MLM Directory

My survey company's email are being blocked by yahoo and hotmail?

I own a small survey firm that conducts web surveys. We do not do any email marketing whatsoever for ourselves or our clients. We only send emails to people in our client databases who have given permission for our clients to send emails. Mostly they are either customers of our clients or else are their members (my company does a lot of work for professional societies). We always offer recipients the opportunity to opt out of follow up emails. However, we are getting blocked by yahoo for a project we are currently conducting. It is a large (175,000) list that contains a lot of students (it is an honor society client) and I think there are a significant number of misspellings in the database, which may be part of the problem. How do I get my emails through to yahoo and hotmail accounts on the list? Since thankyoumaskedman did not seem to get it when I originally posted it, I want to reiterate that this is not SPAM. The emails I am sending are not marketing any service or product at all. They are asking members of an organization (a NON-PROFIT national honor society), questions to find out who they are and what they want out of the organization. They have paid to belong to the organization and have given explicit permission for the organization to send them emails. This is a survey their organization is conducting so they can serve them better. Once you are a member of this organization, all benefits are included, so there isn’t really an opportunity to sell them anything else based on the results of this survey. There is a link to opt-out of further messages regarding the survey, which will be honored. I have already received messages from people on the list who have accidentally opt-out and have asked to be opted back in. I should probably clarify something: I am not aware of anyone reporting my emails for this project as SPAM. A very small percentage (less than 1% so far) have opted out of further emails, which will of course be honored. However, I am concerned that some of Yahoo’s automatic SPAM filtering may be triggered by any mass email whose IP address isn’t registered. I also am concerned about the quality of emails in my client’s database. I think there are probably a lot of typos and I am concerned that this might also trigger a SPAM filter for emails from my IP. Is there a way to be whitelisted for Yahoo ro hotmail?

Public Comments

1. "Client database" is a fancy name for spamlist. Do you really believe 175,000 people opted in to receive your email? Even if customers opted in to receive email from your client, that does not mean they opted in to receive email from you, and even if you think you are an extension of that client, to the recipient that is a client who is violating their privacy. Of course they pushed the Spam button when it arrived. To Yahoo and Hotmail the people who pushed the spam button are their customers, and you are not. ___________________________ If the 175,000 customers opted in to receive email from the honor society's domain, and if you are doing your authorized survey with an email address and URL that is a different domain, what do you expect them to think? What is the advice we give everybody about clicking an unsubscribe link that is not the exact same domain they subscribed to? _____________________ Yahoo Support seems to not like to squander effort or money on things like support. Anyway, here is Yahoo's contact information as listed with BBB: http://sanjose.bbb.org/business-reviews/Internet---Products-and-Services/Yahoo!-in-Sunnyvale-CA-202555
2. John, Don't quote me on this, but there might be a limit as to how much you can send to Hotmail or Yahoo addresses per day. I'm guessing 50,000. Are you sending these list from reputable IPs? That's a huge list so could it be that some may have reported as spam by accident? You have mention that some have opt-out by accident so maybe it might be the issue with the design of the email? Are you running this email service on your own server?