

Ask YC: What do you use for outbound email sending? - terpua

I need to send out automated emails to users (e.g. invitations, share notices, etc.) and want to guarantee that recipients don't receive them in their spam folder.<p>I can minimize by utilizing SPF/DK/DKIM but it's not a guarantee.  Services like Port25 that specialize in outbound MTA is quite expensive.<p>What do you guys use/suggest?
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cmer
First of all, I'd advice NOT doing it yourself. (sorry epi0Bauqu).

Spammers ruined email and it can now be pretty hard to pass some spam filters.
Of course, 95% of your emails will make it through if you do it yourself, but
the last few % can be hard to get.

I recently started sending through Fastmail.fm for our website and it's been
working fine. I simply setup sSmtp on our servers and everything that is sent
through Sendmail is now relayed through Fastmail.

Another company I've considered is authsmtp.com. I haven't tried them, but
their pricing seems to be very reasonable. The reason I didn't go with them is
that I already had a Fastmail account (and I hate paying twice for the same
thing ;-) )

We did Gmail before, but setuping Postfix to relay through them can be a major
pain (mainly because of the way they authenticate). Fastmail (and I assume
authsmtp) was a no-brainer.

Another thing that will help delivery tremendously is SPF. Make sure to set it
properly (with hard fail if possible, ie: -all).

Good luck!

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terpua
How many outbound emails does FM allow?

EDIT: Looks like for the Enhanced service, they allow 2000 messages per hour.
Cost $40/year.

<http://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricingtbl.html>

EDIT2: Looks like that's inbound :(

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terpua
Just confirmed with FM: that's 2000 messages inbound and outbound per hour.
Awesome!

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epi0Bauqu
I would advise doing it yourself. It isn't that hard, and assuming email is an
integral part of your service, I wouldn't trust anyone else with it.

In terms of specifics, I like qmail. In terms of spam management, there are
lots of things to do. First and foremost, have daily monitors on all the major
email providers. Get on all their feedback loops. I've found that contacting
them with problems is annoying, but does work if you are following all their
guidelines and are persistent about it.

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metajack
Doing it yourself is hard, especially if you want any hope of getting past the
major email providers spam filters. We deal with this every day.

Current stats say that our % of users who have signed up that make it through
email confirmation step is about 22%.

Around 33% or so of our signups have yahoo.com addresses, and only about 12%
of those manage email confirmation.

It is similarly bad for hotmail. GMail used to be quite good, but has slowly
gotten worse over time.

I'd be very curious to know if others are measuring these things, and how you
are doing. Feel free to contact me directly as well.

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swombat
That sounds unreasonably low. You might have a different problem than just
spam filters.

I've worked on several business that had to send confirmation emails (via our
own servers), and the figures were never anywhere near as bad.

If there is any way that your users can benefit from signing up other users
(e.g. if you run an MLM site), you might want to look into whether your stats
are not being falsified by a few users submitting vast numbers of email
addresses into your system.

~~~
metajack
I think it's unreasonably low too, but haven't figured out a way to solve it.

You can benefit by signing up other users, but this is not a very often used
feature. It's not an MLM site, but a subscription chess service.

We track signups by ip and by browser cookies, so we're reasonable sure these
are distinct people. Since we switched to the freemium model, there is little
incentive for people to make duplicate accounts now, so I was hoping to see
activation go up.

We do domainkeys and SPF and I have gone around the block with hotmail two
times already.

We send approximately 25k emails a month, the bulk of which are sending out
confirmation emails to people that signed up, and then a thank you for those
that confirm. The rest are forgot password emails and invites.

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terpua
I'm assuming your forward and reverse DNS match?

[http://blog.fastmail.fm/2007/12/05/sending-email-servers-
bes...](http://blog.fastmail.fm/2007/12/05/sending-email-servers-best-
practice/)

~~~
metajack
Of course. That's the first thing on most checklists. Domainkeys and SPF
records are also valid.

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josefresco
For newsletters, ConstantContact.com is THE standard and what I recommend to
all my clients. They make sure that ISP's don't block your email, report on
bounces, spam reports and provide statistics on opens, click-throughs etc.

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bprater
I've known the CEO of Aweber.com for years, and he strives to create a
competitive service. They work very hard on deliverability and have
connections to the big ISPs to deal with on-going issues. Good folks, check
'em out.

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evaneykelen
Try campaignmonitor.com. These guys rock (and no, I'm not affiliated with
them).

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whycombo
Campaignmonitor seems to be "permission based", so you cannot send out Invites
since invitees gave no permission. A current user deciding to invite another
doesn't cut it as "permission".

If permission based is OK for your needs, AWeber is top of the line
(www.aweber.com)

Here's a similar discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=190633>

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cpr
I'd say get your own dedicated host with your own IP address, and use normal
outgoing mail. (I use a colocated Xserve G5 with Postfix, which is a great
system.)

As long as your SMTP server is reasonably secure (you can run simple blacklist
tests on it from various sites), you shouldn't get caught by IP-based spam
filters, and then it's just a question of whether your content looks spammy to
your recipients' mail systems. That's unrelated to how you're delivering the
email, so it's the same problem no matter what you're using to send.

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eng
My business relies heavily on e-mail (we send e-mail proposals on behalf of
hotels to their customers), and we use AuthSMTP (<http://authsmtp.com>).
$168/year buys you 10000 outbound e-mails per month.

That said, guaranteeing 100% success with the delivery of e-mail is pretty
much impossible. You just can't control what the recipient has installed in
terms of mail client, spam filtering software.

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AdamM
I'm working on an application where I need to send emails to 10,000+ users.
The emails can be sent: multiple times per day, daily, weekly, or other. The
content of EACH email is completely custom HTML (not swappable fields, but
sort of like a custom RSS feed in an email.)

Can anyone suggest a solution that allows tracking of opens, bounce backs, and
other standard metrics?

~~~
jaxn
EmailLabs has all of the traditional email marketing features (like the
tracking that you want), but has a good API to allow your application to
interact with them. I chose EmailLabs at an ecommerce company that I used to
work with.

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scott_s
What makes you think you're not spending spam?

I'm not being glib. Really ask yourself if it's necessary to email this
information to users. If I get email from a company and I don't want it, I
don't like your company. If your company has information that _you_ think is
important to me, notify me next time I log in. Let me determine whether or not
it's important.

~~~
terpua
It's information typically requested by a user (e.g. forgot password, register
confirmation, etc.).

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bayes
You must be running quite a big site if you're sending out 100k+ per month
messages on forgotten passwords and registration confirmation.

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terpua
Plus invitations, message notices, etc.

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scott_s
Invitations and message notices are exactly what I was talking about.

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art_wells
I use SPF from a slicehost IP for membership confirmations, more-than daily
mailings to most members, and occasional announcements. No reported failures
yet and all my tests have worked. I figured hitting a large percentage was
enough. When volumes get high enough, I'll worry about what could only be a
very small percent of failures.

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andrewparker
Whatever provider you decide to use (and whether or not you decide to host it
yourself or use an ESP), you should:

A) be sending from your own dedicated IP address (so that spammers sharing
your IP address don't cause all your email to go to spam) and

B) work with a deliverability provider such as ReturnPath or Habeas.

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ComputerGuru
Depending on how much you're sending out and to how many people; Google Apps
is a good choice.

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terpua
Guestimating around 100K+ per month initially. Google Apps Premier allows 2000
per day per user. Which isn't bad for $50/year. That is not a bad option but
quite manual.

Authsmtp seems pricey in comparison.

~~~
ComputerGuru
I'm not sure what you mean by "quite manual?"

You just need to set up the Google Apps service manually; everything else
(including creating accounts, new addresses, sending emails, creating email
aliases, etc.) is fully "automatable" via their API; with wrappers available
in Python, PHP, C++, Java, Ruby, Perl, and more....

~~~
terpua
I mean to say that if you need additional quota, you have to sign up/add a new
account. It's one of those "you-wish-it-was-automated" thing.

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gibsonf1
cl-smtp <http://www.cliki.net/CL-SMTP>

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gruseom
Impossible. Lisp, as is well known, lacks the necessary libraries.

~~~
ra
impossible ??

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lr
Why not use Google Apps for your domain (it includes email!)? I know they
don't delete email, which is bad, but I'm willing to take that risk instead of
running my own mail system. It is a piece of cake to set up, and they offer
mailing lists, too!

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jfornear
I was just trying to figure this out today myself. Very helpful discussion as
usual. I love this site.

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nbarr
Fastmail is an excellent service as has been suggested. Another you might
consider is Rollernet.us.

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dcurtis
VerticalResponse.com works pretty well for sending out email campaigns.

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agentbleu
try dodo

