In a previous post I talked about using Gmail instead of Aweber to send email to your list. At least I think I did?

Gmail has a limit of 500 recipients for each message per day sent from your online account and only 100 when using software. I don’t know how they monitor this i.e. are the total number of sent emails during the day added up or is there a trigger threshold that kicks in when you send an email to multiple recipients at once?

To increase these limits you can register additional Gmail accounts.

However, I think the best way to avoid the limits may be to have software that sends 1 email at a time with a few seconds delay between each one. This is just a theory, so would have to be tested out with a large list. There are 86,400 seconds in a day so, this could be a method to send many more emails than 500 per day.

The technical term for this is “throttling”. The same kind of thing can be used to limit the amount of spam being posted to a blog or forum by a robotic script.

So if we can get our emails being sent, the next thing to do is avoid them getting blocked at the receiving end.

If the recipient has sent us an email request to receive our messages, this should help a lot since this fact is known by the ISP and their spam filter can check for our email address in their address book.

Next, we can ensure that our email has a low spam rating. Spam Assassin is probably the best known spam scoring system online. It looks for tell tale signs that the email is spammy or not. Here are many tips for avoiding your email being regarded as spam.

Bounced (undeliverable) email throws up a red flag to Gmail, so act quickly to remove these email addresses from your list.

I know from experience that Yahoo! blocks you if you send too many emails in a particular time frame to it’s server and other ISPs probably do too. So I would suggest arranging your list such that emails to the same domains are evenly distributed in order in your list. This will maximise the time between emails being sent by you to the same domain.

Now, given that there is a big difference in sending limits between sending emails direct from your Gmail account and connecting to it with email software, which method is best to use?

I am concerned with the lack of control over throttling of emails when simply sending in one go to 500 recipients, so I am in favour of the second approach where we can schedule delivery. In fact, I want to write some code to do this. Today I got some code to send a test email via Gmail, now I can write some code to schedule email to a list.

Another approach that may work is to create a macro to automate what you would normally do to send an email manually. You can maybe use a browser plugin such as imacros?

However, I found some free software (for mailing up to 100 people) that seems to have the features I am after called Send Blaster which I am downloading to try out. The paid version has no limits on the list size for a one-off 75 euros. This could be a great piece of software!

Please share your thoughts on this subject in the comments…