Email distribution list help please.

[FarQue]

A bit of knowledge/advice required if possible: I'm about to take over the ŕunning of my region of a little car club and as such will need to send out group emails. There's a list of nearly 70 email addresses and I plan to use my gmail account.

It's been suggested to me that if I have just one contact list of all the addresses they may not reach the recipients because they'll look like spam and I should split the list into several separate lists of, say, 10 addressess and send to each list separately.

Any thoughts or opinions would be appreciated. Thanks.

[littleredrooster]

...and remember to send them as BCC recipients or everyone on the list will know everyone else's email addy...some people get upset at this sort of thing.

[randlemarcus]

And do make sure you have records of the permissions for you to send them stuff, especially as most of the point of that sort of thing could be construed as commercial offers - group buys, discounts etc...

[Beetnik]

It's not difficult to get yourself marked as a 'spammer' and the consequences are not good. Far better, IMHO, to use a service which will be compliant from the outset. MailChimp (mailchimp.com) is well regarded, used by many and free at the level you anticipate.

[andy-xr]

Your Gmail has DKIM signing on it, so as long as you're sending from Gmail, you'll be fine. 70 emails isnt enough to attract the attention of the rate limits, it's more towards the 5000 emails level. As long as you dont have many bouncebacks from the recipients (as in they're valid email addresses) you wont be rate limited at a few thousand senders.

Stick all the addresses in one DL, and add that to the BCC list for a nice easy way to send out. Just add your email address in the 'To'

There are other ways to do it, but for the sake of a quick, dirty, will work fine answer that's probably the easiest

At some point you might consider eg a Google Group and use the DL for that which broadcasts to everyone who's opted in to receive notifications, but that's probably the answer for another question

[FarQue]

Thanks Andy. Just what I needed to know!