What is the difference between junk email and bulk email?

Many mail servers now deploy cloud-based filtering service that protects your organization against spam, malware, and other email threats. These services actively manage the reputation of sending email servers and attempts to send junk email or bulk email are blocked by these services.

Junk email is spam, which are unsolicited and universally unwanted messages (when identified correctly). Many host email servers will reject spam based on the reputation of the source email server. If a message passes source IP inspection, it's sent to spam filtering. If the message is identified and classified as spam by spam filtering, the message is delivered to the intended recipients and moved to their Junk Email folder.

Bulk email (also known as gray mail), is more difficult to classify. Whereas spam is a constant threat, bulk email is often one-time advertisements or messages. Some users want bulk email messages (and in fact, they have deliberately signed up to receive them), while other users consider bulk email to be spam. Many of these messages are now rejected automatically during the screening focus. If you receive an Error 450 this is an indication that the host server is rejecting your message.

Asporea Hosting's Terms of Use are clear that email is not to be used for sending bulk email. If you do this you will be in violation of our Acceptable Use Policy.  Repeated attempts to send bulk email will reduce our sending reputation and deliverability of client email and therefore repeated violations will result in a ban from sending email.

To avoid this, ensure that all messages have an identified recipient.  If you are sending to more than one receipient, you are sending a bulk email.  A good test is, could you add a salutation to the beginning of the message, e.g. Dear John, without excluding any other recipient.  If so, add the salutation and click send. If not, then you must send each message individually.

If your business relies on sending information to clients, then you must build it into your process.  For example if your business sends invitations to a zoom call after purchase, then it needs to be built into your purchase process (e.g. the user receives the link during purchase in their purchase receipt).  If you are managing payments separately, then each link will need to be emailed individually, and not in bulk.

If your business relies on sending bulk email, then you must use a Bulk Email service. Mailchimp is a service that is easy to operate, however there are many others that can be found by searching "Bulk email service" in Google.

You can see our Acceptable Use Policy here.

 

  • email, junk, deliverability, bulk email, acceptable use policy
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