Ask HN: Startups and In-House Mailing

[knightinblue]

My team and I are getting to close to launching our startup. We were discussing our traffic strategies today and added email to the list - basically, users can sign up for our daily emails.

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...?

[moomerman]

I tend to use a slicehost slice to do my own outbound mail (I use Google Apps for all inbound).

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.

[JacobAldridge]

I guess the first question is, do you really need to handle it in-house (especially as you acknowledge your limitations). Outsourcing to an email service will cost cash, rather than time, in a period when you have more time than cash, but may still be worth it.

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?

[knightinblue]

One of the reasons I'd prefer to run it in-house is because users' emails are valuable data and we prefer to keep it with us rather than outsource to something like Aweber.

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.

[rs]

I tend to use mailman for my newsletters. It has a templating system where you can modify the pages.

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.

[kineticac]

How many emails will you send? You can setup a small server on slicehost, run a smtp server (you set it up) and write something like a quick rails app to do the work. I believe the cheapest slice on slicehost would be fine at $20 a month. Or go with Heroku and launch a rails app on it for free. It might have enough power to send out daily emails using a Sendgrid service. Sendgrid solutions are basically SMTP servers that handle a lot of things like analytics for you. Easy REST API and ridiculously simple integration with Heroku would be awesome.

[knightinblue]

Thanks kinetic!

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?

[mschaecher]

My two cents(I've managed email campaigns to ~100k people):

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...

[kineticac]

Hey no problem, if you have an Ubuntu box running on slicehost etc. you can follow the following to setup postfix: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix

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!

[friendstock]

Try... SendGrid, MailChimp, etc.

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.

[aonic]

I was using Google Apps for my outgoing emails and switched to SendGrid a few months ago. I usually send 500-600 emails a day but with Google Apps I was hearing a lot of complaints about never getting the email.

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

[Skyline]

Our company is in a similar situation. We're currently looking into http://www.port25.com/ (a software solution for $x,xxx) and http://www.strongmail.com/ (a hardware/software solution for $xx,xxx).