I recently purchased an email list for $1300 that contains around 40,000 addresses, mostly from people who previously bought sports equipment.

I’m trying to figure out whether this was a good investment or a mistake. If it wasn’t a total waste, what would be the best way to profit from or make use of it?

I’m open to ideas — email marketing strategies, lead-nurturing tips, or ways to ethically and effectively turn this into revenue.

Would appreciate honest feedback from people who’ve worked with purchased lists or done email marketing at scale.

And while this provides instant spoofing protection, it raises serious privacy and security concerns:

1. DMARC reports containing sending sources, IPs, authentication data, and even mail-to domains now route to a 3rd party, giving Godaddy visibility into domain owners' communications.

2. Enforcing strict policies without proper SPF/DKIM implementation breaks email delivery for millions of small businesses unfamiliar with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC (i.e. local shops, photographers, service providers, etc decided to go online)

3. Reports go to onsecureserver[.]net, registered only in mid-May 2025, with no public evidence of Godaddy ownership, potentially exposing sensitive data to unknown entities.

4. Godaddy recently shifted from p=reject default in June-July to p=quarantine default in August, showing they don't have a solid plan for this kind of enforcement.

While DMARC protection is important, I believe that enforcement decisions must remain with domain owners, not domain registrar providers.

Centralized control over email security data through 3rd-party infrastructure without explicit consent violates privacy and security principles.

We just launched a free Email Checker tool → formtabulo.us/email-checker

It runs a quick check of your domain’s email health — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX, reverse DNS, and basic DNS blacklist scans.
No signup, no fluff — just clear pass/warn/fail results and practical fixes in seconds.

Would love feedback from anyone who manages email domains or deals with deliverability!

So I've been testing Mailbox.org for weeks now and everything seems to work properly. I've been doing some testing in terms of emails landing in people's spam folder. I tested my account using EasyDmarc tools that allows you send an email from your own mailbox to 100 email addresses across a wide range of 3rd party email hosts. Easydmarc than reads those 100 mail addresses and checks if your mail enters or not.

Mailbox banned me for sending an email to 100 email addresses in one email. I've had to raise a ticket and wait for a full day to get an answer as to why no incoming mail was coming through. Mailbox purposely broke three of my most important email domains/aliases. Without warning of word upfront.

Email has been ruined by spammers and scammers. What's needed is an e-stamp-based alternative or enhancement to email. eStamps would fund investigation and enforcement against riff-raff. I'd gladly pay a couple of cents per message for reliable email for important things. The old (existing) system doesn't have to go away, it would just be used for less important concerns.

Democratic nations of the world could devise such a standard and enforcement agreements. Conservative states in the US would probably scoff, being anti-gov't, but blue states may pitch in.

So my domain is bought and hosted at Namecheap and I have a Microsoft 365 business plan.

On some random days many of my emails get rejected and I get this message - "recipient's server rejected the email"

This continues even after enabling external forwarding in security settings.

So I tried adding Dkim & Dmarc but that caused another issue. All my emails started going into spam!

Any advice please?

I need to verify 100,000 emails a month - what is the cheapest and best tool?

We're launching Lemon Email on Product Hunt next week.

If you’ve been running profitable email campaigns for a while, you’ve probably noticed this too:

- Open rates dropping from 45% to 9%

- CTR getting worse, even when you switch to plain text

- Transactional/onboarding emails not landing

- Outlook/Hotmail/Live/MSN/Yahoo becoming a black hole

- And having to send 3x more emails to get the same revenue

When that happens, you start second-guessing everything: The subject line, the copy, the timing, the audience, the market, the entire campaign. God knows I even started doubting myself.

But in many cases, it’s not the content - it’s the sending infrastructure.

We ran into the same thing.

I run a demand gen + lead gen agency for Web3 and PropTech startups.

One of our PropTech clients runs a CRM SaaS, and their users started complaining that their emails were going to spam. Turned out they were using Sendgrid's email API under the hood.

We also spend hundreds of thousands on ads and send millions of emails a month as an agency, and started seeing similar patterns across all our campaigns, especially since February last year (IYKYK).

Most tools rely on one sending engine (Mailchimp, Mailerlite, Brevo, Klaviyo etc). But every provider has inboxes they’re great delivering at, and others they struggle with.

Every email service has their own strengths and weaknesses, and that’s not necessarily a flaw. It’s just reality.

So we came up with a risky idea of having our own in-house software for email marketing, transactional, and automation - but solved the deliverability problem at the routing layer.

Behind the scenes, it connects to multiple email services - Amazon SES, Alibaba Mail, SparkPost, Mailersend, Sendpulse, Mailgun, and more.

Then routes your emails based on which provider is best for that inbox (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud etc.).

But because we built this for our own use first, it works like a tool, not a showroom:

- No fancy dashboards.

- No contact caps.

- No flow/sequences limits.

- No AI or any distractions in the UX/UI.

- We have an ugly website, and payments are handled by Gumroad.

I’m not saying you should cancel your current tools now and switch to something built by a stranger on Reddit. I just wanted to share it here early before we launch.

But if you’re curious, and you try it, and only if you get the results you’re after, then maybe it’s worth making the leap.

Also: We're going to be the first A2A (Agent-to-Agent) email tool working with Google’s new Agentspace protocol to let AI agents send emails natively, but we need more help.

So if you’re a former email marketer or deliverability consultant, or know one who’s also solid with support or light dev/maintenance, we’re hiring.

Thanks for letting me share.

This is one of the few communities on Reddit that’s quietly taught me a lot over the years, feels good to finally give something back.

If you’ve got questions, feedback, or just feel like yelling at me because you're having one of those days - drop a comment. I’ll be around.

Our small company has always used Google Enterprise email... We need to be able to manage/monitor our employees emails more easily then Google seems to offer. Can someone recommend other options? We know Microsoft is an option, we don't love their customer service... Thanks

Hi everyone, over the last year I’ve been working hard to create an email design tool different from the existing ones.

It actually lets you visually design a mobile experience different from the desktop experience in terms of structure, space, backgrounds, colors, and fonts.

Is there anyone interested in trying it out? We’ve launched it now completely for free so people can test it. It’s called Tabular, and you can find it at tabular.email. I would love to hear what you guys think of it!

Setting up a custom email domain for my business made me realize how many technical details are involved - MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, TLS, BIMI - the list goes on. It's a lot for any business owner to tackle, especially when it comes to monitoring DMARC reports, tweaking DNS settings, and ensuring all your SaaS tools play nicely with your custom domain.

I reached out to some folks, and one person even signed up for an annual subscription with minimal information upfront. For this client, after thorough monitoring and collaboration, we configured DNS records for MailChimp and Shopify, elevating their domain's DMARC policy to 'quarantine.'

Remarkably, there were spoofing attempts from 49 countries outside the U.S. Once the DMARC policy was set to 'quarantine,' these attempts ceased. I then assisted another customer with similar success.

The key takeaway is that setting a domain's DMARC policy to 'quarantine' ensures outgoing email protection, as all unauthenticated emails are directed to spam or rejected if configured accordingly.

With the website ready, I've been sending personalized emails highlighting potential vulnerabilities in recipients' email domains. While these emails are opened, they often don't elicit a response, indicating that my message might not be resonating.

I offer a comprehensive service, aiming to alleviate clients from the intricacies of DMARC and related protocols, allowing them to focus on their core responsibilities.

Additionally, I plan to introduce email-related services to keep clients engaged, such as personalized campaigns and using subdomains to protect the root domain's reputation.

I am confident in addressing a tangible, measurable problem. How can I better convey this value to attract clients?

I AM LOOKING OUT FOR A JOB, HENCE ACTIVELY COLD EMAILING RECRUITERS.

As per the link that I shared, which is from Google the max emails one can send using free personal account is 500 emails a day.

My mail won't get marked as spam right? If I'm sending each mail after a duration of 1 minute and personalizing my email?

If ur reading this, hope you reply....

I've noticed that almost every newsletter I receive now has a [Newsletter], [Update] or similar prefix in the subject line. It's cluttering my inbox and adds zero value.

What's ironic is that email marketing best practices actually advise against it – studies show open rates drop by almost 19% when the word "newsletter" appears in the subject line. So it's not even helping the senders.

It seems like a trend that spread through cargo-cult marketing advice, where everyone started doing it because everyone else was doing it – not because it works.

If you're a newsletter sender: please stop. Your readers will thank you.

Has anyone else noticed this? And does anyone know where this trend actually started?

I have this client asking for documents to be emailed. Sent him email with a PDF attachment for the very first time, got rejected instantly. Here's what the returning message says:

Reporting-MTA: dns; instance-us-central1-4f7l.prod.antispam.mailspamprotection.com
Action: failed
Final-Recipient: rfc822; [email protected]
Status: 5.0.0
Remote-MTA: dns; d169093a.ess.barracudanetworks.com
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 permanent failure for one or more recipients (j[email protected]:blocked)

This is the first time ever that I'm sending him email, we've only talked over the phone before. And I'm pretty sure that we never included him in any of our marketing email campaigns before. Tried it again after like 15 minutes still ended the same.

Our business email is legit, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, the whole nine yards. And we never ran into problem like this before. What could be the possible cause of this? From the first line "Reporting-MTA: dns; instance-us-central1-4f7l.prod.antispam.mailspamprotection.com" I can only speculate that our domain falls under the victim of some antispam policy?

Any suggestions/advices are appreciated! Thanks

**** Updates *******************

My website along with my email server all hosted at SiteGround, and I just found out that "instance-us-central1-4f7l.prod.antispam.mailspamprotection.com" is a spam policy server by SiteGround. So actually my email was not even reaching client's server before it got intercepted, by my own email service provider! How weird

✏️ Shorter = better (25-50 words is the sweet spot.)

✏️ Minimize exclamation points, bullets, dashes, and other formatting

✏️ Signing off with "Best" garners the best results

I am very new to email marketing, recently I set up a new domain, and I’ve made an email using Google Workspace to create an email

I’ve noticed that a lot of emails have been going to spam, which is expected since I don’t have very much rep as a sender. I’ve checked, and SPF, DKIM, DMARC aren’t issues. My questions are:

1. What is the quickest way to warm up my email to be able to send hundreds a day?

2. Is there no other option than to just try to keep sending real emails knowing that they will go to spam?

I’d be willing to pay money for whatever services can fix this or if anyone can get this directly handled for us in a timely manner

Came here to ask a question about email and best apps.

Get cut off at the knees because it's not allowed.

Great site. Useless.

We've been using Instantly as our tool to send cold email campaigns. We did our best to prepare everything correctly:

• SPF, DKIM, DMARC records

• Email sequences are simple, only 1 link on the first email, with unsubscribe link, email deliverability score is great.

• All email accounts have more than 2 weeks on warmup.

• 30 cold emails is our daily limit per email account and we haven't reached that yet due to the total of email accounts we have now.

• We verified our email leads.

Yet still when we run email campaigns we got bounce rate from 15%-35%. We've also studied and it shows the bounced emails are having reports that "SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data" and is recognized as spam.

Do you have any other practices or techniques that can reduce our bounce rate and lessen the amount of emails not sending and going to spam?

Kind regards,

Stephen

Heya everyone! I have a new client and they have an interesting case. The client has 8 years of history with their clients who have made an inquiry but eventually declined. We were thinking that we can take these addresses, segment them and send a newsletter to them. But as they have hundreds of them over the years, they don't want to open each email and manually take the addresses. So here is my question - is there a way to automize the process so that some tool just takes the email addresses behind "From" from Outlook and gives you all the contacts? :)

Thanks!

I’m still learning email marketing and there are so many things to learn that it gets confusing.

For someone starting from zero, what should come first?

• Getting subscribers
• Writing better emails
• Lead magnets
• Deliverability
• Automation

If you had to start again, what would you focus on first?

Hi,

I’d love to do a quick mutual inbox test — I’ll send you an email to check where it lands on your end, and you can do the same for me. It’ll take just 2 minutes and will help both of us better understand our deliverability performance in real inboxes. Plus, a quick reply can be beneficial.

Would you be open to doing that?

We all know CTAs make or break an email, but I’ve been asking some fellow marketers recently across Klaviyo flows and campaigns, and the impact of even small changes is wild.

What I am wondering is: → What kind of CTA tweaks have actually made a difference for you? Whether it’s:

• Button vs text links

• CTA placement - above vs below the fold

• First-person vs second-person copy (“Claim my offer” vs “Get your offer”)

• Urgency vs clarity

• Or even just stripping things back to plain text

Not trying to crowdsource generic stuff, genuinely interested in examples where a CTA shift improved CTR or conversions.

What worked for your audience and why do you think it worked?

Appreciate any feedback

Olá, tenho uma dúvida: Meu e-mail não tem SPF configurado ainda. Enviei um e-mail para duas caixas que possuem o mesmo domínio. Uma delas recebeu o e-mail e a outra não. É possível que isso aconteça? Como isso pode ser explicado?