Now Have Dedicated IP For SendinBlue Mail Campaigns

Apparently people don’t either remember they agree to be added to the Dragon Blogger Newsletter, or just don’t like that we send out 1 newsletter per month with a list of giveaways we are running and other useful info because the last Newsletter that went out in July got my account banned for having too many people click Junk/Spam and flagging the SendInBlue shared IP potentially damaging the trust by ISP’s. 

As a result, to reactivate my account I now had to pay for a dedicated IP, $145 for the year which is not a fun fee to pay, though it pales compared to the full $400 plus per year I would have to pay to send over 20,000 email entries per month for other providers, and now it does give me the option to send more emails more frequently.

It was a little bit of a complicated setup, but I am very comfortable modifying DNS Zone Records and they give pretty good instructions on how to manually configure, plus they will host the subdomain for you as most hosting providers don’t let you set custom NS (Name Server) records for a sub domain, only for a primary hosted domain.  So in this case with Bluehost, I had to have news.dragonblogger.com hosted over at SendInBlue and then have various ZONE records setup so that SendInBlue was in charge of that subdomain.

Meanwhile, I also registered for DKIM and authority for my email so that it added assurance and maybe my future newsletters won’t generate so many junk email flags to hurt the reputation of this IP and subdomain which is starting from scratch.  Seriously though, don’t know why I had to shell out so much extra money just to send newsletter to the fans to remind them of the giveaways and some articles, is like paying twice just to help give stuff away.  The newsletter has to have an ROI where it brings more visits and potentially more clicks to our sponsors or else it won’t pay for itself and will be a negative asset instead of a positive one for the site. 

Meanwhile, I do think if you run a massive newsletter a dedicated IP is an eventual thing, I run a dedicated IP for all of my hosting, so it was inevitable I would run for my news and email mailing list too.  I just was hoping not to have to have done it yet.  I do like how SendInBlue will auto blacklist emails that flag and unsubscribe so they won’t ever be contacted again, you can’t even re-add them accidentally since they are listed in a special blacklist.  This prevents accidentally getting a repeat offense, but it means people who sign up for the giveaways and give permission to join the mailing list, only to flag it as spam can never be re-added to the mailing list.

Oh, well I am going to add another clause to the giveaways that says all emails will be scanned in the mailing list and if your email is on the blacklist, you are ineligible for being a winner.  I still like SendInBlue and am not faulting them for the junk rate, it wasn’t their problem that readers did that.

They still have great rates, easy to use Newsletter configurations and very easy to work with support.  Their rates are fantastic and they actually provide a dedicated IP to anyone who subscribes to the Gold or higher plan anyway.  I just happen to be the Bronze plan where I can send 60,000 emails per month.  If I ever get large enough to send 120,000 emails per month, I will upgrade the plan.