4 ms·

email deliverability is a huge can of worms. i didn't know that when we first prototyped it. we noticed that our test emails were going to spam on walter's acc

by rguzman 15y ago

email deliverability is a huge can of worms. i didn't know that when we first prototyped it. we noticed that our test emails were going to spam on walter's account as we were getting ready to send out the first bunch of emails. so, we opted for sending the emails by hand from a gmail account using bcc while we figured out how to tackle the problem. it became clear very quickly that this would be hard to solve ourselves quickly, so we tried mailchimp (which is not well-suited at all) and eventually went with sendgrid. nowadays there are 4 or 5 similar providers that you can use: amazon, sendgrid, mailgun, and a couple of others that i can't remember right now. we haven't had a good reason to start doing that in-house, yet.

jc4p 15y ago
That's exactly why it interested me. At my previous company we had the same problem, we went through everyone of the big names until we found one that was the least expensive and had the least hassle. My wish was to roll our own mail server since the majority of what we did could easily be automated and would save our "marketing team" (one person) a lot of time, but there was just no time for that either. Mailchimp was the funnest experience though, they say they have absolutely no phone support and everything is "self-service support", our marketing guy e-mailed back and forth with one of their higher-ups until they said "there are no phones in our office!" My co-worker then spent the rest of the day prowling over their Flickr account until he found some phones in the background of a shot of their company holiday party. I figure since you're doing very simple e-mails (for good reason), you don't have to roll your own over fear of spam detection (HTML e-mails + using an IP that someone else had used maybe inappropriately before can lead to a high spam score) unless cost becomes an issue.
jph00 15y ago
Definitely outsource this. I wrote this post comparing prices for some service providers: http://jphoward.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/40month-to-send-my-emailare-you-serious/ http://jphoward.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/40month-to-send-my-... . The cheapest (FastMail.FM) is orders of magnitude cheaper. They've been in business since 1999. (Disclaimer: I founded FastMail.FM, although I sold it a few years ago and no longer have any financial or operational relationship.)
- jc4p 15y ago
  When at my old company we switched between multiple mail companies we didn't pay the initial quote that any of the companies gave us. However none of the big names we used are on your chart.

by rguzman 15y ago

jc4p 15y ago

That's exactly why it interested me. At my previous company we had the same problem, we went through everyone of the big names until we found one that was the least expensive and had the least hassle. My wish was to roll our own mail server since the majority of what we did could easily be automated and would save our "marketing team" (one person) a lot of time, but there was just no time for that either. Mailchimp was the funnest experience though, they say they have absolutely no phone support and everything is "self-service support", our marketing guy e-mailed back and forth with one of their higher-ups until they said "there are no phones in our office!" My co-worker then spent the rest of the day prowling over their Flickr account until he found some phones in the background of a shot of their company holiday party. I figure since you're doing very simple e-mails (for good reason), you don't have to roll your own over fear of spam detection (HTML e-mails + using an IP that someone else had used maybe inappropriately before can lead to a high spam score) unless cost becomes an issue.

jph00 15y ago

Definitely outsource this. I wrote this post comparing prices for some service providers: http://jphoward.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/40month-to-send-my-emailare-you-serious/ http://jphoward.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/40month-to-send-my-... . The cheapest (FastMail.FM) is orders of magnitude cheaper. They've been in business since 1999. (Disclaimer: I founded FastMail.FM, although I sold it a few years ago and no longer have any financial or operational relationship.)

jc4p 15y ago
When at my old company we switched between multiple mail companies we didn't pay the initial quote that any of the companies gave us. However none of the big names we used are on your chart.