have you ever tried sending over 20000 emails? from your webhost? shared or dedicated? do you know any free hosting that can handle this? is this even possible?
You're treading into very touchy territory. Nearly every shared host out there will block this amount of outbound emails. Dedicated hosts will probably catch it as well. Hell, your host may shut you down after a few complaints. And you will get complaints. It's a fact of newsletter life. To avoid problems, I recommend keeping tight logs of dates and ip addresses on your double opt-in email list. To make it even easier, use Aweber, iContact or MailChimp and pay the money to ease the headache of managing this many subscribers.
It will be hard, you will need to send batches at a time. Free hosting no way, even for shared or dedicated hosting, sending by batches is the safest. Best is just to use your ISP SMTP for sending.
Just ask your ISP for the SMTP to use for sending emails. Some ISP do not provide, but most will provide an SMTP for their subscribers. Also use a program that can staggered and send in batches as yahoo, hotmail etc may employ tar pitting which can be a problem.
In general, if you establish more than 50 SMTP connections per hour from any host, you will draw attention. This is not a hard and fast rule. It changes from host to host. Dreamhost, for example, will flag you around the 200 mark. DO NOT use your ISP. If they get complaints or suspect you're spamming, you could get your DSL/Cable shut off asap.
If you have that many members on your site, or just friends, why not just post the info on the site? Sites I'm a member of do that and xxx,xxx people can read it at once.
hehe i wish it was that easy... i just have a list of emails and i need to tell them about a site, they're not a part of it yet don't ask me how i got the list...
You can actually purchase a service for email blasting, that can blast your emails instead of you doing it yourself.
yah i guess i can do that... but I don't really wanna spend right now i'm thinking along the lines of making multiple free accounts from different free webhost and just sent them by the 1000 or smaller... dunno... how much do you think is a good devision for that 20k email that I can send using free webhosting shared plans that wouldn't damage there server? (as much) lol
I don't recommend that, this will be abusing the free hosting providers resources. Bear in mind that they do need to earn a living. Doing that may get their IPs in troubles with Spamcop and the likes even if it won't damage their servers.
It's going to be pretty difficult (near impossible, I'd say) to send that many emails using a free service - a dedicated server/box or paying an external mailing service would be your best bet.
i have a list I built myself that has about 14k emails all opt-in (no spamming here) and I had a warning from my ISP about sending spam before and at the time I was only sending about 250 to 300 emails out at a time i some what gave up on the regular newsletter idea just because the only ways I could send them out and feel confident about them being sent was so time consuming it wasn't worth it.
You really would need a professional newsletter sending services so that you get your newsletters successfully send to your users. ISP tolerance levels depends, some being more tolerant than others. Some cut you off or some give you a warning.