We are hosting customer data on behalf of companies/clients, and one of our tasks is to send out a very specific transactional email from us (with our email address as sender and reply-to) to clients customers.
We are trying to move away from storing the personal part of a customers data, including his email address. Of course, in order to be able to send out an email to a customer we need to at some point have access to the email address, but in our view it's a step in the right direction to retrieve the email address from the client during a session instead of retreiving it from our own database.
The problem now is that our unwillingness to have email addresses stored anywhere rules out using email service providers like Sendgrid. Instead we need to send out lots of emails through our own server, and this might hurt deliverability. I've been looking for a kind of "self hosted Sendgrid". One who will enable us to send bulks of emails, and one we can tweak to not store the sent emails.
One solution I've found is sendy.co who defines themselves as:
Sendy is a self hosted application that runs on your web server.
This sound promising, but then I read that emails are sent through Amazon's cloud:
Sendy uses multi-threading to send emails via Amazon SES.
I suppose this leads us back where we started, because then Amazon is storing the email addresses.
As I understand, the high deliverability that ESPs achieve is not only caused by state-of-the-art email headers, but also by their servers being recognized by Google/Gmail, Microsoft and other email hosts. So maybe a high deliverability just isn't possible without an ESP. But is there an alternative approach that lets us acheive relativly high deliverability without needing to involve a 3rd party server to do the sending?
The reason that people tend to pay for this service is because it is reasonably difficult/complicated/time consuming. If sending this email is a core part of your business, you'll want to hire a deliverability engineer to handle this. If it's not, I'd start by contacting the various transactional ESPs and see if you can find one that has an enterprise offering they're willing to tailor to this use case.
I think that I'm a little late to this. I hope that you figured out your question by now.
If you haven't then:
One alternative that you can try is to host your own server with an on-premise option. I would check out SocketLabs Hurricane MTA.
SocketLabs is a cloud ESP, like Sendgrid. But they also have a powerful on-premise option.
https://www.socketlabs.com/blog/introducing-hurricane-mta-3-0/
Related
I am working on a project where I want to allow my clients send a large amount of emails at any given time.
The issue I am having is that usually hosts have a very limited amount of emails allowed to send.
At the moment I am using third party service called Mailgun and it works fine but it is rather expensive since I have to send up to 300 000 emails per months and the number is growing.
Even if I rent a virtual server for example on scaleway where I have to set everything up myself, they have limitations.
Or are those limitations if I use their smtp?
Can anyone clear this one for me?
So my questions are:
Can I create my own smtp or any other way to send emails?
Is it possible to set up my own server and email server and send emails without any limitations?
If yes can you give me a tutorial or a course on that?
Or is it too much of a headache to do it myself and I should stick to third party services?
Thank you!
SMTP is not and headache but IP reputation management is. That's why most hosting providers limit SMTP usage and third party service florish.
As for the question "should I stick to third party ?", there is no right answer possible, only opinions:
If your emails are information requested by users (like forgot my password stuff, or notifications) you could use your own servers, because your IP reputation is going to be good.
If you send marketing stuff, all I can say is that my biggest customers all rely on third party services. Probably for good reasons
I've been reading up on sending mass email to a user-base, and I'm not feeling comfortable using the PHP mail function. It tends to be too simple, spammy and unreliable.
But that leads me to my question... for a custom application, what should I be using to send email to potentially hundreds of people? ...or is mail okay to use?
I appreciate the help.
I would use a third-party service. There are several of them. They ensure the emails are sent from white-listed IP's and have spent a LOT of money on legal prep for terms, privacy policy, etc to ensure the ISP's play nicely with the incoming mail.
If you're only sending mail to potentially hundreds of people, and not hundreds of thousands of people, PHP's sendmail will handle the load fine. You should be worrying more about the newsletter content and the opt-out easiness than the capability of PHP to send your email. For small campaigns to hundreds of people, check out MyEmma.com as an example of a small-list solution.
What you're probably looking for is an API to offload your email calls to and let a service handle the delivery for you. Sending a large number of email messages from PHP can be tricky as if it's not done quickly enough you run the risk of time-outs, and tracking which have been sent is always troublesome if you want to re-try a big batch.
Not surprisingly there are several companies which offer an email API service to make this sort of thing significantly easier than doing it yourself:
SendGrid (PHP example)
Mandrill (PHP package) from MailChimp
Postmark (PHP libraries)
PostageApp (PHP example)
MailGun (PHP sample)
While I'm a developer for PostageApp, but I encourage you to try out many of these to see what works best for you.
In most cases you need to re-write a small portion of your application to work with the particular API or library used to access the API, and once that's done you can send a very large number of messages with one quick call. The delivery of those messages becomes the responsibility of your provider.
The truth is that the less money you're willing to spend on email sending, the more things you have to do yourself, such as:
White listing your sender IP address (especially if you're on shared hosting this can be a PITA, because the other users can mess things up for you).
Setting up SPF and DKIM to add trust for mail hosts (Hotmail, GMail, etc.)
Checking bounce emails
Handling ISP complaints
This is also amongst the things that third party providers charge you for; if you don't wish to bother with any of the above, feel free to use providers such as Mailchimp, Bluehornet, etc. Make sure they provide what you need before you whip your wallet, some might have surprising hidden costs (such as charging you extra for API usage, use of transactional emails, life-cycle emails, etc.)
If you don't mind doing a few of the above (like checking bounce / complaint emails and making some simple DNS changes) you could sign up for Amazon SES; it has a proper API and their email charges are the lowest I've seen so far and recently they have introduced DKIM (signed emails) support. You can also configure your sendmail (assuming dedicated hosting) to talk directly to SES, so it's easy to hook up any mail() based solution and run it.
First, thanks for everyone that has helped me with this thus far.
The answer I was looking for is http://mandrillapp.com/
This is the service behind MailChimp and it rules in every way!
I'm using my Google Apps account (Standard version) to send single emails (automatically) to real interested customers.
The problem is that my sender email account has been suspended, because it's been considered as a "spammer" by Google.
What can I do in order to send that kind of emails from now on? I use MailChimp to send massive emails, and I've seen it has an API, called STS, for sending single emails, but it also required an Amazon SES account, so I don't know whether to invest on those services or doing something else.
What do you recommend for this case?
You should try a service that specializes in sending "transactional" emails, such as Sendgrid, Postmarkapp and Mailjet.
They have APIs and libraries for most programming languages, but in your case you just need to configure the SMTP server they rovide in your email client and you're good to go. They help you not get into the spam folder of your recipients, and help make sure you don't get flagged as a spammer
With most of them you should get some prettty powerfull analytics as well, which is a nice bonus.
For an application we are building, it is required to give certain registered accounts the ability to send emails to other registered accounts.
As part of the registration, we obviously collect the real email address of every user.
I do not want to expose any of my users' email addresses so I would like to have the ability to proxy them through fake email address that basically forward to the real email address.
For example, if someone want's to email John Doe, they would send an email to abcdefg12345#mysite.com which would then forward the email to john#johndoe.com.
In case its not obvious, the purpose of this is to protect the end user from spam and keeps their real email address private. Since my application acts as the proxy, I could easily block certain email's from going through.
The most famous example of this is Facebook's email proxy for Facebook Apps.
My Question: Are there any patterns, servers, 3rd party services, or libraries that provide such a feature? Does anyone have any suggestions for how this could be built?
I've never seen a service that offers this directly. The hardest part here is the receiving of the emails and wiring things up to your app for the authentication. You could use a service like http://cloudmailin.com in order to receive the email and then forward it on or even use some sort of custom install. Another option would be to create a script that modifies a server such as postfix's configuration.
Finally although I wouldn't recommend it you could try and create your own mail server to do this. I would read up a little more on SMTP/IMAP and see what options you have.
It looks like there is no 3rd party service or tool\library to accomplish this. It is going to be a bigger task than I was hoping for so I will be putting it off until I have the time to implement it.
I think the solution is to use a mail daemon that has an API or at least allows you to manipulate the users\emails\aliases in it such that you can create new mailboxes on demand and set them to forward from someuser#proxy.mysite.com to user#theirdomain.com
I found out that there are services that provide this type of functionality as part of their offerings:
http://mailgun.net/
http://www.sendgrid.com
Both of these services are very cool and offer quite a bit for sending and analyzing emails including the ability to create forwarding\proxy emails.
I have a PHP web app that is going to send out about 1,000 emails. I would love to test the performance beforehand. Is there any kind of service that provides dummy email addresses to send to, for this kind of testing? I can't find anything that's not just a general bulk-email service. The key here is I just want dummy addresses to send to.
If you have the ability to just purchase a domain name from a hosting service, I know at least 1&1 gives you like 2500 email addresses per domain so you could literally spam yourself to death and not worry about any other 3rd party. You can pick up a domain name for like
When you say "test the performance", do you mean you want to know about your deliverability rates, or how your emails look?
Deliverability Rates
This is entirely dependent on your SMTP server and the reputation of the IP that it will be sending from along with your domain's SPF records and the content of your email. To maximize this, I would recommend using a marketing email service such as MailChimp or MadMimi.
Appearance of Emails
You could always just send yourself a test email to see how it looks. An alternative is to use a service like PostageApp that has a built in template designer that has both an easy email preview function and a test send email function.
(Full Disclosure: I am the Product Manager of PostageApp.)
If you use "Post Hoc" you can send email to an unlimited number of email addresses. Post Hoc acts like an SMTP server, and receives the email messages that you are sending, but it does not forward them on anywhere. You do not need to set up any email inboxes ahead of time, so there is no problem if you have 1000 different unique email addresses. They do not need to be from a single domain -- you can use any email address you want. It stores the email messages received so that you can inspect them if necessary. You would run it locally so that there is no concern about network problems, and it is very low overhead since it does almost no processing of the email. This way, the performance measure will be mostly the sending side processing. Best of all, it is open source and freely available:
Find it on GitHub: GitHub for Post Hoc
Also see the blog post: PostHoc: Testing Apps that Send Email