I got the authority from the user, and they subscribe to my newsletter.
Are there any free bulk mailing SMTP servers?
If not, which service (e.g., MailChimp) offers the largest mail-sent limit and subscriber limit?
In fact, can I build my own SMTP server and serve email just like MailChimp, given that my computer can handle the workload?
MailChimp offers up to 2000 contacts for free as long as you aren't spamming, so there's your best option.
You can definitely build your own SMTP server and roll your own mailing list software (MailChimp won't let you use your own, AFAIK) but you'd have to ensure that you are whitelisted in as many places as possible, have proper SPF records and DKIM in place, and your IP has a good reputation.
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 am planning strategy for our bulk marketing emails and bulk recruitment emails. Shall we use seperate domains for marketing and recruitment bulk emails even if we are using SMTP Relay service of providers like Critsend and Sendgrid. Reason i am asking as i have read somewhere Domain Reputation is also very important in the long run and should use main domain : abc.com for normal transactional emails and every day communication with our clients and vendors and use seperate domains for Bulk Emailing.
We do have all these 3 domains (main abc.com, others abc.net and abc.org) for several years with us so we can setup quickly and start using though other 2 new domains have never been used for sending emails till date and we have used our main abc.com for sending transactional emails till date for all these years except once a few years ago for bulk emailing but that few 100 emails only.
Or if we are using your SMTP relay of these providers then the domain reputation of providers is required hence it will not matter whether we use other domains or just use our primary domain for everything?
Please help and advise.
For the most part the from address domain is what your sending reputation is associated with, so yes, I would recommend that you separate by domain.
The sending IP also has some effect, so if you have an especially bad reputation on one domain, it may cause deliverability issues for other domains with otherwise good sending reputation that use the same IPs, so it’s a good idea to split that too.
I'd like to set up custom domain authentication using DKIM and SPF for our 3rd party email marketing company (like mail chimp or constant contact). We also run MS exchange. Our Exchange guy is convinced that setting up DKIM and SPF for email marketing company will forever tie the reputation of the email marketing company to our exchange server. Is he correct? If not, how do I convince him?
I think I have enough info now to make this an answer...
Yes, if this is a permission-based list that you have sent to recently (if it's old that means likely spam traps) then I think you are correct that there's not much risk at all.
One way to convince this person would be to find out what IP address your MailChimp emails originate from (maybe send to a small list with just yourself on it but a real send). And then check out the reputation of this IP address using the tools available such as MX Toolbox and others, then show him the output. I'd be surprised if your Mailchimp assigned IP address was on any blacklists or had reputation issues
When he says exchange server is he talking about your company domain name taking a reputation hit? Or is he worried about the IP address from which you send non-marketing email? If he's worried about a separate IP that you send day-to-day email from then explain to him that your marketing emails will go out from a Mailchimp assigned IP address. If he's worried about the domain two things: 1. Your list is opt-in and you've sent recently so it's not an issue 2. If it was a bad list that would cause your domain to be blacklisted then whether you have DMARC, SPF, and DKIM doesn't matter, the originating IP that sends spam can get blocked for spamming regardless.
So I think you are right here but it's a matter of making the case.
We are involved in the project which is designed to gather UK hotels details that our client needs to create a paper guide with most popular and top rated places in the country.
At the begining of each year we automatically send emails out to hotel owners in order to ask them to update their hotel details.
Unfortunately Client reported that some of hotels never received any of the emails nor that email ended up in spam, especially on hotmail mailbox.
Is there any known approach which could help us to overcome that situation?
One of the solutions we tried was to resign from local SMTP server and purchase external SMTP server on turboSMTP, but without effect.
How would you advise us to you deal with that problem or what have you advised to other companies in the past? Surely there must be a way to resolve that problem completely and we would appreciate your prompt help with that.
Sending an email to multiple recipients within the same company may sometimes have that effect. That company’s email firewall often assumes it’s a spam attack.
There's a lot of factors that come into this. Thankfully, by going for an external SMTP relay, you can offload most of the issues to them.
What you can do, is make sure your domain and emails are configured to increase their validity. Two really key things for this:
SPF records
DKIM signing
SPF
SPF is basically a whitelist of IPs that can send email for your domain. SPF records are added to your DNS server. There are plenty of SPF generators online that can help (like this one). Your SMTP provider will also need to be included in your SPF record.
DKIM
DKIM digitally signs your email to verify that it's been sent by an authorised sender. Your SMTP provider will have info on how to set that up (turboSMTP docs).
If you want to explore more, I recommend Jeff Atwood's (co-founder of SO) article on how horrible email is: http://blog.codinghorror.com/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email-through-code/
Let's say I have a couple of ec2 instances with an elastic load balancer, and I want to run an email server on them so I can send and receive emails from multiple addresses. What is the best practice to do that?
It's sort of a broad question, but I can give you a (hopefully) helpful, specific answer. Email is a topic that doesn't get talked about much with AWS. In fact, this is where the benefits of the cloud can get a little... cloudy.
In my view, the key issue is email deliverability -- making sure that the emails sent from the cloud are reliably received by the intended recipients. Because of anti-spam measures employed by email providers, that means using IP addresses that have a good reputation. Unfortunately, that's not a big benefit of AWS. In fact, many spam filters simply drop emails sent from AWS IP's, and this is true for other cloud service providers as well.
So whenever I send any email from AWS, I always use a forwarding service such as SendGrid. Such companies offer SMTP forwarding in a secure way, and give you all the tools you need to reliably deliver both bulk and transactional emails.
At entry level, you use shared IP's and get the benefit of DKIM, open- and click-tracking, and bounce/block reporting. SendGrid helps to take care of managing your domain's reputation with the big providers. At higher service levels, they can help you warm up and maintain your own dedicated email-sending IP address to ensure that you are not impacted negatively by other SendGrid customers.
Of course, Amazon also sells Simple Email Service, and there are also other options such as sending through Gmail. I am in no way affiliated with any of these companies, but my main piece of advice to people wanting to send any kind of email from a cloud provider is to always use a third party service to maximise deliverability.
As to receiving emails, an Elastic Load Balancer isn't helpful for SMTP, though if you are providing webmail then it can help balance your port 80 traffic. For SMTP, use multiple MX records with the same weight, pointing to a set of hosts that can receive the email.
For your Mail Transport Agent, I recommend Postfix, but that's a matter of preference. You will find many people also recommending Qmail and Sendmail.
I agree with most of #platforms' answer in regards to receiving email in the "cloud", i.e., AWS. Especially the note about balancing port 80 traffic and the inability to balance SMTP (using multiple MX records instead). Just to give a different view on this matter, I had always set up a single MS Exchange Edge Transport Server for those tasks. In a Microsoft TechNet post they mention that a farm of 6 of these servers is able to safely handle around 13 million messages a day (even under peak load).
On the sending email from the "cloud", i.e. AWS, matter, I must disagree, though. I highly recommend using Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). It is fully integrated with the rest of your infrastructure, and the AWS SDKs have all the bindings you need for the majority of programming languages/platforms. As long as you correctly set up your Domain Records, DKIM, etc, you will have no trouble with deliverability. You also have the same reports about bounces, blocks, complaints, etc. Source: I have been using SES for years with no single complaint in regards to deliverability.