ISP Blocking Out-Going E-Mails

"My current ISP has gotten very slow and unreliable. Most of the ISPs I have contacted have what is called 'port 25 blocking' to prevent spammers from using their service. With this in place, the mail server will only allow you to send 25 or 50 e-mails at a time. If you go over this they literally cut you off for a set period of time. I have a 100% opt-in mail list of close to 2,000 addresses which would make sending to my list very difficult. Do you know of any service that will do my mailing for me, hopefully at a very reasonable fee?" -- Dan Thompson, Thompson Studios

You are confusing two different spam-prevention approaches that ISPs use.

• Port 25 blocking makes it impossible for the ISP's customers to bypass the ISP's own SMTP mailserver when sending out e-mails, since your ISP can block your messages from being received by other mailservers at their standard e-mail connection point, port 25.
• Capping the number of outgoing e-mails in a certain time period is a completely different approach.

Both make it difficult for legitimate permission-based e-mailers to do their work. One option is rather than to use a desktop mailer, work with a low-cost e-mail listserver to handle your mailing list, such as Topica Email Publisher (http://www.wilsonweb.com/afd/topica.htm), which charges $24.95 for up to 10,000 e-mails per month.

In my case, the ISP through which I receive DSL sets a cap on outgoing e-mails. However, since Port 25 is not blocked, I am able to send e-mails using Gammadyne Mailer's Direct Delivery feature (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/gammadyne.htm). It's somewhat slower than using my ISP's SMTP server, but doesn't limit the number of e-mails I can send. For my larger lists, of course, I don't try to use a desktop listserver. I currently run all my bigger lists and autoresponders with AutoResponse Plus 3.3 (http://www.autoresponseplus.com/link.php?a=rfwilson).