No. There are many problems associated with safelists and free email services. These issues are amplified when associated with high volume safelist submitters like iPostAd.
Some free email services:
- Block safelist email
- TOS that seems to make bulk email a violation
- Are not reliable
- Throttle incoming email
Many free email services only allow a limited number of emails from a mail server in a certain period of time. Example, 100 emails per hour but the number and time span vary greatly. This limit is the total number of emails sent from a mail server. Not just a limit on the number sent to a certain email address. Some servers delay accepting email from bulk email servers after this limit is met.
When the time span is over then they may accept more emails from the sending server. That is until the number limit is met again and it all starts over again. That is an generalized description and not meant to be technical or exact.
Safelists normally send out large volumes of email using low cost servers on low budgets.
Trying to hold large numbers of emails waiting to be accepted back can puts a huge strain on a low budget safelist.
Many safelists email sending servers put a very short expiration time (few minutes) on their email queue to avoid queues that become impossibly large. Once the queues become too large it will cause email servers to stop working.
Receiving email servers know bulk email senders do this. So by delaying acceptance the receiving servers avoids receiving as many bulk emails.
Even when, receiving email servers delay acceptance of emails some will still end up in the users inbox. Until the maximum number of emails for a certain period of time has been met those first several emails will be accepted. This can mask the issue from the end user's prospective. Since they see some email in their inbox they think everything is working fine. In reality not all emails are getting through to the end users inbox.
Besides those and other issues, some free email services report bulk email servers to spam avoidance organizations. The safelist ends up on anti-spam list and websites when in fact they only send opt-in email. Getting some of those organizations to remove a safelist from their UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email) list can be next to impossible even if one has proof. All this can cost a safelist many problems as they spend time and money trying to defend their benign practices.
That is a very general and incomplete description of issues involved with free email services.
At the end of the day many safelists close down because of these sorts of issues.
We strive to run an honest, ethical and legal service that takes care of iPostAd members and listed safelists owners. Since we know these issues can (and do) come back to haunt safelist owners we do not recommend free email services be used.