6 ms·

Could anyone give me some insight about how to start an email service like MailChimp? It seems to me like the only way to send emails is via a service provider.

Could anyone give me some insight about how to start an email service like MailChimp? It seems to me like the only way to send emails is via a service provider. When I try to get a hosting server to send emails myself, it seems like all of the server ips have been blacklisted and flagged as spam.

jdavis703 5y ago
You need to bring your own IPs and warm them up with legit emails. People abuse shared cloud IP addresses for spam, so you're going to run in to problems if you want to use them.
- songzme 5y ago
  Ah I need to buy my own block of ip addresses? Is that what I need to do? And then connect those ip addresses to my computer that I run at home / office? Sorry if the question is a bit noob, feel free to point me at any resources and I can do some reading myself too
  - kccqzy 5y ago
    Most likely you don't buy IP addresses outright. You sign a business Internet contract with your ISP that has a fixed IP address. You essentially lease that IP address from your ISP. You will stipulate in the contract that the IP address will be used to send/receive emails, because otherwise ISPs may block SMTP traffic completely. Once you get big enough, you can consider buying an IP address prefix, getting your Autonomous System number, setting up peering, etc. For example Mailchimp seems to have AS14782.
tootie 5y ago
Yeah, this is the big moat that big viral email companies have. You can only get around spam filters by building reputation which takes time and volume so it's really hard to bootstrap. The shortest path would be to start with low-level managed service like AWS SES and build value adds on top of it.
- gtirloni 5y ago
  It's not easy but it's not that hard. I've bootstrapped many mail servers on AWS and others and, although the initial outgoing emails might be flagged as spam AND you may have to remove yourself from Spamhaus and others, it's been mostly painless.
  - pfarrell 5y ago
    When I worked in email marketing in the 2000's, our director of engineering said something to me I've repeated many times. "Everything is hard at scale."
  - nulbyte 5y ago
    > It's not easy but it's not that hard. Agreed. I think the hardest part is getting started; folks not familiar with hosting their own email just don't have as much awareness of what to do and how to do it. But take a bit of time to learn, get a reputable ISP, don't spam people, and you can do just fine without too much effort. I got a cheap VPS specifically to host email, and the worst I've had to do is fill out a Spamhaus form one time.
    - Breza 5y ago
      I agree with you. It sounds basic, but from my experience the key is only sending emails that people actually want to receive and being ruthless about dropping accounts that appear to have become inactive.
granshaw 5y ago
I imagine its a fairly difficult undertaking nowadays. Your best bet is to probably use Mailgun or similar for the actual sending and let them deal with the reputation management headaches
superasn 5y ago
Yes sending emails yourself is just as impossible as hosting a payment processor yourself. Even though all the docs and technology is there, you really can't do it without the help of a big company like Amazon due to the following reasons: - almost all residential ips are blocked. - most data center ips are mostly blocked because there are like 100s of blacklists and every blacklist has it's own unique way of getting delisted. - every big email provider has its own version of FBL and it's often a big black box. For example till date gmail won't even give Amazon access to its fbl(1) - spam filtering is not an exact science and while there are things like spf, dkim, dmarc etc to ensure the authenticity of message at the end of the day it all comes down to your reputation as a sender and managing it is nothing short of a full time job. (1) https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=257487 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=257487
- warent 5y ago
  yup. I use protonmail and even that apparently gets blocked by gmail recipients occasionally. Rolling your own, you're lucky to have anyone ever see your mail
  - arosier 5y ago
    Thanks for using protonmail, email deliverability is always a battle. Let us know if you see more of this https://protonmail.com/support-form https://protonmail.com/support-form
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Protonmail gets banned from email lists because their users tend to behave poorly.
- Zababa 5y ago
  > Yes sending emails yourself is just as impossible as hosting a payment processor yourself. Genuine questions, how do companies like Mailchimp get started then?
  - 5y ago
codazoda 5y ago
Even the state of Utah seems to be failing at this. They recently started to snail mail vehicle registration reminders again. I signed up for email reminders on all my vehicles multiple times and I've never received an email from the state. Apparently others haven't either because the state now has a massive problem with expired plates. My own assumption about why the system doesn't work.
biztos 5y ago
I don't know how much it really counts as "like MailChimp" but Substack is relatively new, and seems to have found its way past the spam filters at least enough to get top-tier VC backing, so if I were trying to solve this problem I'd probably look at how they did it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substack
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  Looks like substack.com is configured for sending from Google, Mailgun, and Zendesk. I’d guess that’s for personal, product, and customer service emails respectively.
- leftnode 5y ago
  Surely Substack uses Amazon SES or another transactional email service to actually send the emails to their user's subscribers, right?
estreeper 5y ago
I hate to recommend what is just another service provider, but there are many cloud hosting providers that offer email sending (i.e. AWS, GCP, etc.) and dedicated email companies (Sendgrid, Mailgun, etc.). The cost to send email via any of these services is a tiny fraction of the amount you would pay to Mailchimp. The value in what Mailchimp does is not so much just sending email, but in all the things around it, like managing subscribers, tracking opens, easily creating nice-looking emails that look good in a variety of mail clients, etc. Contrary to some of the replies you've received here, it definitely is possible to run your own mail server with good deliverability, and we routinely did this for companies, even fairly small ones, physically on-prem and in datacenters, and cloud. It is not trivial, but far from impossible, and will likely involve communicating with a human when getting a static IP to find a good one. With that being said, I do not recommend you run your own mail server starting out, that is probably not the problem you are trying to solve.
kureikain 5y ago
I run an email forwarding services https://hanami.run https://hanami.run so I can share quite a bit about this. Oppose with what many said, delivery to gmail.com is easisest. Now, where it's land is another question. Their spam filtering also very quick to learn. icloud and hotmail are the worst because no way to get unblocked. You just fill in the form and wait in the dark. If you got luckly enough, they work on your ticket and unblock the ip. And here is the thing, they outright reject connection so your email cannot event reach the spam inbox. So when launch a new IP, you should check on https://ipcheck.proofpoint.com https://ipcheck.proofpoint.com and https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/data.aspx https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/data.a... Any host providers that are cheap are most liklely has their IP blocked by proofpoint or microsoft already. My strategy was to use server on Hetzner, then try to buy float IP then I can attach to any server. I have to try like 40 before I was able to get a pair of IP that aren't blocked by proofpoint/outlook. Then I tried to warm up and build reputation by having a bunch of inbox email each others like 100 email per day then up to 1000 email per day. Even with that I got blocked by proofpoint for no reason time by time... So it's hard but with right strategy you can still do it. Just take more time and plan to build up and keep good reputation of your IPs.
- Swannie 5y ago
  Nice work. I was thinking you might have had to go as far as to get your own subnet and even Autonomous System, to get clean IP's.
  - alexeldeib 5y ago
    Is this viable in 2021 without huge resources? Can you go ipv6? What's the startup cost of an AS like? I assume there's the technical cost, but what about actually getting an AS assigned (time/money?), etc?
    - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
      You can do it small yes. ARIN et all will gladly allocate you ipv6, but finding a transit provider with full support is a bit more tricky. The ARIN fees to start up are a few hundred.
cortesoft 5y ago
I have a feeling that other than owning your own IP blocks so that you can manage reputation for them, a lot of it is just legwork. Finding out which providers are blocking your emails, tracking down their dispute process, using it… working with providers to make sure you stay unblocked… building relationships with them so that they are willing to work with you on that. You also need to monitor your customers to make sure they aren’t doing things that will get you blocked.
pfarrell 5y ago
Echoing what a lot have already said. I worked for a large email marketing provider that was acquired by Salesforce about a decade ago. The number one thing you are selling is deliverability. The second thing you are selling is the tracking (opens, bounces, unsubscribes, etc.). Next, you are selling segmentation for subscriber lists (i.e being able to send the right message to the right consumer at the right time). You have to be diligent about your customers too, because if you are letting bad actors use your system... there goes your reputation and there goes your business. But deliverability is the key. We had relationships with ISPs so we could fix $MAJOR_CORP's million email pre-holiday sales campaign while it was sending and we staffed the teams to do that, 24/7. This had nothing to do with programming and everything to do with company mission, reputation, contacts at Google, MSN, Yahoo, ..., and the history of having done it. We were "lucky" enough to have started as the industry matured. * I say "lucky" because the founder's really caught this vision at the right time (2000/2001) and made it happen.
gerdesj 5y ago
"Could anyone give me some insight about how to start an email service like MailChimp" It will always be a dance. I own a small IT company in the UK and have always managed to run local SMTP. I've done it for about 22 years. I could not run a Mail Chimp. For starters, I could not live with myself! I don't do spam. MailChimp is a spammer for hire by definition. Your idea of spam and mine may be different. OK: Unsolicited Bulk Email is the key phrase. At which point are you solicited or unsolicited? Opt out or opt in? Where do you get your lists and how do you monetize this beast? How do you vet your customers or do you even care? What standards of ethics do you ascribe to? I could possibly create another MailChimp because I know rather a lot about SMTP and own a fair few IPv4s and could cycle them and I'm fairly IPv6 savvy so I'll use that to get some more mileage. I know DMARC/DKIM/SPF and all the rest and can play those little games to up the authenticity score. Can't be arsed to spam the world. I prefer to host recipients than senders.
- songzme 5y ago
  can you teach me what you know? I want to learn but there's only so much I could find. Most of my googling always gives me a full list of "AWS" and other service provider articles.
  - gerdesj 5y ago
    You'll need an MTA to start with. I use Exim. What's your use case?
SilverRed 5y ago
The problem is that ideally mailchimp and any alternative should not even exist. 99% of the stuff they fire out is legitimately spam, usually unwanted and unrequested by the recipient. So asking "How do I start my own spamming service and not get spamlisted" is kind of a silly question.
- kwijibob 5y ago
  This is a bit cynical. Mailchimp emails are well known for having 1 click unsubcribe by default. There has been a huge resurgence in email newsletters for companies and content creators to have a direct relationship with their audience. Mailchimp have done well because email seems to continually survive as a medium.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Sure, they do make it easy to unsubscribe, but every user of their system seems to sign you up without consent or tricks you in to it somehow because I do not want a single newsletter in my inbox but I am constantly unsubscribing to mailchimp newsletters.

jdavis703 5y ago

You need to bring your own IPs and warm them up with legit emails. People abuse shared cloud IP addresses for spam, so you're going to run in to problems if you want to use them.

songzme 5y ago
Ah I need to buy my own block of ip addresses? Is that what I need to do? And then connect those ip addresses to my computer that I run at home / office? Sorry if the question is a bit noob, feel free to point me at any resources and I can do some reading myself too
- kccqzy 5y ago
  Most likely you don't buy IP addresses outright. You sign a business Internet contract with your ISP that has a fixed IP address. You essentially lease that IP address from your ISP. You will stipulate in the contract that the IP address will be used to send/receive emails, because otherwise ISPs may block SMTP traffic completely. Once you get big enough, you can consider buying an IP address prefix, getting your Autonomous System number, setting up peering, etc. For example Mailchimp seems to have AS14782.

tootie 5y ago

Yeah, this is the big moat that big viral email companies have. You can only get around spam filters by building reputation which takes time and volume so it's really hard to bootstrap. The shortest path would be to start with low-level managed service like AWS SES and build value adds on top of it.

gtirloni 5y ago
It's not easy but it's not that hard. I've bootstrapped many mail servers on AWS and others and, although the initial outgoing emails might be flagged as spam AND you may have to remove yourself from Spamhaus and others, it's been mostly painless.
- pfarrell 5y ago
  When I worked in email marketing in the 2000's, our director of engineering said something to me I've repeated many times. "Everything is hard at scale."
- nulbyte 5y ago
  > It's not easy but it's not that hard. Agreed. I think the hardest part is getting started; folks not familiar with hosting their own email just don't have as much awareness of what to do and how to do it. But take a bit of time to learn, get a reputable ISP, don't spam people, and you can do just fine without too much effort. I got a cheap VPS specifically to host email, and the worst I've had to do is fill out a Spamhaus form one time.
  - Breza 5y ago
    I agree with you. It sounds basic, but from my experience the key is only sending emails that people actually want to receive and being ruthless about dropping accounts that appear to have become inactive.

granshaw 5y ago

I imagine its a fairly difficult undertaking nowadays. Your best bet is to probably use Mailgun or similar for the actual sending and let them deal with the reputation management headaches

superasn 5y ago

Yes sending emails yourself is just as impossible as hosting a payment processor yourself. Even though all the docs and technology is there, you really can't do it without the help of a big company like Amazon due to the following reasons: - almost all residential ips are blocked. - most data center ips are mostly blocked because there are like 100s of blacklists and every blacklist has it's own unique way of getting delisted. - every big email provider has its own version of FBL and it's often a big black box. For example till date gmail won't even give Amazon access to its fbl(1) - spam filtering is not an exact science and while there are things like spf, dkim, dmarc etc to ensure the authenticity of message at the end of the day it all comes down to your reputation as a sender and managing it is nothing short of a full time job. (1) https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=257487 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=257487

warent 5y ago
yup. I use protonmail and even that apparently gets blocked by gmail recipients occasionally. Rolling your own, you're lucky to have anyone ever see your mail
- arosier 5y ago
  Thanks for using protonmail, email deliverability is always a battle. Let us know if you see more of this https://protonmail.com/support-form https://protonmail.com/support-form
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Protonmail gets banned from email lists because their users tend to behave poorly.
Zababa 5y ago
> Yes sending emails yourself is just as impossible as hosting a payment processor yourself. Genuine questions, how do companies like Mailchimp get started then?
- 5y ago

codazoda 5y ago

Even the state of Utah seems to be failing at this. They recently started to snail mail vehicle registration reminders again. I signed up for email reminders on all my vehicles multiple times and I've never received an email from the state. Apparently others haven't either because the state now has a massive problem with expired plates. My own assumption about why the system doesn't work.

biztos 5y ago

I don't know how much it really counts as "like MailChimp" but Substack is relatively new, and seems to have found its way past the spam filters at least enough to get top-tier VC backing, so if I were trying to solve this problem I'd probably look at how they did it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substack

snowwrestler 5y ago
Looks like substack.com is configured for sending from Google, Mailgun, and Zendesk. I’d guess that’s for personal, product, and customer service emails respectively.
leftnode 5y ago
Surely Substack uses Amazon SES or another transactional email service to actually send the emails to their user's subscribers, right?

estreeper 5y ago

I hate to recommend what is just another service provider, but there are many cloud hosting providers that offer email sending (i.e. AWS, GCP, etc.) and dedicated email companies (Sendgrid, Mailgun, etc.). The cost to send email via any of these services is a tiny fraction of the amount you would pay to Mailchimp. The value in what Mailchimp does is not so much just sending email, but in all the things around it, like managing subscribers, tracking opens, easily creating nice-looking emails that look good in a variety of mail clients, etc. Contrary to some of the replies you've received here, it definitely is possible to run your own mail server with good deliverability, and we routinely did this for companies, even fairly small ones, physically on-prem and in datacenters, and cloud. It is not trivial, but far from impossible, and will likely involve communicating with a human when getting a static IP to find a good one. With that being said, I do not recommend you run your own mail server starting out, that is probably not the problem you are trying to solve.

kureikain 5y ago

I run an email forwarding services https://hanami.run https://hanami.run so I can share quite a bit about this. Oppose with what many said, delivery to gmail.com is easisest. Now, where it's land is another question. Their spam filtering also very quick to learn. icloud and hotmail are the worst because no way to get unblocked. You just fill in the form and wait in the dark. If you got luckly enough, they work on your ticket and unblock the ip. And here is the thing, they outright reject connection so your email cannot event reach the spam inbox. So when launch a new IP, you should check on https://ipcheck.proofpoint.com https://ipcheck.proofpoint.com and https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/data.aspx https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/data.a... Any host providers that are cheap are most liklely has their IP blocked by proofpoint or microsoft already. My strategy was to use server on Hetzner, then try to buy float IP then I can attach to any server. I have to try like 40 before I was able to get a pair of IP that aren't blocked by proofpoint/outlook. Then I tried to warm up and build reputation by having a bunch of inbox email each others like 100 email per day then up to 1000 email per day. Even with that I got blocked by proofpoint for no reason time by time... So it's hard but with right strategy you can still do it. Just take more time and plan to build up and keep good reputation of your IPs.

Swannie 5y ago
Nice work. I was thinking you might have had to go as far as to get your own subnet and even Autonomous System, to get clean IP's.
- alexeldeib 5y ago
  Is this viable in 2021 without huge resources? Can you go ipv6? What's the startup cost of an AS like? I assume there's the technical cost, but what about actually getting an AS assigned (time/money?), etc?
  - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
    You can do it small yes. ARIN et all will gladly allocate you ipv6, but finding a transit provider with full support is a bit more tricky. The ARIN fees to start up are a few hundred.

cortesoft 5y ago

I have a feeling that other than owning your own IP blocks so that you can manage reputation for them, a lot of it is just legwork. Finding out which providers are blocking your emails, tracking down their dispute process, using it… working with providers to make sure you stay unblocked… building relationships with them so that they are willing to work with you on that. You also need to monitor your customers to make sure they aren’t doing things that will get you blocked.

pfarrell 5y ago

Echoing what a lot have already said. I worked for a large email marketing provider that was acquired by Salesforce about a decade ago. The number one thing you are selling is deliverability. The second thing you are selling is the tracking (opens, bounces, unsubscribes, etc.). Next, you are selling segmentation for subscriber lists (i.e being able to send the right message to the right consumer at the right time). You have to be diligent about your customers too, because if you are letting bad actors use your system... there goes your reputation and there goes your business. But deliverability is the key. We had relationships with ISPs so we could fix $MAJOR_CORP's million email pre-holiday sales campaign while it was sending and we staffed the teams to do that, 24/7. This had nothing to do with programming and everything to do with company mission, reputation, contacts at Google, MSN, Yahoo, ..., and the history of having done it. We were "lucky" enough to have started as the industry matured. * I say "lucky" because the founder's really caught this vision at the right time (2000/2001) and made it happen.

gerdesj 5y ago

"Could anyone give me some insight about how to start an email service like MailChimp" It will always be a dance. I own a small IT company in the UK and have always managed to run local SMTP. I've done it for about 22 years. I could not run a Mail Chimp. For starters, I could not live with myself! I don't do spam. MailChimp is a spammer for hire by definition. Your idea of spam and mine may be different. OK: Unsolicited Bulk Email is the key phrase. At which point are you solicited or unsolicited? Opt out or opt in? Where do you get your lists and how do you monetize this beast? How do you vet your customers or do you even care? What standards of ethics do you ascribe to? I could possibly create another MailChimp because I know rather a lot about SMTP and own a fair few IPv4s and could cycle them and I'm fairly IPv6 savvy so I'll use that to get some more mileage. I know DMARC/DKIM/SPF and all the rest and can play those little games to up the authenticity score. Can't be arsed to spam the world. I prefer to host recipients than senders.

songzme 5y ago
can you teach me what you know? I want to learn but there's only so much I could find. Most of my googling always gives me a full list of "AWS" and other service provider articles.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  You'll need an MTA to start with. I use Exim. What's your use case?

SilverRed 5y ago

The problem is that ideally mailchimp and any alternative should not even exist. 99% of the stuff they fire out is legitimately spam, usually unwanted and unrequested by the recipient. So asking "How do I start my own spamming service and not get spamlisted" is kind of a silly question.

kwijibob 5y ago
This is a bit cynical. Mailchimp emails are well known for having 1 click unsubcribe by default. There has been a huge resurgence in email newsletters for companies and content creators to have a direct relationship with their audience. Mailchimp have done well because email seems to continually survive as a medium.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Sure, they do make it easy to unsubscribe, but every user of their system seems to sign you up without consent or tricks you in to it somehow because I do not want a single newsletter in my inbox but I am constantly unsubscribing to mailchimp newsletters.