We purchased an email list that had around 1 million names, email addresses, city/st/zip, etc. of Realtors around the country. I was working for a small real estate sales and marketing company at the time and we were wanting to reach out to other agents in the region where we had a project and other “feeder” markets.

The only limitation we had was that we could send no more than 2,000 emails per hour. Our first “trial” send was around 50,000 and we had planned to deploy over 2 days, keeping the throttle to around 1000 per hour.

I set the thing up to begin running the schedule one evening before I left work to run overnight. We had a “dummy” reply-to email address set up that was being checked using Outlook on the dedicated PC we were using for the deployment. The email solicitation had a clearly marked unsubscribe button at the bottom and we disclosed our full mailing address, etc.

Well, the next morning when I came into work, I noticed Gammadyne wasn’t mailing anymore. I opened up my Outlook on my computer and realized that I couldn’t send email either through my local ISP. We had been blocked and were not being permitted to send out any emails using our ISP’s out-going mail server.

The stink was that at that time, our local ISP didn’t allow us to use an out-going mail server other than them at the time, so I single handedly got our whole network blocked so no one in the office (senior management and all!) could send email. Business came to a literal halt!

Lol, no I didn’t lose my job. We were working with the technology of the time and none of us knew any better. And, fortunately I was on the senior marketing team so I had some credibility when I was explaining what had happened.

All turned out well, though, as within 48 hours we were unblocked, and I learned a very valuable lesson. We incidentally changed our email communication practices and figured out how to “really” send emails in bulk. And of course, we dumped the list.

We purchased an email list that had around 1 million names, email addresses, city/st/zip, etc. of Realtors around the country. I was working for a small real estate sales and marketing company at the time and we were wanting to reach out to other agents in the region where we had a project and other “feeder” markets.

The only limitation we had was that we could send no more than 2,000 emails per hour. Our first “trial” send was around 50,000 and we had planned to deploy over 2 days, keeping the throttle to around 1000 per hour.

I set the thing up to begin running the schedule one evening before I left work to run overnight. We had a “dummy” reply-to email address set up that was being checked using Outlook on the dedicated PC we were using for the deployment. The email solicitation had a clearly marked unsubscribe button at the bottom and we disclosed our full mailing address, etc.

Well, the next morning when I came into work, I noticed Gammadyne wasn't mailing anymore. I opened up my Outlook on my computer and realized that I couldn't send email either through my local ISP. We had been blocked and were not being permitted to send out any emails using our ISP's out-going mail server.

The stink was that at that time, our local ISP didn't allow us to use an out-going mail server other than them at the time, so I single handedly got our whole network blocked so no one in the office (senior management and all!) could send email. Business came to a literal halt!

Lol, no I didn't lose my job. We were working with the technology of the time and none of us knew any better. And, fortunately I was on the senior marketing team so I had some credibility when I was explaining what had happened.

All turned out well, though, as within 48 hours we were unblocked, and I learned a very valuable lesson. We incidentally changed our email communication practices and figured out how to “really” send emails in bulk. And of course, we dumped the list.