Any thoughts on offering a premium ‘low volume’ mail server as an add on?
Having mail servers regularly being tagged by blacklists and having to get support to delist or change IP addresses is a pain and of course, hard to explain to customers why their mail server is blacklisted when they didn’t do anything wrong. (Yes, I’m looking at you MAIL3 and MAILSPIKE)
(I’d love it to be a SmarterMail server but that’s just my personal wishlist)
Cheers
We aren’t working specifically on this one point, but working on a complete premium offering on unix side with georedundant everything. It will be premium at all levels, and still reasonable at cost. We have some ideas if you want a private mail server still with it part of your existing reseller plan but got to get approval to do that.
Not sure I’d want to go down the road of a private mail server - can’t see that being very cost effective unfortunately. Just that MailSpike has been a pain in my side for the last couple months with MAIL3 and client (primary) has one contact organization that uses MailSpike as anti-spam. Mail3 gets blacklisted on a regular basis and hate always explaining that “we’re working on it and waiting for MailSpike to de-list”
If I had more hair, I’d pull it out.
G
I would be interested in details on alternate mail server options. I’m on mail3, as are many of my clients (happens when you’ve been around for a long time I guess). Sending mail is pretty much an impossibility many days. I just filed a ticket on this issue. I don’t mean to air my dirty laundry here, but I’m very very frustrated by this issue and almost ready to take drastic actions.
I’ve successfully used free Gmail smtp and Amazon SES for website sending. I doubt if Gmail would allow much bulk sending on a free account (haven’t tried), but you can use SES for it. Amazon will throttle it to begin with so it takes a while to build up your permitted hourly limits and sending rate. SES allows you to set up any amount of users, verify an entire domain, and gives you domain keys and SPF, and feedback on usage, but can be a pain to configure their permissions and settings. You pay by Gb, but for most people that amounts to a few cents per month. (For large senders you can charge them directly through Amazon, I think, or they can create their own account if they wish.) I actually use it for sending my own personal mail now.
For new customers, I tell them they can only get forwarding mail accounts with their domains, and so they don’t get to use the shared mail servers for outgoing mail at all. They need to send through their own ISP, Gmail or whatever. I tell them it’s for their own good that mail functionality is reserved for website use only, which it is. Free Gmail can easily be configured to display their domain name address rather than Gmail. That way if there is any blacklisting of their own mail it’s not our responsibility. It’s a bit of a pain to convert existing clients if they’re technically clueless, but frankly anyone I’ve converted to Gmail loves the extra functionality they get.
Having said all that, I have had mail sent through Amazon rejected as blacklisted on at least one occasion. There’s no easy solution.
Many blacklists list gmail now as well, spam is a huge issue worldwide and with every provider.
We are working on solving and we have lowered alert thresholds so low we get many alerts now but always check them!