Confirmed Opt-In Subscription Process

Once upon a time, when you sent an email message to join a mailing list, you got right on. These days, we have a lot of pranksters that like to sign up other people for mailing lists. Sometimes signing up the same person to hundreds and thousands of mailing lists at the same time.

And we have computer viruses, like the Klez or MyDoom virus, that likes to send out email with forged email addresses. And these viruses sends out lots of forged messages.

When those message arrives at most mailing list servers, it will automatically subscribe the person in the From line, even though that person did not send the email message.

Since 1999, mail-list.com has been running all new subscribers to open announcement lists through a confirmation process.

Confirmed opt-in means that when a person requests to get on one of our lists, our machine will send back a confirmation reply. The Subject line will contain your list name and a random number. You may put your own message in the body of the email. Only when they reply to that email with the same random number will our machine add them to your list. This two step process proves that their email address was not forged, and our system saves their confirmation reply should any questions ever arise about how somebody got on your list.

Besides being a common courtesy on today's rough and tumble Internet, it solves the problems described above. And it keeps us off the spam blocklists, so that we can deliver your email message to all of your subscribers.

Anti-spam volunteers maintain lists of IP addresses (like 68.92.51.32) that have sent out spam in the past. Many ISP's use these lists to block incoming email, in an attempt to keep spam from getting to their customer's mailbox.

That means if you use a mailing list provider that is on one or more blacklists, then your email will also be refused by those ISP's, since your email is coming from the same IP address.

If you are technically inclined, you may investigate which domains or IP addresses are listed on the various blocklists. Three such sites that give you that information are http://www.dnsstuff.com and http://openrbl.org.

We use three different upstream providers, and are responsible for the following IP address ranges.

• 12.53.208.128 - 12.53.208.255 - AT&T
• 64.241.105.0 - 63.241.105.255 - Savvis
• 68.92.51.0 - 68.92.51.255 - SBC
• 67.200.150.178 - 67.200.150.190 - Logix

You will find that our IP addresses are not on any of the blocklists, and that all ISP's should accept your message.