Gmail says I'm a spammer. How to avoid this?

Gmail isn't the best tool to send mass email. You're better off using an email service provider.

Fluther uses VerticalResponse for its email marketing.

The huge advantage of gmail is it’s free. I think their limit is 500/24 hours. So just keep count and send 495 once a day. Just how large is your email list? Also be sure to clean up you list when msgs get sent back as non-deliverable. They don’t really think you’re a spammer. It’s a pretty reasonable system to keep away real spammers (who would spam in the hundreds of thousands of msgs).

That’s the thing, I’m only sending to about 30–40 people. It’s just a way for our student led church group to get announcements out.

That’s weird. How are you adding the addresses, in the TO:, or in the CC or BCC? Try emailing the newsletter to yourself and putting the other recipients in the BCC. I’ve done this successfully with up to 120 names per mailing. If you use CC instead of BCC, the recipients will all see each other’s email addresses. Not polite, even if everyone knows each other..

@Perchik—an alternative is to use Google Groups or Yahoogroups, since these are services designed specifically for group-based email communications. And they’re free

An added benefit is that your recipients can choose to unsubscribe at any time, so you are assured that the people who do receive your email really want it.

You can choose to make them private or public, and can define the groups to either be participatory (everyone can post) or broadcast (only the group owner can post) in nature.

Also, this type of service acts as an online archive of all your group’s email exchanges, so newer group members can always browse the archives for historical context.

Have you asked the folks at Gmail what is an acceptable number of people to send a single email to? That might solve your problem right there. Seems to me that all you need to do is send your emails out in waves. 40 emails at a times seems a bit harsh to be labeled a “spammer”. My father in-law would be behind bars now with all the “useful” emails he sends to everyone he knows who has an email address.

Vertical Response, Constant Contact or any of the self-service email deployment suppliers are still going to be unneccessarily expensive.

If gmail insists on crushing you, you might migrate to a different service.