Outbound Bulk Email

Sonic.net & Spam

It is the longstanding practice of Sonic.net to prevent, discourage, and foil unsolicited bulk e-mail in its various forms. In addition to undertaking various efforts to reduce the amount of spam arriving in Sonic.net customer mailboxes, Sonic.net also seeks to avoid becoming a source of such malicious traffic to other hosts. Toward this end, Sonic.net mail servers are configured to protect themselves from abuse by bulk mailers.

How this affects customers

From time to time, it is possible to unintentionally appear to be a bulk e-mailer. If even a single recipient of a message complains to his or her service provider that a given message was spam, it is possible that future messages from Sonic.net to that recipient's service provider will be blocked. In the interest of ensuring that legitimate correspondence is delivered reliably, bulk messages must be handled with caution.

By sending messages to large lists of recipients using a normal mail program, it is possible to trigger Sonic.net's spam countermeasures. This will result in the message not reaching all of its intended recipients and an error message being delivered to the original sender. Users sending the same message to a large number of recipients may be blocked.

How to send to large lists of recipients

Sonic.net provides a free mailing-list solution that uses a confirmed opt-in mechanism. By confirming that each recipient has requested to receive the correspondence, we can confirm that a given message is not spam, and can send it to as many recipients as necessary. Instructions for the setup and use of Mailman, the Sonic.net mailing-list solution, are available at http://www.sonic.net/support/faq/mailman/.