Bulk email polcies

One of the things we've been trying to nail down with our outsourced email provider is their policy WRT to bulk email. This afternoon, one of our marketing managers working the issue asked me if during the course of my research, I came across such policies.

Most providers' email policies bar sending out unsolicited email, although other than that they don't go into a ton of detail. Verio actually has a pretty good, detailed policy. In my reply, I mentioned Verio and added the following as key points:

(a) That there must be a pre-existing commercial relationship between sender and recipient.

(b) Lists with over 50 recipients should be handled using a mailing list manager like Majordomo or ezmlm. The big problem with using a regular mail client to send bulk emails is that quite often all the recipients get listed in the "To" field, which facilitates address harvesting by viruses. This is a MAJOR problem.

(c) Message size on bulk emails should be no more than 10 megs each, preferably much less. Sending out big file attachments to multiple recipients is a huge waste of bandwidth. The better course of action would be to send out a link that the recipient can click on to download it if desired. If a customer REALLY needs to send out massive attachments, or to very large distribution lists, he should be running his own SMTP server