Last year, after 8 years in the B2C email marketing business, I finally decided it was time to buy a mailing solution and host it myself. After all this was the next logical step at my volume and would mean that my email delivery cost line would flat line.

It was the right decision for the right reasons. In fact, a few providers were looking at me sideways when i told them how many million emails I was deploying a still paying an ESP (Email Service Provider).

The only catch with my new platform was that I would have to manage my own relationship with the ISP's and keep my IP/S clean.

No problem for a guy who lives, eats and breathes email marketing right?

Wrong!

There is an abundance of information out there on how to configure your IP's, Feedback loops, reputation monitoring, SPF, Sender ID, Sender Certification, Domain Keys, DKIM and whatever the standard du jour is.

Does it help? Well yes - kind of.

If you are an email marketing company and you want to get your email delivered into Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Live and all the other usual suspects, you will need a hell of a lot of patience and very deep pockets to establish your own reputation. I think I might have been close. Unfortunately I ran out of funds and customers with patience while I worked on it.

After three frustrating months of communicating with Hotmail and the like on issues like IP blocking and content filtering, I had to cry Uncle.

Don't get me wrong. Everyone I spoke to were empathic and responsive (though I couldn't determine who was real, a server or an outsourced response person with a form letter). The only problem was, nobody couldn't help me.

i would be told my commercial email was blocked due to content that appears like spam and, even though we know you are not a spammer because you have identified yourself, what your company does and taken responsibility for the commercial email you send, we are still going to leave your blocked for 72 hours as a matter of policy - sorry.

"No problems. I will just get another 20k out of the bank and flush it down the toilet. And hey..thanks so much for your candor".

After a while I was spending so much time and money on the issue, I forgot what I did for a living.

I applied for sender certification, and probably would have qualified, except I had to maintain a certain volume of delivery and keep a low enough complaint and blocking rate for a certain period in order to get approved.

Great, except I was getting consistently blocked by hotmail as my advertising clients use nasty words when they run a legitimate prize promotion like... "prize promotion", "win" and other spammy filth.

After crying uncle, I looked for the best email marketing solution there was - migrated my lists, started sending and low and behold - my email gets delivered.

I use ESP's domain to send from and their shared IP's reputation. They spend their days working out what the latest geeky standard needs to be, how their email needs to be delivered, in what volumes and how to maintain a good ISP/ESP relationship and I deliver the content my subscriber signed up for.