4 ms·

Projects like this seem like a great idea, but deliverability seems like a big concern that is hard to measure unless you have a reasonable amount of experience

Projects like this seem like a great idea, but deliverability seems like a big concern that is hard to measure unless you have a reasonable amount of experience. What are best practices for using/selecting an ESP if you were to use a project like this and want to ensure reasonable deliverability?

knadh 7y ago
Author here. We've been using listmonk in production at our company (regulated financial business) to deliver e-mail updates including regulatory ones for over 6 months. We host our own SMTP instances using Postal[1] on EC2 instances and have never had any issues with deliverability. If it's legitimate e-mail, I don't think it's much of an issue. PS: Postal SMTP is awesome. [1] https://github.com/atech/postal https://github.com/atech/postal
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rolltiide 7y ago
  > If it's legitimate e-mail, I don't think it's much of an issue. starting to sound hopelessly naive you deliver email updates to fund LPs that aren't unilaterally marking you as spam for no reason
  - 0xffff2 7y ago
    >that aren't unilaterally marking you as spam for no reason This sounds hopelessly naive to me. If the receiver marks it as spam, it's spam. By definition. Work harder to only send emails to people who want them.
    - cat199 7y ago
      Really? Spam is unsolicited commercial email. if I sign up on a site, click the 'yes email me' button, and then mark the email as spam when I get it, I am the one acting incorrectly, not the sender who is literally doing what I instructed them to do..
      - MisterBastahrd 7y ago
        Sure, but the end user is going to do whatever is most convenient for them. Unsubscribing from email lists can be cumbersome and non-uniform, which is usually why people just hit that spam button instead. It always provides them a uniform interface and largely achieves the same goal from their perspective.
      - webbie917 7y ago
        Actually, cold emails (without permission) aren't spam. What makes an email spam is: 1) misleading subject line 2) misleading message 3) lack of simple (not requiring login or extra steps) unsubscribe link, and a couple other factors. People forget subscribing and hit "Spam", which has an impact on the sender reputation and affects future deliverability for that sender.
        thedufer 7y ago
        That's a very narrow definition of spam that you're only going to hear from spammers (your profile is utterly unsurprising after reading this comment). Unfortunately for you, end-users are going to mark as spam based on their own much more reasonable definition.
        webbie917 7y ago
        It's not my definition, that's how the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (applicable to US only) defines spam and most marketers are familiar with since it's been around for 15 years. Of course the laws are different in Europe and Canada. One of the factors I didn't mention in previous comment is presence of physical mail address. Not sure what "unfortunately for me" is in reference to - BigMailer isn't a platform for cold emails (there are plenty others that specialize in cold email campaigns) and Amazon SES doesn't give a free pass on the practice either.
    - rolltiide 7y ago
      > If the receiver marks it as spam, it's spam. By definition. but that shouldn't effect the deliverability to everyone else, but thats a reality which has its own problem and has its own countermeasures. when people asked OP if they had a solution to this, they hand waived it away. all closed sourced mailing list clients have solutions for this. but anyway since somehow it is 2019 and people want to act like its 2009 on this matter I'll just skip ahead to echo the productive answer someone else left: this could probably be run through Amazon SES with their DKIM settings
PatrolX 7y ago
Deliverability is a non-issue if you hook tools like this and Sendy up to Amazon SES with DKIM and verified MAIL FROM settings. I've been doing it for years and never once had a deliverability issue. I've also sent directly from EC2 instances without issues but SES is so cheap and reliable I've stuck with it.
- webbie917 7y ago
  Sounds like you have a good and established sender reputation, which is a big factor. When people start fresh (new sender identity) they tend to run into deliverability issues. Also, the quality and size of the starting list matters too because a large list (like the OPs) or unengaged list can have a high bounce and low engagement rate, which factors into future deliverability.
dvtrn 7y ago
I wonder if orgs using gApps can use it as an SMTP relay as a possible solution. My team did this (except we used our Office365 as a relay) when one of our clients brought in a new firewall and found that password reset emails were being blocked coming out of AWS. Now before you mention how this should be a solveable problem inn AWS, we’re already well underway testing with the client. The problem presented itself as a manifestation of inheriting the last guy’s infrastructure and working to...unfuck a lot of his questionable design choices.
massaman_yams 7y ago
The other comments here don't quite tell the whole story; "I never had any problems" is anecdotal - there are plenty of legitimate senders who do run into deliverability issues. Using an ESP will generally simplify the amount of work necessary to achieve good delivery, but due to the complexities of domain reputation and fingerprinting, very occasionally they can also be the cause of delivery problems. General guidelines: - It's a bit harder to predict how deliverability will turn out at smaller ESPs, vs. well-established ones like Sendgrid, SES, Mailgun, and perhaps Mailchimp. - DKIM, SPF, DMARC (p=none is fine to start; gmail has a guide for deploying dmarc https://support.google.com/a/answer/2466563 https://support.google.com/a/answer/2466563) - Use the same root domain everywhere within your email: From, Return-Path, DKIM signature headers; URLs for links and images in the message body. (Separate subdomains are fine, e.g., img.example.com, bounce.example.com) - Having your sending domain show up in third party email can cause problems. Try to avoid it if possible; use a separate domain as a last resort. - Send consistently. Some variation in sending patterns will be tolerated, but you'll probably have trouble if you send 500 messages a day most of the time, then once a month you send 100,000 messages. - Consider a dedicated IP if you're sending over 50,000-ish messages a month. - You may want to split up transactional email from marketing, sending these from separate IPs and/or subdomains. - Finally, make sure you're sending email your recipients find valuable and are interested in receiving. Too much disinterest/disengagement can cause delivery issues.
- webbie917 7y ago
  I agree with all your suggestions, but want to expand on a couple points: 1) The shared IP pool at cheaper providers like Sendgrid, SES, and MailGun will have lower reputation versus a platform with a guarded (via cost, but also on-boarding mechanisms) platforms like MailChimp, simply due to customer pool and quality of emails sent. I have been hearing from my (BigMailer.io) customers about having deliverability issues with platforms like SendInBlue and MailGun frequently in the last year or so. 2) If the bulk sending practices are healthy and engagement is good, then it's better to use the same sender/domain for both bulk and transactional email. I would recommend to NOT send different email types from different providers, like use SendGrid or SES for transactional emails and then some other platform for marketing emails, especially using the same sender domain. That's because email header signature and tracking links will be different and email box providers like Gmail can find it suspicious and send emails to Spam. And then there is the issue of processing and syncing bounces/unsubscribes/complaints data. Keeping all email campaign types in a single platform allows for centralized processing of bounces/unsubscribes/complaints date and protects future campaign engagement + sender reputation.

knadh 7y ago

Author here. We've been using listmonk in production at our company (regulated financial business) to deliver e-mail updates including regulatory ones for over 6 months. We host our own SMTP instances using Postal[1] on EC2 instances and have never had any issues with deliverability. If it's legitimate e-mail, I don't think it's much of an issue. PS: Postal SMTP is awesome. [1] https://github.com/atech/postal https://github.com/atech/postal

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rolltiide 7y ago
> If it's legitimate e-mail, I don't think it's much of an issue. starting to sound hopelessly naive you deliver email updates to fund LPs that aren't unilaterally marking you as spam for no reason
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  >that aren't unilaterally marking you as spam for no reason This sounds hopelessly naive to me. If the receiver marks it as spam, it's spam. By definition. Work harder to only send emails to people who want them.
  - cat199 7y ago
    Really? Spam is unsolicited commercial email. if I sign up on a site, click the 'yes email me' button, and then mark the email as spam when I get it, I am the one acting incorrectly, not the sender who is literally doing what I instructed them to do..
    - MisterBastahrd 7y ago
      Sure, but the end user is going to do whatever is most convenient for them. Unsubscribing from email lists can be cumbersome and non-uniform, which is usually why people just hit that spam button instead. It always provides them a uniform interface and largely achieves the same goal from their perspective.
    - webbie917 7y ago
      Actually, cold emails (without permission) aren't spam. What makes an email spam is: 1) misleading subject line 2) misleading message 3) lack of simple (not requiring login or extra steps) unsubscribe link, and a couple other factors. People forget subscribing and hit "Spam", which has an impact on the sender reputation and affects future deliverability for that sender.
      - thedufer 7y ago
        That's a very narrow definition of spam that you're only going to hear from spammers (your profile is utterly unsurprising after reading this comment). Unfortunately for you, end-users are going to mark as spam based on their own much more reasonable definition.
        webbie917 7y ago
        It's not my definition, that's how the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (applicable to US only) defines spam and most marketers are familiar with since it's been around for 15 years. Of course the laws are different in Europe and Canada. One of the factors I didn't mention in previous comment is presence of physical mail address. Not sure what "unfortunately for me" is in reference to - BigMailer isn't a platform for cold emails (there are plenty others that specialize in cold email campaigns) and Amazon SES doesn't give a free pass on the practice either.
  - rolltiide 7y ago
    > If the receiver marks it as spam, it's spam. By definition. but that shouldn't effect the deliverability to everyone else, but thats a reality which has its own problem and has its own countermeasures. when people asked OP if they had a solution to this, they hand waived it away. all closed sourced mailing list clients have solutions for this. but anyway since somehow it is 2019 and people want to act like its 2009 on this matter I'll just skip ahead to echo the productive answer someone else left: this could probably be run through Amazon SES with their DKIM settings

PatrolX 7y ago

Deliverability is a non-issue if you hook tools like this and Sendy up to Amazon SES with DKIM and verified MAIL FROM settings. I've been doing it for years and never once had a deliverability issue. I've also sent directly from EC2 instances without issues but SES is so cheap and reliable I've stuck with it.

webbie917 7y ago
Sounds like you have a good and established sender reputation, which is a big factor. When people start fresh (new sender identity) they tend to run into deliverability issues. Also, the quality and size of the starting list matters too because a large list (like the OPs) or unengaged list can have a high bounce and low engagement rate, which factors into future deliverability.

dvtrn 7y ago

I wonder if orgs using gApps can use it as an SMTP relay as a possible solution. My team did this (except we used our Office365 as a relay) when one of our clients brought in a new firewall and found that password reset emails were being blocked coming out of AWS. Now before you mention how this should be a solveable problem inn AWS, we’re already well underway testing with the client. The problem presented itself as a manifestation of inheriting the last guy’s infrastructure and working to...unfuck a lot of his questionable design choices.

massaman_yams 7y ago

The other comments here don't quite tell the whole story; "I never had any problems" is anecdotal - there are plenty of legitimate senders who do run into deliverability issues. Using an ESP will generally simplify the amount of work necessary to achieve good delivery, but due to the complexities of domain reputation and fingerprinting, very occasionally they can also be the cause of delivery problems. General guidelines: - It's a bit harder to predict how deliverability will turn out at smaller ESPs, vs. well-established ones like Sendgrid, SES, Mailgun, and perhaps Mailchimp. - DKIM, SPF, DMARC (p=none is fine to start; gmail has a guide for deploying dmarc https://support.google.com/a/answer/2466563 https://support.google.com/a/answer/2466563) - Use the same root domain everywhere within your email: From, Return-Path, DKIM signature headers; URLs for links and images in the message body. (Separate subdomains are fine, e.g., img.example.com, bounce.example.com) - Having your sending domain show up in third party email can cause problems. Try to avoid it if possible; use a separate domain as a last resort. - Send consistently. Some variation in sending patterns will be tolerated, but you'll probably have trouble if you send 500 messages a day most of the time, then once a month you send 100,000 messages. - Consider a dedicated IP if you're sending over 50,000-ish messages a month. - You may want to split up transactional email from marketing, sending these from separate IPs and/or subdomains. - Finally, make sure you're sending email your recipients find valuable and are interested in receiving. Too much disinterest/disengagement can cause delivery issues.

webbie917 7y ago
I agree with all your suggestions, but want to expand on a couple points: 1) The shared IP pool at cheaper providers like Sendgrid, SES, and MailGun will have lower reputation versus a platform with a guarded (via cost, but also on-boarding mechanisms) platforms like MailChimp, simply due to customer pool and quality of emails sent. I have been hearing from my (BigMailer.io) customers about having deliverability issues with platforms like SendInBlue and MailGun frequently in the last year or so. 2) If the bulk sending practices are healthy and engagement is good, then it's better to use the same sender/domain for both bulk and transactional email. I would recommend to NOT send different email types from different providers, like use SendGrid or SES for transactional emails and then some other platform for marketing emails, especially using the same sender domain. That's because email header signature and tracking links will be different and email box providers like Gmail can find it suspicious and send emails to Spam. And then there is the issue of processing and syncing bounces/unsubscribes/complaints data. Keeping all email campaign types in a single platform allows for centralized processing of bounces/unsubscribes/complaints date and protects future campaign engagement + sender reputation.