Seeking email provider for mass emailing purposes

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve got Earthlink. And FileMaker. Was a good combo for years and years, I’d load up a database with an array of recipients, write an email body (with merge codes fetching info from the individual’s record), and use the native Send Mail via SMTP Server to execute the sending of an email to each, in a looping script.

In the last decade there’s been more clamping down against spammers (who should be flayed and salty poison ivy pressed against their open wounds); one outcome of the clamping down has been Earthlink’s servers reacting to a rapid sequence of email-sending by inserting an unknown x-minute pause before they’ll allow more emails from that (email account? email account with similar email body and subject line?) to be sent. Then they imposed a cap on the total number of emails per day.

I periodically need to be able to send out mass emails. Most recent example, I’m handling the email responsibilities of a committee that needs to tell delegates from all the various states that they are credentialed to attend the forthcoming presidential nominating convention. It isn’t spam. But it’s several hundred emails with identical content (give or take the merge of their state or caucus name).

I’m okay with moving to a different email service provider to do mass emails. An organization that has a standard protocol for okaying mass emails and which will let me send an email per second with SMTP server credentials and not slow me down after the first dozen; which will let me authenticate in some fashion that yes I am the sender and will accept liability if there is any.

(I don’t want to use other software though. I’m FileMaker-centric and want to be able to use FileMaker scripting to send the emails)

If you have any recommendations or advice, please reply with.

2

Mailgun?

3

We use MailJet

4

Mailchimp is a an old perennial.

5

Mailchimp is more of a marketing engine, which is what we use Hubspot for. Mailgun as mentioned by @DPRK, MailJet, and SendGrid are more suitable for mass SMTP or API mail delivery systems when you are creating the email yourself.

6

I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear — I already have an engine that lets me email large numbers of people at the click of a button.

I’m seeking an email service provider (an ISP, except that I don’t need internet, just email), one that, unlike earthlink, has some flexibility about their clients sending large quantities of email in a short period of time and having identical or virtually identical email bodies.

7

You mean you want to set up a mail server host yourself? You will need, at minimum, a static IP address. The ISP should not block you, but your mail will be rejected as spam if you screw up the configuration.

Setting up high-availability enterprise-grade e-mail requires real expertise, but a single host running Postfix is something anyone can set up and can theoretically process hundreds of messages per second…

8

The problem isn’t throughput. The problem is getting e.g. gmail to believe that the 150 messages that just came in to 150 of their clients from the same unrecognized IP address aren’t spam.

Setting up your own server pretty well ensures you’re by default on all the blacklists, not the whitelists. SPF and the other “trust me, I’m honest” email sender authentication systems are weak sauce at best. And take real skill to set up completely and correctly.

9

Well, yeah. As I said, at the very least you will need a “real” IP address.

For sure you will need to add appropriate DNS records and set up email authentication as well.

10

PS instead of doing all that, I am pretty sure one can use one of the services mentioned by @FinsToTheLeft. The “engine” can be set up to use them instead of Earthlink which is apparently not designed for that use case.

It could be as simple as setting it to use—I said Mailgun or whatever— as a smarthost.

11

This is what the services I listed do. You point to them and they send via SMTP on your behalf. Make sure to have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configured to reduce being flagged as spam.

12

Oh yeesh, lemme start over. I’m not communicating worth a damn.

I use FileMaker. Imagine me sitting there with 490 records, each of them with an email address. Send Mail is a built-in script step; it has a place where I enter the SMTP Server, my account with the SMTP server, my password, what port to use and what kind of encryption and all that.

So I don’t need a 3rd-party service where I upload a list of names and email addresses and they do the sending.

But using Earthlink’s SMTP Server, which used to work, now results in lockups and failures after the first 10-20 rapid-fire emails are sent; and from then on it requires babysitting, pausing, retrying, and the risk of being locked out from being able to send any emails at all.

It’s Earthlink that I want to replace, not FileMaker. I need an organization that provides me with a reputable SMTP Server to use, and, with it, presumably, an email address to send from. An organization that expects some of its customers to want to send email blasts to a lot of recipients, and which has a mechanism in place for letting them do so without opening the floodgates to spammers.

Make sure to have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configured to reduce being flagged as spam.

What’s that?

Mailgun or whatever

I thought Mailgun and Mailchimp and all that were services where you upload a list and they fire the emails off.

13

They’re a series of protocols and extensions to SMTP that allow the recipient to verify that the host sending the mail is authorized to send email from that domain. Are you using a @earthlink.com email address to send these messages? If so, Earthlink is almost certainly handling that for you at the moment. If you are wanting to move away from Earthlink, you’ll most likely need a new domain and will have to set up the necessary DNS records, etc. for those protocols for that domain yourself.

Basically, what you’re looking for is generally thought of as “Mail hosting”. There are a lot of services out there that will do that for a price, M365 and Gmail are the largest.

One thing that you’ll have to work around is port 25 being blocked by almost all ISPs. So, you’ll need to set up a listener at your mail host that uses a different port to receive the mail from your local machine. Port 587 is a pretty common solution for that, and it normally only handles authenticated connections. That may be a little wonky to set up through sendmail, but I haven’t messed with sendmail in more than a decade so I can’t really speak on that.

For more detail on each:

SPF is basically a list of hosts you authorize to send mail for your domain. You publish that record in DNS, and when a MTA receives mail for your domain it looks it up and sees if the host matches any of the records in the list. If not, they’ll usually be suspicious of the message and will be more likely to mark it as spam. Some hosts will outright reject it, but that’s not how it was intended to work.

DKIM is a method of cryptographically signing your messages and publishing a DNS record of a key so the receiving host can verify the signature. Similar to SPF, messages that aren’t DKIM signed or fail to verify are viewed as suspect, and some hosts reject them outright.

DMARC is a system built upon SPF and DKIM to allow the domain to publish a policy in DNS on what to do with messages that fail SPF or DKIM checks, and provides a method for the sending domain to receive feedback reports on how many messages are passing/failing the check. If you satisfy the SPF or DKIM check, you satisfy DMARC.

Good luck, and be sure you don’t create an open relay. Spammers scan for those constantly, and will flood out of it if they find one. If that happens, the reputation of the IPs assigned to you will drop pretty fast, and it takes time for that reputation to come back.

14

Yeah, I’m not trying to set up an SMTP Server. I want some organization (and will look into M365, thanks) and they handle reputation with the rest of the email-sending / email-receiving world

15

What you are describing is exactly what SMTP2Go or other services mentioned above do.

You simply enter the SMTP2Go SMTP information in your script, exactly as you do now.

16

Hehehe, yeah. You seem to not have much interest in running a SMTP server. It really does seem like you’re looking for a mail host. Unfortunately, you’re still going to need a new domain if you’re currently using your @earthlink.com email address. Sending from that address through a dedicated mail host is not going to pass SPF/DKIM/DMARC, and will be viewed as spammy. Most mail hosts offer some sort of DNS hosting as well, but you’ll still probably need to manage the SPF/DKIM/DMARC records through whatever control panel they offer.

I’d personally set one up and run it myself if I thought I needed another (already have one), but then again I’m a control freak.

17

I"m okay with starting over with a new email address to send from.

Basically I’m asking for an email address provider. But not just any (I could always register with yahoo or gmail if I only wanted a new clean email address). I want one from an org that expects their customers to send (reputable) (nonspam) mass emails on occasion and has worked out a structure for okaying them and whitelisting them as nonspam and so on.

18

I had SMTP2Go and used them for years and years. But then the world shifted and most ISP email stopped accepting email sent from my earthlink address using SMTP2Go to do the actual sending. So they weren’t being received.

Reit: I don’t need them to have my earthlink account on the “From” header. But SMTP2Go was not providing me with an email address, just an SMTP Server.

19

You will need to get your own domain. No email provider will update their SPF records for you.

Microsoft is not a viable option for you as they throttle bulk email, although they have a service in preview for High Volume Email senders.

Sign up for an account with Mail Jet or SMTP To Go and follow their instructions to update your DNS records for SPF and DMARC. Get an API key from MailJet. This is your user name and password. Point FileMaker at their SMTP server using the credentials. Send your email.

20

No, they will do exactly what you want, just that

you will almost definitely need your own domain (not earthlink.net) and to set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. as everyone is saying.