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Looking for affordable smtp relay for non-marketing emails
A little background of what we are needing the smtp relay for.
We're a public library system with 17 locations.
Our customers are able to reserve books and other lendable items through our online catalog. They are also able to opt-in to receive notifications when the book arrives and is ready for them to pickup. They also get notifications when an item is 3 days away from being due and when items are overdue.
We use Office 365 for our organizational email system. Since Microsoft considers public libraries Educational institutions, we are using them since we get Office 365 for free.
We have an IIS smtp server that connects to Office 365 as a smart host to send the emails from our catalog system currently. We also use it for the 70ish printers and copiers we have throughout our library system so it can send email alerts when toner is low or other errors. We have several other devices that send alerts as well, UPS's, switches, routers, etc.
Office 365 is going to cripple their SMTP service on June 1 and only allow 3 concurrent connections at a time. We are currently sending 120,000 emails per month through Office 365 using this single IIS smtp relay. We also would love to have something that makes it easier to search for emails that have been sent.
We often get customers that tell the libraries they never received an email telling them their book was due. We suspect some of these calls are legit complaints, but also suspect some are trying to get out of paying the 10 cent per day fine. It would be nice to be able to pull up their email address and see that the email was delivered and possibly even opened.
I almost went with Elastic Email because you get 150k free emails, I've signed up and really liked the instant sending and the tracking you can do.
The issue is, they have a mandatory unsubscribe link that gets inserted into every email. I can understand this for campaign emails, but we don't want this for notifications that customers have opted-in to. We also put instructions in the signature of every email explaining how they can log in to their online account and disable each type of notification.
We also like PepiPost, but in the tests I've run so far, the emails are often delayed several minutes. This is okay for the notifications we send to our customers, but not for notifications alerts coming from our network equipment and UPS equipment. I also never could get the bounces to show up to forwarded account I set up.
I tried SparkPost and every single email I sent to my personal gmail account bounced because the IP's were all listed in DNSBLs. They seemed to work fine to any other email, just not gmail, which is a large percentage of our customer base. SPF, DKIM, etc was all set up correctly and passing.
Since we are a taxpayer funded entity, we don't have a lot of funds to spend on this, so we're looking for something affordable, but reliable.
I've already contact Mailcheap and have decided against them since you can't test it before paying. I'm unwilling to spend taxpayer dollars on a service that I can't confirm will work for us first.
We'll need to be able to do the following:
- Send up to 150k emails per month.
- Not be forced to have a different unsubscribe footer than our own. We aren't using this for marketing, we get the same amount of funds no matter how many people use our libraries every year.
- Not spend more than $50 per month.
- Be able to search by email address to see if a message was ever sent to it.
- Be able to test the service by testing sending from our IIS SMTP server a few hundred emails and testing bounces with some fake email addresses, etc.
Sincerely,
John
Comments
https://mxroute.io/#plans
Sparkpost could work, they have 15k free emails too so if you wanted to test it first. 150k emails cost $49 with them. I'm currently using their grandfathered free tier and am quite pleased with their service.
Aws SES? Very cheap and easy to setup.
+1 for Amazon SES! It'd only cost you $15/month for 150k emails per month. Compare this to €55 for MXroute.io - but maybe MXroute.io is worth it for the much better support though.
how mxroute fit this plan? how you track bounce using cpanel?
@op I can recommended SES
For your particular case, I wouldn't bother looking at anything beyond Amazon SES. Just set it up once, put in a ticket to get the sending limits adjusted according to your requirements, and forget it - until the (low) monthly bill arrives, that is.
Any other solutions would either be expensive, or come with their own issues (like sparkpost, that you mentioned above)
+1 for Amazon SES.
Mxroute.io doesn't use cpanel. Customers have direct access at console.mailchannels.net.
Note that ses has a different pricing based on whether the mail originated from ec2 or not.
opps, my fault.
I am basing my price estimate off of the stated $0.10 per 1000 emails "Sending email from an email client or other software package".
Hi,
I work for Elastic Email and I think that it might be worth for you to reconsider your usage of this platform again. As you mentioned, we have lots of free emails at your disposal.
The mandatory unsubscribe link is going to be a must for all kind of emails very very soon anyway. It is simply a matter of time as the regulations are rather going to be more strict in the future.
You can easily stylize the "unsubscribe" phrase with a link so it fits the rest of the email nicely. Looks natural and doesn't stand out too much.
Considering all the new regulations coming soon, unsubscribe option in every email might be inevitable pretty soon anyway.
Removed old spam that got past us before - mod.
New account, 1 comment
With a panel that does not support https? Go fish.
Edit: LOL:
Does anyone have an email sending/smtp service with SPAM filtering built in?
Sadly contact us forms tend to attract spammers.
@Marcin I had a quick play with elastic email, seems that there's just one generic SMTP login for the account rather than any ablity to specify a per application password.
Can I use your platform to deliver my family emails? Probably not. I don't want recipients getting confused by an unsubscribe link in the footer of a non-marketing email. Same applies to internal emails at work or emails to clients.
I'd very much look at making this removable with either a ticket or some other mechanism.
We do! www.mxroute.io
Thank you for the mention sir!
@raneman, feel free to get in touch with us.
We do not provide trials but I will open an exception for you should you wish considering its for a public library and a really useful service to your readers. I will make sure to do a discount as well, we do discounts for such projects / institutions.
Canned marketing post. Read OP requirements. Its a public library looking for a relay service, not actually to convert / generate leads.
Also, unlimited emails for 18USD is no damn way reasonable, just wont work for you.
Guys I am sorry for posting so many replies. Im on cellphone and its not easy to split the replies (still getting used to it!).
@karatekidmonkey, thank you for the recommendation and kind words!
. We do discounts for such institutions so we will be able to fit the budget and provide further assistance to our clients getting their emails sent!
P.S. If a mod reads this, feel free to merge my replies. I really suck typing from my cellphone. Like a 70 year old grandpa.
Thanks @MikePT, we were able to set our IIS SMTP server to a max of 3 outbound connections and even during our heaviest times, the Queue folder hasn't gotten too big and has always cleared up, so it seems to be working for the time being.
This does buy us a bit of time, we're in the middle of a couple of big projects so I was dreading having to deal with getting this all set up right now. However, we still want to be able to set something up a bit better long-term so after we get these projects knocked out, I'll be reaching out to you to get more information about MXroute. We'd still love to have the option of being able to easily search to see if an email was sent to a customer if they claim they never received it (we suspect some people use this to get out of paying a fine if they didn't get the "coming due" notice.)
I can technically check now, but it requires digging through the raw IIS SMTP log and it's quite ugly.
A customer will always be able to claim they didn't receive it, and there's no way you can "prove" absolutely that they did.
The best you can do is demonstrate that the message was sent from your mail server and accepted by their mail server.
Your mail log will contain that information. If you were sending from a linux machine then I could offer a few suggestions, but with IIS I'm clueless.