How to send an email from your application with high deliverability
April 22nd, 2010 // 2:31 pm @ Aymeric // No Comments
I am writing a series of articles on emails, this one is specifically targeted at developers.
In the series I cover the following topics:
- How to set up your emails for your own domain
- How to send an email from your application with high deliverability
- How to put your email marketing strategy on auto-pilot
Set up your own SMTP server?
Some people will tell you it is easy to set up an SMTP server on your own server and then you can send emails for free.
Unfortunately, it is not as simple.
I used to host my own SMTP server for my emailing needs. A lot of my emails were ending directly to the Spam folder of my users. Once, some spammers actually used my SMTP server to spam people and sometimes the SMTP server would stop by itself and I would have no way to know.
To try to avoid this problem, you can set up a few more stuff to make your domain name more trustworthy (generation of private/public keys, addition of some records in the DNS, improve the security of your server) and to monitor the health of the SMTP server.
But on top of exposing yourself to a lot of problems and a lot of time spent setting up your email server, you don’t get any benefits out the box (bounce management for example). You will have to reinvent the wheel.
If you insist, you can find some information on how to set up your SMTP server on Coding Horror
Benefits
- Free
- Total control
Drawbacks
- Time sink
- Exposed to spammers
- Low deliverability
- No extra features
Google Apps for Domain SMTP Server?
Some developers suggest you use the Google Apps SMTP server. Although I can see as a better option to the self hosted one, you still have some limitations. You can only send 500 emails per day and you don’t get any monitoring on what you have sent. How many emails bounced?
Benefits
- Free
- Reliable
- Higher deliverability
Drawbacks
- Limited to 500 emails per day
- Still need to do some work on your side to increased trustworthiness
- No extra features
AuthSmtp / PostMark / Other SaaS
I moved away from the self hosted option to use Postmark. It took me 30 minutes to have a highly reliable emailing system set up for a cheap price.
There are many different products online, and I chose PostMark simply because they seem to understand developers and have a nice UI :)
The PostMark application will tell me if the sending succeeded or if the email bounced. If an email fails, I can update the user profile in my database to make sure I ask the user to update his email address or I can resend the email to a secondary email address if the email is important.
In the next section, I will show you how I set up Postmark in my asp.net application.
Benefits
- First 1000 emails sent are free
- Reliable
- High deliverability
- Quick setup
- Out of the box features like analytics, bounce hooks, monitoring
Drawbacks
- Not free
- Email marketing / newsletter are not handled
Other articles you might like
Category : Programming tips and tricks &Startup tips and tricks
