E-mail Campaigns From Your Own Mailbox, and Why We Made Them Slow on Purpose

Most of the businesses using TalkOmni already have a list, they just do not think of it as one. Every WhatsApp conversation, every form, every booking leaves a name and an address behind. When the counsellor opens a new workshop date, or the clinic gets a new service, the obvious move is to tell the people who already asked. What usually happens instead is a copy-paste into a mailing tool, a new account, a new sender address nobody recognises, and a spam folder.

So we built campaigns on the contact book that was already there.

Consent is a history, not a checkbox

The first decision was the one that shaped everything else. A contact does not have a "subscribed: yes" field. Consent is kept per channel (e-mail, SMS and WhatsApp separately) as a list of events: granted on this date, from this source, withdrawn on that date. The current state is simply the newest event.

The sources are specific. A visitor ticked a consent box on one of your forms, and we keep the box's exact wording with the submission. You uploaded a list and declared how you collected the consent for it. Someone on your team recorded it by hand and had to write a reason ("signed up at the September seminar"). Or the person pressed unsubscribe.

This sounds like bookkeeping, and it is. The point shows up the day someone asks "when did I agree to this?" and you can answer with a date and a sentence instead of a shrug. Only people whose newest e-mail event says granted can receive a campaign, and there is no setting that turns that off.

Your address, not ours

A campaign leaves from the sending account you set in the project: your own info@ or news@, through your own mail provider. Replies come back to you. Bounces land in that mailbox too, which means they do not show up in our report; we would rather say so than pretend we see them.

Sending through a shared platform address would have been quicker to build. It would also have meant your customers receiving your news from a name they have never seen, and your reputation depending on every other sender on that platform.

Why it is slow

Mail leaves at 20 a minute and 200 a day. A list of 200 is done in ten minutes. A list of 1,000 takes five days.

That annoys people, and we understand why. The reason is that Gmail, Yandex and company mail servers watch for an account that suddenly sends hundreds of messages, and they lock it. That same account is the one your appointment reminders and form receipts leave from. Losing it for a campaign would mean your customers stop getting their reminders the next morning, which is a much worse day than a slow campaign. If your provider can safely take more, write to us and we raise it for your account.

The small rules that make it safe to press Send

• Send yourself a proof first. It arrives with "[PROVA]" in the subject, its links are not tracked and it counts for nothing. Open it on a phone too.
• The list freezes when you send. Whoever matches the filter and has consent at that moment is in; people added later are not. If someone unsubscribes after the list froze but before their turn comes, they are skipped.
• The unsubscribe link cannot be removed. Every mail ends with one. Pressing it writes a withdrawal on their card, and they are left out of the next campaign.
• We count clicks per link, not per person. You see that the workshop link was clicked, say, 34 times. You do not see who clicked. That is on purpose: knowing which link worked is enough to plan the next campaign, and it does not need a record of each person's behaviour.

İYS and the legal side

In Turkey, commercial electronic messages need prior consent under Law 6563, and İYS is the national registry where that consent is recorded. The responsibility for collecting consent in a valid way and registering where the law requires it stays with your business. TalkOmni is the processor: it keeps the evidence, honours opt-outs and refuses to send to anyone without consent on record. Whether your business has to register and how is a question for your own advisor, and it is worth asking before the first campaign rather than after.

Where this stops

Campaigns are e-mail only for now, on the Pro and Enterprise plans (2,000 and 10,000 recipients a month). The contact card already records SMS and WhatsApp consent separately, but we do not send on those channels. And writing to one person, from their card, is a different thing altogether: a personal message needs no marketing consent, goes from the same account, and shows up on the card like everything else.

If you already have a list in a spreadsheet, upload it with a tag and your consent declaration, send yourself a proof, and read it on your phone before anyone else does.