How do email marketers get success while sending mails

How do email marketers get success while sending mails? Though their emails volume is very high, they can deliver mails with out any problem like spam or bounce. If we try to send bulk mails with our own server, Yahoo or Gmail servers reject mails after certain time. Will email marketers pay anything to Yahoo or Gmail to get delivered their emails? If it is not the case, please suggest me what are the steps we need to consider to setup good SMTP server.

Because they use a zillion zombies each sending max-emails-before-cutoff minus one emails

Typically large ISPs (especially the likes of Yahoo & Gmail) monitor frequency of mail coming from IP addresses over time. If they detect "unusual" patterns of mail from an IP address they've not had much volume from then they will throttle and sometimes outright block emails as it appears to be a compromised host. When spammers compromise a mail server, they'll attempt to blast as much email as technically possible out of it before ISPs have time to react hence why the larger ISPs take a cautious approach.

As for a "fix" there is no quick fix answer, it takes time to establish you as a trustworthy bulk mailer. Start off with a slow volume of email to larger ISPs and carefully review all bounce messages, if all looks ok then slowly start ramping up your mail volume until you're sending at normal rates over a period of weeks, NOT days.

Many companies will "claim" they have special relationships with ISPs possibly involving money. It's all lies there is no such system available, anyone armed with the right knowledge can successfully establish themselves as a bulk mailer. There are various whitelist schemes as Tom has mentioned, AOL and Hotmail also have whitelisting schemes. But again in order to be accepted on the schemes you have to prove you're a trustworthy bulk emailer (Yes they do keep track!) I also suggest signing up for any feedback loops such as AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo (although the latter requires you sign all your outbound email with DKIM) as this further helps your cause.

All the large ISP's, hotmail, aol, yahoo, gmail monitor bulk senders by how many people click the "this is spam" or "report spam" buttons and each complaint counts against you. Combined with your frequency (consistency) of volume and some other factors such as engagement e.g. how many people open and click on your email makes up you reputation score. It is this score that defines how many emails you deliver.

Keep your volume fairly consistent over the days of the week/month. Keep your bounces low e.g. for every 100 emails you send make sure at least 90% are delivered, send to opt-in only addresses e.g. keep your spam complaints low and send relevant content which keeps your engagement high.

This will get you a long way towards your goal but remember, this takes a long time to establish, not days.