Basically, our startup will need to handle large scale email delivery in-house. Only problem is we have no idea where to start on this.
Any help as to where to start reading/looking? Servers, IPs...?
We're planning on sending 1 daily email to each subscriber. Let's say we want to be prepared for sending 100,000+ per day.
We're currently on rackspace's cloudservers, so we have no problem spinning a separate instance for a mail server. Just needed some guidance in terms of setting up the server and start mailing.
Can you point me to a resource where I can do some reading and educate myself a bit more?
Sending one email per day to everyone is a lot of mail to be sending your users. You better have a really, really good reason to do so--and those emails better provide significant value to your users, otherwise they will opt out, possibly even report as spam.
I don't know what business you are in, but only certain businesses can really get away with sending that much email--ie Groupon, Gilt, etc.--and that is because those emails provide a lot of value and meet a lot of needs. If you fall in the category of a business who can send that much email awesome!
If possible I think it is best to use a tiered, opt-in subscription model. Some example tiers: "Daily Deals Beat", "Weekly Rundown", "2-Week Summary", and "Monthly Newsletter"(these names suck I know). You can present these options as part of the sign-up process, or better yet, when they click the sign up confirmation email take them to a settings to opt-in to the various tiers. This is also good to have as the landing page for when someone clicks unsubscribe in your email. Take them to this settings page where they can adjust the level of contact, or unsubscribe completely, that is right for them. If you are sending one message a day chances are you will have a lot of people hitting that unsubscribe link, and some might not want to totally discontinue contact so give them options to adjust as well as totally unsubscribe.
Sidenote: Mediapost has an awesome publication called Email Insider, if you plan on sending that much email you might want to be reading this. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?art_type=32&fa=Ar...
In terms of sending the mail, you'll need some kind of simple app to talk to the smtp server, for example a rails app that uses ActiveMailer. If you're familiar with rails, this will help: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionMailer/Base.html
Though there are probably even simpler services that can talk to SMTP servers even better, as rails is sort of a lot of overhead just for actionmailer.
Hope that helps!
An out-of-the box solution for a few hundred dollars a month may tick this item off a crowded to-do list, and shift developer time from database creation / html editors / unsubscribe handling / deliverability reports etc to something more productive for your business.
Edit: Or have I misunderstood the question?
Another reason is the cost. Once email lists get into the tens of thousands, it becomes expensive to have someone else like Aweber handle them. I have a feeling it'd be cheaper to run it in-house. I don't really have any hard data to prove this of course, just assuming based on the fact that most startups do it this way.
Finally, based on the little bit that I've read, it's the initial setup (servers, IPs, subscribe/unsubscribe requests) that takes effort. But once it's automated, things will be humming along nicely, provided there's regular periodic monitoring of course.
I'm pretty sure startups run email delivery in-house for the reasons above and more. Take Groupon for example - I'd be willing to bet they do it in-house.
I definitely recommend using one of these email service providers (ESPs) until you're sending enough emails to justify the time/cost of setting up your own email service.
It's been a lot better with SendGrid and SendGrid also tracks bounces so you dont send more emails to invalid addresses, which hurts your reputation on mail servers.
I'm on the 10,000 emails/month plan and go over every month but the overage charges are very reasonable
Assuming you have a slice first you'll need to set up your DNS entry pointing to the slice and a reverse DNS entry in the slicehost manager. See these resources for more information:
http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/9/2/mail-server-slice-set... http://articles.slicehost.com/2007/10/24/creating-a-reverse-....
Next set up an SPF record for your domain to legitimize your new mail server:
http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/8/8/email-setting-a-sende...
Finally you'll want to install the mail server software and configure it. I have a blog post that shows the standard config needed to configure the mail server and set up DKIM and DomainKeys to help your mail look legitimate:
http://blog.nimbu.net/setting-up-a-postifx-outbound-mail-ser...
Check out the links at the bottom of the article for more information about DKIM and DomainKeys.
For example:
http://lists.exentriquesolutions.com/listinfo/xp-dev-newslet...
Give a shout if you need some pointers on getting the templates customised.
The only thing is you don't get things like hit ratios etc. You will have to track those yourself. Additionally, you have to worry about things like SPF and domainkeys.
I did some research, and there is PHPList which some people swear by, but I found it a bit clunky.
