Email blast platform: how to send a safe first blast, step by step

Platforms call one blast a campaign; Rasket’s API calls the same thing a broadcast. The platform matters because Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook decide where each message lands from your sending domain’s reputation (their record of how readers treated its past mail), what the message contains, and how that reader has treated your mail before. A blast feeds thousands of those judgements into your domain in an hour, so four habits damage it fast:

A spam trap is an address no person reads: created as bait, or an abandoned mailbox a provider has repurposed. Mail to one tells the provider your list was bought, scraped or never cleaned.

Google counts you as a bulk sender once you send close to 5,000 messages or more in 24 hours to personal Gmail accounts, counted across your primary domain, and its FAQ says the status is permanent, so one big seasonal blast keeps you under the stricter rules for good. Microsoft draws a 5,000-message line for Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live addresses and can reject mail that fails its checks. Google demands all four below only of bulk senders, but meet them at any size; each has a guide of its own:

• Authenticate the domain. Your domain is the part after the @ in your address, such as yourshop.com. Its settings page, usually where you bought it, holds short public text entries that mail servers look up: the DNS records. SPF is the guest list of servers allowed to send for you, DKIM a seal on each message that proves it came from you unaltered, and DMARC your instruction for mail that fails both. For you it comes down to one check in step 7: the seal must carry your domain, not the platform’s. The DKIM, SPF and DMARC post shows each record.
• Offer one-click unsubscribe. Two hidden lines at the top of the email (headers) let Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook show its own Unsubscribe button. Your platform should add them for you; keep a visible link in the body too. Yahoo asks bulk senders to honour unsubscribes within 2 days (the one-click unsubscribe guide).
• Keep spam complaints rare. Google’s target is under 0.1% of the mail that reached the inbox, about one report per 1,000, and never 0.3%. The spam complaint rate guide explains how each provider counts it.
• Send steadily, and only to people who signed up. Google asks senders to “send email at a consistent rate” and not “send messages to people who didn’t sign up to get messages from you.”

The law adds a postal address and a working opt-out in the United States (step 2), and consent rules elsewhere (past customers, below). The bulk sender requirements guide compares the three providers line by line.

Each step starts with what any platform needs, then where to click in Rasket where that is the next step; none of it needs code. Steps 1 to 4 are done once, 5 to 9 for every blast.

SPF:    PASS with IP 192.0.2.10
DKIM:   'PASS' with domain news.yourshop.com
DMARC:  'PASS'

Stop it. Rasket has no pause button: open the campaign and click Cancel campaign while it is Scheduled, Queued or Sending. It stops at the next page of recipients, emails already created still go out, and it can’t be restarted; Duplicate in the row’s menu on the Campaigns list copies it for later. Then find the cause:

• Who: the report’s Complained tab lists them, already suppressed.
• How many: Metrics charts Complaint rate, filterable by sending domain, from the complaints providers report back. Gmail never says which person complained, so for Gmail readers that figure runs low; Gmail’s own number is in Google Postmaster Tools.
• Delays: if Delivery delayed climbs in Metrics, providers are slowing you down. Delays that clear within hours usually mean pacing of sudden volume; delays that grow with each send, or end as bounces, mean look at reputation. Either way, send smaller segments over more days.
• Blocklists: read the bounce message first, since a blocklist rejection usually names the list. Spamhaus has a free domain reputation checker. If the listing is for a shared sending address rather than your domain, it is your provider’s to fix, so tell their support.

The usual cause is the audience, not the wording: an old segment, people who never opted in, or a topic they didn’t choose.

Ask two questions of every address: when did this person last agree to hear from you, and when did they last click, buy or reply? M3AAWG, the email industry’s anti-abuse working group, counts “not mailing to the addresses in a year or more” as a mark of a dirty list. If you can’t answer the first question for an address, leave it out. If the person has done nothing for a year, send one small re-engagement email and stop mailing those who ignore it. Never test a stale list with a big blast; that is how spam traps get hit.

It depends on where they live; this is a summary, not legal advice.

• United States. The FTC’s CAN-SPAM guide does not require permission before the first commercial email. It requires accurate sender details and subject lines, a clear sign that the message is an ad, your postal address, and an opt-out that works for at least 30 days after the send and is honoured within 10 business days.
• EU and UK. Marketing email to individuals needs consent, apart from the narrow “soft opt-in”: you got the address while selling them something, told them then that you would email them and let them refuse, the email is about your own similar products, and every email offers a free way out. Countries differ in the detail.
• Canada. Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation treats a purchase in the previous two years as an existing business relationship, which gives implied consent for that period.

Legal is not the same as wanted: Google asks you not to mail people who did not sign up, whatever your law allows, and people who never chose your emails complain more. Where the law allows it, put only recent buyers on a topic, send them one campaign that says why they are hearing from you, and drop anyone who ignores it. The marketing email guide quotes each region’s rules.

Take 2,000 contacts and one blast a month: 2,000 emails. The Free plan is for smaller lists (it holds 900 contacts and sends 100 emails a day, campaigns included). The cheapest plan that fits is Pro at $20 a month, with 4,500 contacts and 50,000 emails a month; a weekly blast to the same list, up to 10,000 emails a month, costs the same $20. Paid yearly, it works out at $16 a month. The pricing page prices other list sizes.

Whichever email blast service you are weighing, a free plan or trial answers these:

• Consent: does it record how each contact opted in, and send only to people who chose that kind of mail?
• Unsubscribe: does a test’s Show original list both unsubscribe headers, with a body link you can’t delete by accident?
• Your own domain: does it sign with your domain’s DKIM, not one shared among its customers?
• Complaints: does the report show complaints per campaign, not only opens and clicks?
• Pricing: contacts, emails sent, or both? Contact pricing favours a small list mailed often, per-email pricing a big list mailed rarely. Do unsubscribed people still count?
• Editor: can someone who doesn’t write HTML build the email by dragging blocks?

We wrote this list, so weigh our own answers with that in mind. Rasket covers consent, unsubscribe, your own DKIM, per-campaign complaints and contact-plus-email pricing. Four gaps matter for a blast. Segments filter on contact fields, properties and topics, not on opens or clicks, so “engaged” means order data you import or a click tag an automation sets (the email marketing software post shows how). There is no A/B testing. Complaints are not split by Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft. And there is no per-provider speed setting; you pace a blast with segments and schedules, as in step 5. A campaign can be built without HTML, from a published template or a starter.

When Rasket is not the right tool: if your shop platform’s own email feature already sends from your authenticated domain (the check in step 1) and you need none of those four, stay with it and run the steps above there. If you need A/B tests or segments built on opens and clicks, pick a platform that has them.

To send bulk email from code instead, a campaign is the broadcasts resource. This call creates the draft from step 6. Set RASKET_API_KEY, set SEGMENT_ID and TOPIC_ID to IDs from Audience, and change from to an address on your verified domain. Every request needs a User-Agent naming your app.

curl -X POST https://api.rasket.com/broadcasts \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $RASKET_API_KEY" \
  -H "User-Agent: acme-news/1.0" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "Autumn sale, first segment",
    "segment_id": "'"$SEGMENT_ID"'",
    "topic_id": "'"$TOPIC_ID"'",
    "from": "Acme <news@news.acme.example>",
    "subject": "The autumn sale starts Monday",
    "html": "<p>Hi {{{FIRST_NAME|there}}},</p><p>Everything in the shop is cheaper for a week.</p><p><a href=\"{{{UNSUBSCRIBE_URL}}}\">Unsubscribe</a></p>"
  }'

It answers 201 with the draft’s id. To send it, call POST /broadcasts/{id}/send, optionally with scheduled_at; or put "send": true in the create call. Either runs the same gate as Review: a missing condition is a 422 naming it (a 403 if your team cannot send), and a failing content check is a 422 unless you pass "acknowledge_checks": true, which an automated sender should leave to a person. POST /broadcasts/{id}/cancel stops a send, GET /broadcasts/{id}/recipients?type=complained lists who complained, and email.complained and email.bounced webhooks fire per recipient. The broadcasts reference and the newsletter API post cover the rest.