Question

Voting application: how to send the voting links without being blocked as spam?

I am planning a web-application for voting in closed groups, such as clubs or parties. It should work as follows:

  • The club manager uploads a CSV file with the names and emails of the club members.
  • The webapp sends each member an email with a unique URL for one-time voting.
  • Each member can click the unique URL to vote.
  • After the voting deadline, the webapp computes the results and sends them to the club manager (the votes are not secret - the manager may need to know which member sent which vote).

My main concern is that sending many emails to the club members might be considered as spam. I read this other question about how to not be considered a spammer, but that question considers promotional emails. In that case, the best solution is to use a mailing-list handling service such as MailChimp. But for my application it is not a good solution, because:

  • My app needs to send a unique voting-link, automatically generated by the webapp, in order to track the voting and associate them with the voters (and to prevent multiple voting by the same person).
  • My app typically sends one-time emails - I do not need a service for periodic emailing to a list.

What is a right way to send the voting links from this application?


Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
January 15, 2022
Accepted Answer

Hello,

What I could suggest in your case is to use a managed SMTP service like SendGrid for example, they offer a free plan which might be sufficient for your initial needs.

That way you would not have to manage and maintain your own mail server.

This post here might be a good read too:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/why-you-may-not-want-to-run-your-own-mail-server

Best, Bobby

alexdo
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
January 15, 2022

Hello, @erelsgl

As per Bobby’s suggestion, I’ll also recommend to use a third-party email bulk provider like SendGrid which you can use as a SMTP server in order to send emails from your droplet using your algorithm.

https://sendgrid.com/blog/create-an-smtp-server/

You can also use other providers but make sure to check their policy for sending bulk emails. Most of them will require sign-off/unsubscribe links or the list to be OPTED-IN (meaning the users have agreed to receive your emails) and so on.

Hope that this helps! Regards, Alex

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Become a contributor for community

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

DigitalOcean Documentation

Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.

Resources for startups and SMBs

The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.

Get our newsletter

Stay up to date by signing up for DigitalOcean’s Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

New accounts only. By submitting your email you agree to our Privacy Policy

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Get started for free

Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*

*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.