A mate of mine is trialling CASG and emailed me the following question. I suspect he is going to face the same gateway issue he faced in the past (outlined below), but thought I had better throw this to brighter minds than mine.
My question is in relation to sending bulk mail. We use Mailchimp for most of the larger direct mail campaigns however some of the smaller campaigns or email notifications we go directly out of our CRM.
Initially when we setup Google Apps (previously Postini), we had setup the primary MX as the Postini servers and it acted as a gateway which forwarded to our Exchange. So when we sent mail it would be sent from our Exchange server but a reverse lookup on our mail would return Postini servers.
This was causing massive issues with other Spam filters now rejecting our mail. Running a mail campaign out of CRM became unusable and we have for a long time had the primary MX pointing to our internal Exchange server. Mail now only goes to Google in the event of server downtime and there are no issues sending bulk mail from CRM.
Do you know if we might run into similar issues now that our primary MX is now an alternate address (CASG) to where mail is being sent from?
Providing you are excluding the sending email account from the CASG auto-lock (found under Outgoing Users > click user name > Edit (on the toolbar) > Edit Outgoing Settings) then you should have no problems.
We act as a pass-through filter so your bulk-mailing efforts (assuming non spam-like content) should not be hampered. You can always disable outbound filtering if needed.
In fairness and before you decide to buy ASG, I should point out that CASG’s terms and conditions stated in the EULA specify that if ASG is adversely affected by an ASG customer’s actions, such as getting our filtering servers blacklisted, that we reserve the right to cancel the subscription and prevent that customer from future use of ASG.
Just my 2 cents but let’s bear in mind that bulk-mailing campaigns are in essence spam campaigns in as much as you are sending potentially unsolicited email, so being caught in other spam filters in not an unreasonable outcome. Best thing to do is push these campaigns from a 3rd party and let them assume the risks of being blacklisted.
