If implemented correctly, email blasting is the most powerful and has the highest ROI among all marketing channels. The first thing to do before you send out your email campaign is to select a healthy SMTP server to deliver emails. If you made a wrong move at this step, you would be risking your capital and the reputation of your company.

There are usually three types of email SMTP servers you can choose:

1. Partner Email SMTP Servers

These email service providers (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL Mail, etc.) sign agreements that emails from each other's server will never be blocked and there is no limitation on the number of emails sent per day. The only limitation imposed is on the content of the email. Therefore, as long as you avoid using those spam keywords in your email, and do not send mass emails too fast, most of your emails will be delivered safely and accurately. By utilizing professional email marketing software, like 1and1Mail, you can get your job done very easily.

2. Email SMTP servers with healthy records

To ensure a SMTP server has a healthy record, there are three things to check. (1) The servers have fixed IPs and they are not in the blacklist of international anti-spam association. (2) The Reverse PTR Records are set correctly. (3) The settings on the SMTP servers are correct. Again, as long as you write good contents and control the speed of sending well with 1and1Mail, your IPs will not be blocked.

3. Unknown Email SMTP servers

These servers usually use dynamic IPs, do not have a correct DNS records or reverse PTR records, or are blacklisted by many well-known email service providers. Emails sent from these servers would be easily blocked or go into junk mail box.

To conclude, do some research on the email SMTP servers you are using. Moreover, do not be too aggressive when sending mass emails. Use them properly with professional email blasters to build up reputation of your domain and email account.

Many large companies and small business owners host their websites and email accounts on GoDaddy servers. Therefore, email marketers also hope to send mass emails through Go Daddy email SMTP servers. This article introduces how to get the correct settings of GoDaddy SMTP server in your email marketing software.

1. In Go Daddy "My Account" Panel, click “Email”

2. Find the the email account you want to send mass emails with. Click “Manage Account”.

3. In the new window, click the Info Center icon of the email account you want to do mass mailing with.

4. In the next pop-up window, find the correct SMTP settings and port number of this email address. (Note: you can also find the daily sending quota of your email account on this page.)

5. Input the settings above into your email marketing software. Here we use 1and1Mail screen as an example.

6. Click "Test Account" in 1and1Mail to see if the setting is correct.

Now, you are ready to send out your first email marketing campaigns through GoDaddy email account with professional email marketing software.

1and1Mail 3.26 has fixed another 2 bugs:

• Create table error in non-English OS
• List index out of bounds error

The complete 1and1Mail changelog can be viewed here.

After 30-day testing and receiving a few customer feedbacks, 1and1Mail is upgraded to version 3.24 and fixed a few bugs, especially in multi-threaded sending and multi account management.

Here are the details:

• Added notification pop-ups when a task is ended
• Bug fix: failed to send mass emails
• Bug fix: account assignment error in multi-thread sending
• Bug fix: failed to save account in new account group
• Bug fix: failed to resend unfinsihed emails
• Bug fix: HTML editor error in Win 7 64-bit
• Bug fix: failed to display account assignment correctly in multi-thread sending

The complete 1and1Mail changelog can be viewed here.

Whether or not email marketing software can be installed and run on a thumb drive depends on the stability of the thumb drive. When the software is sending mass emails, it is usually reading and writing data to and from the thumb drive, although not very frequently. If something goes wrong with the thumb drive (access error, or the thumb drive is removed), the software may stop running and it may affect the email deliverability of your marketing campaign.
 

Therefore, we suggest the following when you are running email marketing software on a thumb drive:

1. If the sending task can be finished within 30 minutes or the number of recipient is small, it is fine to run the software from a thumb drive. After all, the stability of the thumb drive is worse than hard disk, so it is better to keep the sending time short.

2. You can install the software on a thumb drive first, and copy the whole folder to the hard disk and run it from the hard disk. After sending out the email campaigns, you can copy the whole folder from the hard disk back to the thumb drive to ensure all data and records are stored in the same place.

Last but not least, if you are 1and1Mail Free Edition user, feel free to use the software anywhere you like. If you are 1and1Mail Personal and Business Edition user, 1 license only allows you to run the software on 1 PC.

Today 1and1Mail announced a major upgrade of its email marketing software for small and medium businesses. The upgrade includes a revolutionary new feature called Auto IP Switcher that increases email deliverability rate to a new level.

"In an email marketing campaign, Auto IP Switcher can increase the inbox placement rate by at least 30%," said Bill Graham, CEO of 1and1Soft. "It ensures your emails will be delivered accurately and safely to your clients' inbox."

Auto IP Switcher prevents sender's email accounts from being blacklisted and enables email marketers to send more emails out per day. It is most effective when working with multiple free email services, such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL Mail.

Multi Account Manager is another feature that differentiates 1and1Mail from other mass mailing software. Through accurate grouping and segmentation of sender's email accounts in Multi Account Manager, email marketers are able to better organize their marketing campaigns and reduce the risk of being considered as a spammer.

"Our goal is to minimize the marketing cost and maximize the email marketing efficiency for our clients. I believe the new version can significantly boost 1and1Mail's market share," Bill continues, "we roll out an upgrade every 3 months and each upgrade is based on hundreds of customer feedbacks and new feature requests. That's why we have been growing so fast."

New 1and1Mail Free Edition downloads can be found at http://www.1and1soft.com/download/.

—

About 1and1Mail

1and1Mail is free email marketing software specifically designed for small and medium business worldwide to create, schedule and send personalized mass emails, manage email contacts and design email newsletters.

1and1Mail differentiates itself from other mass mailing software by offering unique features that can greatly boost your email deliverability and lower your email marketing cost. These features include Automatic IP Switcher, Multi-threaded Sending, Email Template Downloader and Multi Account Manager. With 1and1Mail, you are able to not only send more emails to your customers per day, but also build a better corporate image with professional and well-designed email templates.
 

When you start a mass mailing task in 1and1Mail, sometimes you will encounter a pop-up message: "List index out of bounds (8)".

It is usually caused by your modification (import, add or delete) of emails in the address books that are being used by the ongoing task.

To resolve the issue, please restart 1and1Mail and start a new sending task. Make sure there is no change on the address book when the task is ongoing.

Free email service providers, such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL Mail, usually provide free SMTP connections to send emails and they are the most commonly used channels for mass mailing.

When using the free service, you should pay special attention to the send limits and rate limits imposed by these free email providers. Through using well-recognized mass mailing software and configuring it properly, you can easily go over the limits and save significant marketing cost.

The following data is mostly collected from the official sources (namely, the official websites of Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL Mail). But your email service provider may change its mailing policy without any prior notification. It is suggested you always contact your email service provider and ask about the most updated SMTP email send limits and send rate before proceeding with your email marketing campaigns.
 

Gmail Sending Limit and Send Rate

Gmail Send Limits: 100 people / connection
Gmail Send Rate: 100 people / day
Gmail Attachment Size Limit: 25MB
Gmail Restriction Expiry Method: Recovered within 24 hours after the limit is reached

Gmail will temporarily disable your account if you send emails to more than 500 recipients or if you send a large number of undeliverable messages.

If you use a POP or IMAP client (e.g. Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird or Apple Mail), you may only send a message to 100 people at a time. Your account should be re-enabled within 24 hours.

Please do verify your contacts' email addresses. It's also important that everyone you are sending mail to is willing to receive it.

Further reading: Gmail Bulk Senders Guidelines

Hotmail Sending Limit and Send Rate

Hotmail Send Limits: 100 messages / connection
Hotmail Send Rate: 100 people / day
Hotmail Attachment Size Limit: 25MB
Hotmail Restriction Expiry Method: N/A

The Hotmail limit for outgoing email messages is 100 messages per day. However, it is not a fixed number!

The limit also depends on your reputation within Hotmail. The system needs a few days to build your reputation. So, there are stricter limitations on new accounts or accounts that have engaged in activity representative of abusers sending spam. As you develop a reputation for not sending junk e-mail, Hotmail increases the number of recipients that you can send messages to.

If you are a new free user, you might be limited to a lower limit compared to an older account which is a temporary restriction and is upgraded to the maximum recipients limit as soon as the user establishes credibility in the system.

You can verify your account with a mobile number (only available in limited markets at this time): http://g.live.com/1rewlive4tup/tupp to increase the limit immediately. Please note that the SMS validation will increase the limit only if you are hitting a lower limit compared to a regular free user. If you already have the maximum limit of a free account, SMS validation will not help in increasing the limit.

Or, you can upgrade to Hotmail Plus or MSN Premium, both of which are paid accounts, to enjoy a higher sending limit.

Further reading: Hotmail Daily Message Limit

Yahoo! Mail Sending Limit and Send Rate

Yahoo! Mail Send Limits: 20 people / connection
Yahoo! Mail Send Rate: 100 people / day
Yahoo! Mail Attachment Size Limit: 25MB
Yahoo! Mail Restriction Expiry Method: N/A

Yahoo! Mail accepts a maximum of 20 messages per SMTP connection. It is suggested you cap the number of messages you send to Yahoo! Mail to fall within this per-connection limit. When this limit is reached, no further messages will be accepted for delivery as Yahoo! Mail server automatically terminates the connection (without giving an error code).

If you are sending messages to a significant number of Yahoo! Mail users, you may try to reconnect to Yahoo! Mail MX servers immediately thereafter.

You may open concurrent connections from the same server to facilitate efficient transmission of your messages under the help of email marketing software.

Yahoo! Mail also keeps reputation data about each IP address and domain you send from. Therefore, by segmenting the mail stream that delivers marketing mail from another that sends transactional messages, you make it easier for Yahoo! Mail to determine and assign each mail stream's reputation.

If you use Yahoo! Mail Plus, the outbound email messages are limited to 500 per day, and each message can be sent to no more than 100 contacts at once.

Further reading: Yahoo! Mail Basics

AOL Mail Sending Limit and Send Rate

AOL Mail Send Limits: 200 / connection
AOL Mail Send Rate: Constantly changing
AOL Mail Attachment Size Limit: 25MB
AOL Mail Restriction Expiry Method: N/A

AOL also imposes a rate limit on an AOL member when a member exceeds the acceptable number of email messages sent in a given time period. Rate Limits have been put in place by AOL Mail to curtail abuse from spammers and ensure an enjoyable online experience. The maximum number of people you can send an email to is constantly changing so that spammers cannot find out what it is. If you need to send an email to a large group of people, please break your mailing list into the smallest groups possible.

Further reading: AOL Mail Rate Limit

Original Post: http://www.1and1soft.com/free-email-marketing-resources/email-sending-limit/

1and1Mail 3.1 is released on Mar. 5, 2011. Here are the updates and bug fixes to the new version.

• Added support of import/export Excel files (.xlsx, xls)
• Added support of local pictures in email newsletters
• Enhanced system tray feature
• Enhanced email template management
• Added support of multi-national character sets (UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2, windows-1250, IBM852, GB2312, HZ-GB-2312, Big5, EUC-KR, ISO-2022-KR, EUC-JP, ISO-2022-JP, cp866, ISO-8859-5, KOI8-U, KOI8-R, ISO-8859-8, ISO-8859-8-I, ISO-8859-7, ISO-8859-9, ASMO-708, ISO-8859-6, windows-1256, ISO-8859-4, windows-1257, ISO-8859-3, windows-1258, IBM775)
• Enhanced email settings (reply-to address, request read receipt, priority, sender, etc.)
• Improved HTML email support
• Some bug fixing

Please download it here.

Go Viral or Go Home

Writing a message that doesn't spread is a waste of others' time and a waste of your life.Ideas that spread win!

After working in the Internet marketing field for more than five years and creating numerous successful marketing campaigns, here I am going to summarize the key elements that I have used every time to make a message spread out like a virus. Some examples are supplemented to help you understand each element more deeply and see how others apply them in real life.

Let's see how to go viral now!

1. Surprise

The message you want to spread has to be logical and reasonable, but somewhat beyond people's expectation. More importantly, you'd better do this in the title of your message.

Example: Remember the news "Steve Jobs has just six weeks to live"? It is common for a person to go to hospital and in fact Steve went to hospital many times. So what's surprising? It's "six weeks to live".

Question for you: What surprise in the message do I have for my clients?

2. Simple

Nowadays, people are overloaded with information. If you want your idea to get inside people's head, make it simple! The most effective way is to create a visual image for your idea, at least subconsciously. A picture is worth a thousand words.PS: If your idea is too long and complicated, make sure you divide it into pieces and spread it one by one.

PPS: Make a video whenever possible.

Example: Remember the story that the average person consumes 4 spiders per year in his sleep? Can you picturize a spider slowly crawling into your mouth in your head? Yes, you got it!

Question for you: Can my clients see pictures in my message?

3. Emotion

People's emotional brain (right brain) always works faster than the logical brain (left brain).If you count the news in the past few weeks, you will notice that bad news has occupied most of the columns, such as wars, murders, diseases, car accidents and natural disasters. Why? It is because bad news triggers the No.1 emotion in a human's head: fear. Fear attracts the most attention and calls for action.

When people spread your message, they either want to ask others for more information, or just want to seek for calmness through simple sharing.

Example: Still remember the spider?

Question for you: Any emotion you can embed into your message?

4. Jealousy

Jealousy is a very complicated human emotion. I specifically emphasize it here because it works quite well on people's subconscious mind. It is just so difficult for a person to admit that he takes the action because he is jealous of something.The resource is always limited on the planet. The fact that you get it indicates I lose it, in a sense. And lacking resource is a life-or-death issue.

Example: Remember the news of someone winning the lottery? Remember the news that some movie star had slept with several women? Remember the story that a simple business model made several millions of dollars per month?

Question for you: How could you create a sense of competition in your message?

5. Authority

This is the most critical factor why your audience has to listen to you, not others. Biologically, people were born to listen to authority because the world is full of uncertainties and the authority creates a sense of safety for us.

Example: No offence, but Made in Germany and Made in China, which do you trust more?

Question for you: How can I prove to my audience that I am authorized to talk about my idea?

6. Repetition

Something unfamiliar or unknown indicates danger. When it is repeated many times, it gets familiar to you and it creates a sense of safety in your head, unconsciously. Safety is a good thing.

Example: Why ads are repeated again and again on TV even though you hate them? Why an awful song starts to sound familiar and nice to you when you hear it everywhere? Why people fall in love with someone even though they do not have feeling for each other at the first sight?

Question for you: How can I show up in front of my customers more often?

7. Timing

When you read the headline news every morning, pause and think for a few seconds. It may be your chance.Try to relate your products to something popular recently. People are eager to read and spread everything related to it.

Example: Prince William's royal wedding boosted the sales of everything in the wedding industry, such as wedding dresses, rings, matchmaking services and divorce lawsuits. Anything else you can think of?

Question for you: What's today's news? How can I relate my ideas/products to the news?

8. Time

The longer a fact exists in our head, the harder it is to deny it. When the fact is proven to be false, people would fight to defend it, because the fact has become part of our belief, and we live upon such belief to survive in the world.

Example: In China, a majority of grown-ups still believe the Great Wall is the only construction humans can see through eyes from the universe. In United States, today most people still believe Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Question for you: How can I get my words out as early as possible?

Recommended Tool

Now you understand the key elements of how to spread ideas. You can actually apply them everywhere in life, through word-of-mouth, social media and emails.I use emails more often. Nowadays, people still allocate a specific amount of time every day scanning and replying emails, during which, they are more focused and willing to accept new things when they see something interesting or beyond their expectation. Therefore, apply the above-mentioned elements in your next emails today and see how viral they go!

Last but not least, you may need some powerful email blasting tools to assist you in spreading ideas. Using professional email marketing software ensure the deliverability of your email campaigns and you can personalize every email for each of your customers.

1and1Mail
Easy-to-use free email marketing software, perfect for small businesses. It allows you to create, schedule and send personalized mass email campaigns, manage email lists and design email newsletters. 1and1Mail Personal Edition allows you to send mass emails to 1,000 persons per batch, and it is so far the most affordable email marketing software that I can find in the market.

Original Post: http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-spread-ideas