics that is sort of related to this conversation is those that choose to purchase email marketing lists. I’ve had numerous customers call me wanting assistance/help with importing a purchased list of several thousand contacts and emails into their GoldMine with the intent of sending an email to these contacts with the hopes of generating business. This is a bad practice on many levels, especially if the email list has not been cleaned/verified.
So if you are someone who uses this practice, the best thing you can do to protect your sending reputation is to ensure that you get that list of emails verified before potentially sending to lots of non-deliverable email addresses. I have also posted several articles/videos on how to integrate an email list cleaning service provider with your GoldMine or how to bulk remove bad emails that might exist in your GoldMine. If you get your email list verified before you import it into GoldMine then you don’t have to worry about removing any bad emails.
I do recommend customers that have not had their GoldMine email addresses cleaned/scrubbed to do so. It is not wise to just send and rely on the email service provider to manage the hard bounces for you. Too many hard bounces will hurt your domains sender reputation and could get your domain blacklisted or worse your account shut down by what ever service provider you are using.
