VerticalResponse.com works pretty well for sending out email campaigns.
Ask YC: What do you use for outbound email sending?
21–30 of 49 posts
Re: Ask YC: What do you use for outbound email sending?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 use…
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.
Re: Ask YC: What do you use for outbound email sending?
#23For 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.
Re: Ask YC: What do you use for outbound email sending?
#24Try campaignmonitor.com. These guys rock (and no, I'm not affiliated with them).
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
Re: Ask YC: What do you use for outbound email sending?
#25Try campaignmonitor.com. These guys rock (and no, I'm not affiliated with them).
I second this. Crazy expensive for large lists, but it worked like a charm.
Re: Ask YC: What do you use for outbound email sending?
#26First 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 throug…
No problem, I'm used to being contrarian.
Hard fail can send people who use email forwarding to their spam folders.
Re: Ask YC: What do you use for outbound email sending?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 use…
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 accou…
I'm assuming your forward and reverse DNS match?
http://blog.fastmail.fm/2007/12/05/sending-email-servers-bes...
Re: Ask YC: What do you use for outbound email sending?
#28Depending on how much you're sending out and to how many people; Google Apps is a good choice.
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.
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....
Re: Ask YC: What do you use for outbound email sending?
#29I 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…
The default qmail install will accept and queue incoming messages for accounts that don't exist on the system, and bounce them later (usually to an unrelated, innocent address) if the account isn't created.
Did you do anything in your installations to address that problem? If so, what was it?
Re: Ask YC: What do you use for outbound email sending?
#30Whatever 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.