This is my second query about thunderbird mass mailings. I want to explain exactly what my situation is.
I am an historian and a well-published author. Publishing has g… (read more)
This is my second query about thunderbird mass mailings. I want to explain exactly what my situation is.
I am an historian and a well-published author. Publishing has gone crazy in the last 10-15 years, and as a result, I have had to self-publish two books,. one quite recently. There's a self-publishing network out there, and I was able to purchase an email database covering about 7,000 libraries. The data base is on excel spreadsheets and I had done one mailing with them a couple of years ago, via gmail. However, that gmail acocunt isn't working now, and their support hasn't been able to fix that.
My publishing house domain, mountgreylockbooks.com, has several thunderbird email accounts, and I decided to try one of those. I immediately ran into the 500 a day limit. So I started breaking the sheets down into 500-entry sheets and sending one a day--and for about five days, that worked just fine. In addition, the mailing had a very measurable effect on my amazon ranking for the book. It was going to take a while to reach the whole list, but things seemed to be on track. About 10 per cent of the emails were bouncing back but that was mostly because people had left their jobs and the addresses were no longer valid.
Yesterday, however, when I hit send for the mass mailing, the mailing began coming to a halt almost immediately. I had a long online session with a tech at BigScoots, who host my web site. He couldn't figure out what to do, and suggested I try mail chimp. So I signed up for a one month free account and had a tech on the line there this morning, and it turned out that they would not work for me unless the people on my email list had subscribed to my mailings--which of course they had not. The maling itself isn't spam at all. It just tells them about the availability of a new book and tells them who I am. And let me stress this: if I can get this mailing to work, there won't be any more mailings for years.
So if anyone can help me either with the thunderbird error or with some other solution, I'd be very appreciative. Thanks.
David Kaiser
You can read about the book here: https://www.amazon.com/States-Union-David-Kaiser/dp/1732874530