Hi,
I have a church-related professional/social networking site I am running for a client. Have been plonking along nicely - but recently they have decided that they are ramping up the email notifications, and want to send ALL forum topics/comments to ALL members by default. Members are used to yahoo groups, so apparently that's what they want...
Anyhoo - they have a small but growing Victorian based member list - currently about 120.
We are currently using their google apps domain email as the SMTP relay. But Google apps (free one) has a cap of 500 emails a day.
If someone posts something interesting and elicits 4 or 5 comments in one day, they will blow their email limit.
But at the same time, we might need 1000 emails one day, and then nothing for a couple of weeks. It runs hot and cold - so I dont need big volume/big cost service. Just something one step up from free google apps...
Site is hosting on shared hosting at Dreamhost, and other than the email issue, their is no issues with that level of basic hosting.
I've been looking at alternative SMTP providers, at the moment I'm thinking about low end accounts wth Sendgrid http://sendgrid.com/pricing.html or Amazon SES http://aws.amazon.com/ses/
Anyone have any thoughts, recommendations, local experience?
Comments
We use Critsend, mainly
We use Critsend, mainly because you can buy credits instead of monthly plans…
MailChimp
Its incredible, has social connection tolls and loads of great templates. And you can pay credits as required, on top of a great free plan.
Mad Mimi
I recently found Mad Mimi - https://madmimi.com. I've not investigated yet but thought they might be worth a mention.
cheers
ruben
Mad Mimi
Just to follow up on my earlier comment - I went ahead and tried out the MadMimi service. It can be integrated with a D6 site using the module: http://drupal.org/project/madmimi but D7 is not supported.
I don't think the price would compare to some of the solutions being discussed here. I chose the service for the out of the box simplicity. My client found MailChimp too complex. Integrating a custom solution for my clients small mailing list (800 - 2000) would have been overkill.
cheers
ruben
Critsend is excellent value -
Critsend is excellent value - compare CPM rates of all the competitors (cost per 1000 emails). If you don't need the front end, and just the SMTP then Critsend is all you need, with good deliverability, server reputation and reports. They also have an API which we use to get data back, so if you want to add intelligence to your database about who is responding to your emails, and URLs clicked then you can.
I second that… Thought we've
I second that…
Thought we've been getting a lot of bounces from it recently, that's probably due to something else though.
Actually looking at Sendgrid,
Actually looking at Sendgrid, they do actually appear to be cheaper - 10c for 1000 emails vs 50c for Critsend. I'll definitely be taking a closer look, and checking out their API. Have to admit I have had support issues in the past with Critsend, although they were always able to solve them - if Sendgrid can equal or better that then it might be the way forward.
bulk email aka email blasts aka spam
Once you start discussing "n cents per 1000 emails" and you have more than a few thousand email addresses, I would preemptively suspect you of spamming. Very few sites would actually have that many people who explicitly signed up to receive a newsletter or are clients of the company.
So: uncool & do.not.like.
Should also mention that much of that realm would be illegal under Australian anti-spam legislation, subject to serious fines.
See spam Act 2003: http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_310294
use-case for 1000's emails
Actually, I have a number of clients that could potentially (and quite legitamately) hit those sorts of numbers.
An example is a client who has recently migrated his professional community (approx 250 members) from yahoo groups, to a custom website. Because the members are very "old school", they want/need/expect that they will get email notification of everything - all new posts and new comments against posts on the site. They all sign up for these subscriptions manually - and 99% of them sign up for everything.
all I need is someone to post something very interesting, and then have 3 people make comments - over the course of a day - and we have 1000 emails in a day. If I get ten conversations like that a month, then that's 10K emails. a month.
It may be stupid, and there are better ways of engaging (in my opinion) via daily/weekly digest notifications, rss feeds, etc.
But there is nothing illegitimate about that. None of it is unsolicited, and all of it is option-in. So dont get too excited about the anti-spam implications.
We're discussing professional
arjenlentz - we're discussing professional services here for database marketing - many companies have customer databases in 10's if not 100's of thousands, sending weekly emails and require a professional solution. You're too quick to judge - go and look at these services yourself so you are fully informed. If this is of no interest to you then please drop out allow others to share information in the spirit of helpfulness and positivity.
Wow arjenlentz! Pretty bloody
Wow arjenlentz! Pretty bloody rude of you....... Very quick to throw around accusations.
Err wtf, don't assume what
Err wtf, don't assume what other people are doing.
http://dgtlmoon.com
We were just working on a
We were just working on a site with 56,000 perfectly legitimate users. I could see them wanting to use such a service to email everyone at once - and certainly not spamming.
The original post was just about sending forum notifications, so definitely not spam, and I'm not sure how forum notifications would trigger such an accusation anyway ...
Likewise, and our
Likewise, and our organisation has a staff of 2… And a mailing list of 1500, also event registration emails, registration emails, thank you emails, order emails, receipt emails etc…
Bulk Emails using uas.coop
This applies to people using CiviMail only.
We use the service offered by the Urban Alliance for Sustainability in San Francisco. The price is good. They are able to support very large mailings for us, up to 80,000 recipients.
========================
Dennis M. Gray
Skype: d0325mgray
Mobile: +84 93 257 5571
US VoIP: +1-805-467-6707
Mailjet offers 200 emails a day for free and 30,000 for $7,49
Hi,
I work for Mailjet, a SMTP relay service. The prices are quite low and you will get some very useful features to track your emails and check that they actually were delivered. For non-profits, we might offer free services and / or reductions: it's part of our policy to help useful projects.
A plugin is also available for Drupal: http://www.mailjet.com/plugin/drupal.htm
Hope this helps!
Post on Drupal.org
If you want people to use your module, you should submit as a project on drupal.org. Most people will never find it if its not there (and lately, I am generally avoiding any modules not managed here as a matter of security)
--Ryan
Ryan Cross
Drupal Development Services
ProjectPier project management and collaboration software
We've actually did :(
But it seems it didn't move from the sandbox!
http://drupal.org/sandbox/mailjet/1319774
I am not part of the team taking care of the submissions, but if you had some insight on this, I would be very grateful. What can be wrong? Why does it take so much time?
There appears to be a
There appears to be a discussion here about it http://drupal.org/node/1439308
I've downloaded the library directly from the site - module seems to work, although got one error when the SMPT server did not respond but all fine since. You have to create an account to get API keys for it to work. It works not unlike the SMPT module for routing mail via their server - fairly straightforward module.
RE their online proposition - good UI for using as a DBM tool in its own right, and good stats - although I can't see click URL's yet - maybe through API. RE list management, I've asked about sync possibilities wit OG or Mailman - failing that it may require getting into the API for some bespoke programming, but it does look promising as far as adding/removing users etc.
Compared with Critsend, the API, UI, functionality, pricing all appear to be competitive - too early for support but so far responsiveness/overall CX has been OK. Will continue to test but won't make any decisions until I can fully test the API.
Hope this is helpful - interested in others experiences as well.
Thanks for the feedback!
I'm actually not the person managing the submission process... To be followed I guess!
Howerver, thanks a lot for your feedback, it is quite useful and encouraging for us. Our Support team does its best, there will be present and reactive if you need them :)
Was a solution ever decided upon
Mudsurfer,
Did you ever find a solution?
========================
Dennis M. Gray
Skype: d0325mgray
Mobile: +84 93 257 5571
US VoIP: +1-805-467-6707
Eventually...
I tried Amazon SES, but had configuration issues, and could never get it to authenticate more than once - I'm sure that was me, not it, but never the less I gave up on that.
Then I had a go at mailchimp, which is an excellent service, particularly the module that supports integrated mailing list subscription... but I needed something to support notification from forums as well (transactional emails via SMTP). And Mailchimp used the same Amazon SES system as above, and needed an upgraded payment plan to do that... so I gave up on that as well.
Then I looked at mailjet, and found they were "developing" a drupal module - I swapped a few tweets and emails with mailjet asking when their drupal module was going to be published on D.O., and the answers were: "we intend to", "we are working on it", "it's coming soon".... but it never eventuated - I saw no movement in that regard.
But I gave them a go anyway, I did NOT use their drupal module, I just used SMTP module and configured manually - and I must say, i'm really impressed with the mailjet service. Had no setup issues, and the reporting on the mailjet side is pretty decent. Also good easily accessed information related to setting up appropriate SPF, DKIM DNS records.
I'm using mailjet via SMTP module for a few sites now - some just using the free basic mailjet service, and couple of sites with higher email throughput requirements on their $7.95 month account. My site with biggest requirements uses the $7.95/mth and occasionally needs to pay a couple of dollars extra for excess emails - but it's cheep, cheerful and does the job for me at the moment.
But I would still like to see what that drupal module does if they ever publish on D.O. :)
Check out mailjets project
Check out mailjets project application http://drupal.org/node/1439308.
There is also my project application for sendgrid http://drupal.org/node/1548328
horrible customer support
Critsend became very rude to its customers. They have got system glitch couple of days ago and instead of trying to solve the problem they closed my account. Nicolas Toper gave me support but I would better get support from somebody else in their company, because this guy was behaving like he was already drunk... He said that he rather close my account then try to solve the problem and find out what went wrong with their service. Actually the problem was related to wrong e-mail address in FROM field, their service just put there critsent@postmaster.com instead of my company e-mail address which just caused deletion of my mails by customers without reading... Now, Nicolas Toper just closed my account and as he said applied for refund. Not very good experience with customer support. I understand any service may have problems but I think people from critsend.com just do not care about their customers and it is easy for them to say you bye instead of trying to find out what is going with their service. Also Nico said that all their staff is on holidays for the next two weeks so technical support is impossible. So if you are sending mail through them on Christmas time be prepared that in case of any technical problems nobody will help you and if you complain then Mr. Nico just will close your account. I liked the reporting tool of critsend but even if you find really good service the customer support may kill any goodness!!!
Some what come into my mind -
Some what come into my mind
- SendGrid (i use it myself)
- MailGun
- Amazon has their own
- Mailjet