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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#11

Post by 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!

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

#12

Post by 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.

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

#14

Post by 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.

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

#15

Post by swombat »

metajack wrote: post #10
epi0Bauqu wrote: post #7

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…

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 users submitting vast numbers of email addresses into your system.

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

#16

Post by epi0Bauqu »

metajack wrote: post #10
epi0Bauqu wrote: post #7

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…

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…

Following the above, I was relatively spam free for about 3 and half years. At the high point of my last company, I was sending about a million messages a day. There would be spam flare ups of course, but I would get them resolved through persistent contacting of support staff. Now that I have essentially no users in comparison :), I'm not sending hardly anything, but I'm still monitoring and am not having any spam problems.

In my new services, I did have issues originally, especially on Gmail. So there was an initial ramp up with spam issues on the majors. But like I said, after following all their rules and then persistently hounding their support staff to investigate, I've gotten past their filters.

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

#17

Post by terpua »

cmer wrote: post #11

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 throug…

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 :(

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

#18

Post by chaostheory »

bretthoerner wrote: post #4
ComputerGuru wrote: post #3

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

I realize you said it depends, but did they lesson the limit of 500 outgoing per account per day? That's pretty low for any service, and a total hassle to create a bunch of fake user accounts and keep track of how much they've sent today while round robin-ing around "as many accounts as I hope I'll need today".

I think that's the for the free version. There's now a paid version. It's not cheap depending on how many email accounts you need for your startup ($50/year per email account), but it will give you a reliable email provider that gets you through a lot of spam bins

It's good to note to that you can do aliases for each account too

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

#19

Post by terpua »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #3

Depending 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.

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