RESPONSIBLE BULK EMAILING

E-mail is the most successful way of recruiting prospects business!

Please print out and study this page before you start sending emails! Mass Mailing is the primary key to building wealth on the World Wide Web.
BUT
You must learn to use it wisely.

If you are going to send out bulk emails, you have to understand EXACTLY what you are doing and what you are about to get into, and the laws that surround bulk emailing.

You also have to be fully prepared and educated on where you are sending your bulk email. If you send a bulk email to a person living in Nevada, Washington or California where laws against Bulk Email exist, you could possibly be subject to fines of up to 25,000.00 per day, per host that you send your bulk email to. But even these laws would not apply to you if you are not involved in some illegal activity. The laws provide penalties for hiding the sender's origin, not for sending the emails.

On the more positive side, Bulk mail is a LEGAL form of advertising in most States. The FTC web site at http://www.ftc.gov makes no mention of email at all. You will probably find a lot of messages in your mailbox which begin with the following disclaimer.

################################################
This message is sent in compliance of
the new e-mail bill:SECTION 301*
################################################
* "Per Section 301, Paragraph (a)(2)(C) of S. 1618,
further transmissions to you by the sender of this
email may be stopped at no cost to you by sending a
reply to this email address with the word
"remove" in the subject line."
################################################

The bill referred to was introduced into the Senate in 1997. IT FAILED
IN CONGRESS! The header above could rightly be called "Murkowski Spam". It is strictly a ploy to throw "anti-spammers" off track. Here is an excerpt taken directly from Senator Mukowski's Web Site

"If you have been directed to this page, you have probably received spam from an Internet marketer. I was the author of anti-spam legislation in the 105th Congress since I believe that spam is a burden upon citizens who use the Internet. Although my bill passed the Senate, the House of Representatives took a different view of the issue by merely recommending self-regulation. Ultimately no legislation was adopted into law. I will shortly be re-introducing similar anti-spam legislation in the 106th Congress.

If the spam you received contains illegal and/or offensive material, I encourage you to forward the spam to the Federal Trade Commission at uce@ftc.gov. The FTC is beginning to take legal action against these abusers of the Internet and is seeking examples of spam to initiate its investigations and prosecutions".

Like it or not, Bulk email is where the money is!

How Does Bulk Emailing Work? - Let's start by breaking down the components involved in bulk emailing. First, the bulk emailer needs a list of addresses to mail to. Second, a software program that sends out bulk email is necessary. Third, an internet connection to transmit the mail is required. Fourth, a product or service to sell is mandatory. Fifth, a means of doing business is needed. Sixth, the bulk emailer has to have a method of payment to receive money from the customers. We will deal with all these topics.

Targeted lists - These lists can be developed based on certain criteria such as city, state or country the recipient is located in. It can also be based on occupation, age, special interests, hobbies, industry etc. Targeted lists can be the email addresses of business web sites or email addresses of people. The lists of email addresses belonging to people are developed from member directories, chat rooms, bulletin boards and forums in America Online and CompuServe for the most part.

There are numerous software products that help one harvest these addresses. One of the most popular ones is Power Tools (the older version) which is a shareware program downloadable from AOL itself as well as the general internet shareware sites. Power Tools doesn't put the email addresses in workable format (plain .txt files, one to a line) so another software must be used to process the files from Power Tools. At the end of the book there is a discussion of software products.

Targeted list builder software programs are typically not passive products in that they require the operator to be pointing and clicking actively. Let's use AOL for an example. The bulk emailer goes in to the member directory and hits advanced. In this mode the harvesting bulk emailer can search AOL members according to various criteria such as location (city, state, country) date of birth, sex, marital status, occupation, hobbies, type of computer, and even whether or not they are signed on to AOL at the time. The search can also be directed to only extract names of those signed on to AOL at the time of the search.

The idea here is to quickly build a list, and then send those people an email while they are still signed on to AOL so they hear the voice say "You have Mail". Then the AOL member checks their messages and sees the email ad.

The bulk emailer also likes to harvest addresses of those signed on since it is a good indication that the person is a frequent user of AOL and thus likely to frequently check their email. AOL users are not the same as general internet users. Many AOL members don't know how to use the general internet and like to remain within the confines of AOL. They post on bulletin boards, talk in chat rooms, etc. They are busy interacting with other people and use their email frequently, which means they check it frequently. When building a targeted list the more search criteria that are applied, the smaller the harvest or yield. The yield is generally about 5,000 email addresses per hour. Similar searches can be conducted using Delphi, Prodigy, and CompuServe. Email addresses can also be harvested from chat rooms, forums and bulletin board postings. Again, these are the people that are going to frequently check their email. The bulk emailers like to refer to AOL as the motherlode. The average AOL member has a $60,000 per year income. CompuServe members have an average income of $90,000 per year but they are not as responsive as AOL members in most cases. This of course will vary depending on the product you are selling.

Most bulk emailers are poor marketers and don't have viable products or services to sell. They offer a lot of MLM opportunities most of which are failures waiting to happen, and you see many of them selling the same products. Email Addresses - The bulk emailer needs to have a list to mail to. Numbers drives bulk email. Large amounts of bulk email need to get sent out. The bulk emailer is only as good as his or her list. There are two types of lists, targeted and general.

Target lists of email addresses extracted from business web sites can be built with more automated software products. One must keep in mind the fact that with such a list the recipient is frequently a webmaster or a business email box not belonging to a particular individual. This means the message may not be considered to be of interest to the person reading the email who could be a receptionist or clerical person who has no idea who to forward your message to.

The software designed to do this is being developed at a rapid pace with a lot of new products hitting the market. These products are typically extracting duplicate addresses that must be purged. The way they work is they go into several of the major search engines at the same time doing a keyword search. The software is looking for "mailto:" in the web site. It extracts these email addresses. The best yield I ever heard of was 23,000 email addresses (after duplicate removal) in a night. To attain this yield the person ran the computer all night long.

One inherent problem with this technique is the deeper you go into a search engine the lower the relevancy factor becomes so the email addresses extracted after an hour or so might be stripped from web sites that have very little relevance with the keyword searched for.

People also strip email addresses from newsgroups as another means of building targeted lists. These people have an interest in the subject matter of the newsgroup or else they wouldn't sign up for the newsgroup. There are software products that operate in this manner and they are typically the same products that strip addresses in other ways as well but some are specialized for newsgroups.

Don't be deceived by targeted lists. If you are a manufacturer of sailboat sails and you build a list of sailboat owners that is true targeting. The recipient has a specialized need for products you are selling. Another example of true targeting would be a saddle maker building a targeted list of people who own horses. When a bulk emailer mails to a targeted list they typically receive fewer flames than if they mailed to a general list. A flame is a complaint. Most bulk emailers ignore flames.

In addition the response rate from a targeted list is usually 10 to 20 times higher than with a general list. Remember the bulk emailer isn't paying for stamps, printing, envelopes, labels etc, so he or she can send out 50 million emails and eventually hit their target audience in addition to others that wouldn't be identifiable as their target. Not all horse owners are going to provide publicly available information stating that they own a horse.

An example of gross targeting would be a Pizza Store in Dallas compiling an email address list of all the people who live in Dallas. These people do not necessarily have an interest in pizza. It does however make sense for the pizza storeowner in Dallas to restrict the list to Dallas recipients due to the nature of the business, but this is not truly accurate targeting.

A seller of ladies clothes building a list of women is not really targeting. In a very oversimplified fashion they are targeting, but results from mailing such an oversimplified list would tend to be similar to results obtained from mailing to a general list.

In the case of the Pizza Store the market is inherently limited geographically, so the owner is just restricting the mailing using a geographic filter. It is important to understand that many sales from bulk email are secondary. This means the person receiving the bulk email forwards the email to someone else who they feel would be interested in the email.

There are those in the bulk email business that specialize in building target lists for others. The rates tend to vary but range from $0.01 per name to $0.25 per name and everything in between. General email lists are far less costly.

General Lists - General email lists are far less costly than targeted lists. General lists of 30+ million email addresses on CD-ROM are selling from $100 - $300.

It is unlikely that one could get more than 35-40 million email addresses on a CD-ROM without utilizing some powerful zipping software. The CD's that are not zipped, with no password protection are the easiest for the bulk emailer to use. You can use them right off the CD without even having to load them onto the computer.

There is at least one company selling massive amounts of email addresses, up to 50 million, via ftp download. It can take up to 20 minutes to download a million addresses. It may be pratical to capture such a list with a cable modem, but it's a pretty big job for even a 56K board. Time is money in the bulk email business. A person using a list on CD can get a new list each month or two and they just pop out the old CD and put in the new one.

Many, but not all, bulk emailers don't bother purging their lists of "remove" and undeliverable addresses. To do so would require the addresses be installed on their hard drive. This takes up space and is time consuming. There is no law at this time that the author is aware of that requires a bulk emailer to remove anyone from his or her list.

Actually remove requests are a fairly infrequent event. Most bulk emailers will receive perhaps 50 remove requests per million emails, unless they have a particularly offensive product. Removes and flames are directly related to the product being offered. Having said all that, it is really adviseable to process your removes and undeliverables if you wish to re-use the list. It cuts down on the complaints and bounced back mail, which can bog down your ISP's server.

General lists can vary greatly in quality. Age is a big factor in evaluating a list. Most email addresses are only considered good for 3-6 months. AOL members can each have up to 5 different email addresses and these can be changed in a moments notice. This of course can explain why one can have a list of 20 million AOL addresses when AOL only has 8 or 9 million members. When purchasing a list don't put a lot of stock into what the seller says is the age of the list. The seller probably didn't build the list. Most of these large (over 5 million lists) are being sold by people who acquired the addresses by trading with others or outright purchasing them and they don't know how old their lists really are.

They also may not know what the deliverable rate is. One must remember the deliverable rate of a list gets worse each month.

What you can reasonably expect to find out from the seller of the list is whether or not all the duplicates have been removed. You can also ask if the .edu, .gov, .mil, and .org addresses have been removed.

Let me explain a bit here. The .edu means the email address has .edu in it so it is an email address of an education institution. These educational institutions are renowned for complaining (flaming) regarding bulk email and many don't like to mail to them. The same applies for .gov (governments), .mil (military) and .org (non-profits). A general list with the duplicates and the .gov, .edu, .mil, and .org removed is worth a lot more than one missing these removals. In passing, there are some bulk emailers who like to mail to .edu and .org addresses because they get orders from these addresses. Currently there is a shortage of non-AOL, non-CompuServe, non-MCI, non-Earthlink, non-Prodigy and non-Delphi lists. There are numerous lists containing email addresses from these large domains, but obtaining the email addresses of those in the smaller domains (under 2500) members is tough. These are the people who do not recieve a lot of bulk email and should be more responsive for that very reason.

There are email address "generators" that create email addresses for CompuServe and AOL. However, many of these addresses are invalid and bulk emailers avoid them. The large domains make up no more than 30 - 50 million members of the internet community, which is estimated at, over 150 million. Of course one must bear in mind that quite a few people have more than one email address so it is quite conceivable for there to be in excess of 200 million deliverable email addresses in existence at the time of this writing. It is the opinion of the author that there are bulk emailers who do have the hard-to-come-by address lists but retain them strictly for their own use. Bulk Email Software - Currently there are several bulk email programs on the market. The list seems to be changing monthly. First we will discuss some general considerations regarding bulk email software in terms of what it must be capable of doing. Then we will discuss some specific programs. Transmission Speed - The bulk emailer needs to send out large amounts of email to be successful. The less the time required performing this task, the more you can send. More mail means more orders. The bulk emailer doesn't have to pay for postage, printing, etc., so transmission speed becomes the critical issue.

The fastest program currently on the market, Stealth Mass Mailer, can send out messages at the rate of 250,000 - 600,000 thousand per hour. Users with a Pentium and a 33 modem will get about 200,000 messages out per hour actually sent out. The program starts out sending very fast and then slows down. There are also limits as to how many addresses can be loaded into a computer. A 266 Pentium with 128 of ram may be able to handle 500,000 addresses loaded in at one time, while a 166 with 32 of ram may not be able to handle more than 200,000 at one time.

The bulk emailer is also subject to the capabilities of the mail servers they are using for relay. If the rate of mail going into the relay server is greater than the rate the mail is going out from the relay server you can bog down or even crash the relay mail server and lose your mail. 

What happens is the the mail you are sending is going into the hard drive of the relaying server and then being sent out to the next relay or final destination. Enough mail going into the relay server you could fill up it's hard drive space. What the bulk emailer doesn't know is who else is using this mail server at the same time and to what extent.

You need to control your flow of mail to meet the capabilities of your servers. Most bulk mail software tests the server to see how much they can transmit without overloading or bogging down a server.

Other variables are: internet traffic, message size, the list being mailed to and so forth. If Stealth Mass Mailer is being run directly into a T-1 the rate of transmission can get even higher. Most of the other programs are running at 500,000 to 600,000 per hour.

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