Probably one of the biggest issues surrounding small businesses and solopreneurs — especially those who use 1ShoppingCart.com autoresponder system — since last month is bulk mail delivery as a result of an alleged blacklisting by The Spamhaus Project. Some e-mail marketers who sent out legitimate mailings, including those I read regularly, ended up in the Bulk or Spam folder.

Why this is a big issue? Because 1ShoppingCart is probably one of the most widely used shopping cart and ecommerce solution for small businesses and solopreneurs. One of their service is autoresponder, which allows marketers to build mailing list and send bulk mail.

1ShoppingCart, unlike some other autoresponder systems I know, allows marketers to turn the double opt-in service on and off. This poses a higher risk because anyone can sign up others without their consent, hence not a best practice among legitimate e-mail marketers.

Many marketers have chosen to sign up for other autoresponder service and move their shopping cart solution to other service or application. Some still use the shopping cart and other feature, but not the autoresponder. Those who try a new autoresponder stumbled upon a problem: No names will be imported unless they are verified first.

Others still wait to see how it goes.

As a respond to solve the problem 1ShoppingCart decided to develop a new mail delivery system for all merchants who wish to adhere to industry recommended best practices. Effective May 15, 2006 the company also have enforced the following changes:

Any new clients added to your account, either manually with the add client function or via an imported list, will be subject to our closed-loop confirmation system (opt-in verified).

Existing customers will be able to move their existing prospects who were never subject to the original verified-opt-in process to the new mail delivery system. 1ShoppingCart will provide the tool to do that.

If marketers choose not to use the Close-Loop process on their web-forms, their email will be delivered only on the current Spamhaus listed IP’s and can not be delivered to any of the ISP’s that utilize Spamhaus services.

It’s time to take action. The situation will not get any better if you wait. Turn on the double opt-in feature and move over to the new mail delivery system. I know you can’t possibly attain your names entirely as the results of this action, the entire customers currently face the same issue.

You can always move to a new autoresponder service, of which the choice is all yours.