I know, what a transactional email is (like sending reset password, sending welcome message confirmation upon registering, etc...).
My doubt is the survey mails, are these considered transactional emails?
For example, I have a survey and I need to send it to a bulk of customers, will that be treated as a transactional email? If yes, then can I use Mandrill email service provide for that?
Surveys would fall under a 'request' email, which is still valid as a transactional email if it's done properly. Other types of request emails include asking users for feedback, or to rate things such as products or services. You should be fine to do this.
Here is a great article from Vero that includes some thoughts on 'request' emails.
Finally in answer to the second part of the questions, yes you could use SendGrid or Mandrill, to move this kind of email to your users.
Related
We are using sendgrid to send a weekly newsletter to about 50k emails. We have an authenticated domain as well as two of our own IP addresses. Our script batch sends 500 emails at a time to all the addresses with personalization. However, when we run the script, many of the emails are being processed and then being deferred according to sendgrid logs. The response is 202. Some emails receive the newsletter but others do not. Any suggestion on how to resolve this issue?
Twilio SendGrid developer evangelist here.
I would certainly follow flaxon's advice, check the dashboard and see what it says about your delivery as well as bounces or spam reports. There is a good article here on what being "deferred" means too.
I would also look into SendGrid's Marketing Campaigns. It is a better way to send bulk email, like to your 50k email list, than making several requests as you describe.
I'm using AWS SES to send emails to customers. I want to send an initial email to confirm an action they've made on my website, and then send subsequent emails to that same email address to notify of any subsequent activity on that initial action.
Different email clients appear to implement this behaviour differently, and I've read about the thread-index header here, but that doesn't cover all clients.
Is there a standard way to mark that an email belongs to the thread of a previously sent email?
Thanks
When adding the References Header to Emails, you can add message-ids of previously sent emails in order to create email threads.
Of course it's again a topic of the client to fulfill this feature, but it should be supported by major email clients.
Heres an old blogpost about that. (considering that email is also old, it should be fine ;) )
https://wesmorgan.blogspot.com/2012/07/understanding-email-headers-part-ii.html
I read MailChimp is to send bulk emails and Mandrill for transactional emails.
I am not so familiar with these terms. Can I have bulk transactional emails when I have a lot of users? or does bulk emails apply just when I sent one copy to many users?
My app is sending emails a few because is new, but it could grow. Will I be sending bulk emails when application grows? event if these emails are transactional?
What is a transactional email?
Transactional emails are typically non-marketing emails. Usually they are a thank you, confirmation, invoice, receipt etc. Something that is related to a transaction your customer made. General newsletters or promotional/sales emails (anything sent in bulk to a list) is not transactional.
Here is Mailchimp's What is transactional email link
Another thing to consider is how technical are you? Mandrill assumes you have a good bit of email knowledge and technical chops for design and sending. You can design an email in Mailchimp's editor and use it in Mandrill but even that isn't going to be easy without some pretty good understanding of the platform.
I looked at using Mandrill to send out a newsletter that needed more technical integration than Mailchimp could support and ultimately I scrapped the heavier tech pieces to use Mailchimp.
in a recent project I integrated a custom Contact Form which uses the silverstripe Email Class. Unfortunately the sent E-Mails do not arrive at the client. It seems to depend on the host/domain of the target E-Mail Address. E.g. gmx does work (but spam), but receiving the mails on the E-Mail Address of the client does not work at all (hosted at united domains). Thanks,
Florian
The Email class in SilverStripe is admittedly not the greatest ;) But apart from potential lowlevel encoding errors, email delivery mainly depends on factors outside of SilverStripe.
You can start debugging mailservers, DNS records, spam headers, bounce emails, etc - but in the end its probably far easier to leave email delivery to a SaaS-provider like SendGrid or MailChimp. Both have offerings where you can just point your PHP configuration to their SMTP servers. SendGrid has a nice best practice collection on what to watch out for when sending emails in general.
We send out email via our own SMTP server. Is there a way to make Gmail (and others) send some kind of pingback or response, if receivers mark our mail as spam?
Is this even a feature provided by Gmail/Hotmail etc?
Email inbox services either accept an email message or reject it completely as spam, often saying so, but I don’t believe that any will provide automatic feedback once the email is delivered to the recipient’s inbox.
There are blacklists that indicate known sources of spam and the better ones are dynamic, continually adding and removing senders from the blacklists. These are high-quality blacklists that I use to filter my incoming email:
Spamhaus ZEN
SpamCop
You might benefit from periodically checking for your sending IP address on these lists.
No.
First, a huge privacy violation - "what business of yours is it what I did with an e-mail from you?"
Second, this would bring huge benefits to spammers (as #Wooble mentions in the comment) - allowing them to judge the effectiveness of spam campaigns, verify which accounts are active, and tune the content to slip through
Third, most spam received has forged headers, so the "From" address is fake anyway.
However, if you want to track your e-mails, you can
track click-throughs from your e-mails
request receipt notifications
Hotmail has this feature.
You need to enlist with their "Junk Email Reporting" program.
They send you a note whenever someone clicks "junk" on one of your emails. This way you can unsubscribe them.