Transactional Email Services

We send 100,000 or so emails to members through our VB forums per month. You know, email confirmation, password reset, reply notices and such - transactional emails.

Currently we send all these through our dedicated server. But we find AT&T, AOL and sometimes others like to block these emails as spam. They don't put them in spam folders - they block them outright.

We're looking at using a 3rd party smtp service like Sendgrid or Mandrill to correct this issue so I'd like to ask if you've used these two or others or if you have had good luck with other 3rd party mailers.

 

Mandrill for me https://community.centminmod.com/threads/forums-switched-over-to-mandrill-for-email-smtp.384/

 

I'm looking at Mandrill for this.

Also, I just started using Robly.com for sending out promo emails - I need to see if they have a SMTP service for transactional emails.

 

I have problems delivering to AOL even with Sendgrid. AOL reports a lot of emails to Sendgrid as bounced when the email address is valid (ie, I can email the person myself and get replies from them).

 

Can we do anything about the emails from forums to make them more acceptable to email providers? Google almost never blocks VB mail. Does IPB and XF have the same issue? OR is it more the way VB transactional emails are sent.

I was surprised to hear that IB has the exact same issue with their forums.

 

Valid SPF text records for the domain is start. I posted a bit about SPF text on lower half of my page at http://centminmod.com/outlook_live_domains.html

And quoting myself

FYI valid SPF, reverse dns etc is also required for Mandrill

• http://help.mandrill.com/entries/21681347-How-do-I-set-up-sending-domains-
• http://help.mandrill.com/entries/21751322-What-are-SPF-and-DKIM-and-do-I-need-to-set-them-up-

 

I run 8 websites on one server. 6 of the forums are on one IP address and the two largest forums have their own IP address but they ALL are on the same server.

The SERVER IP reverses to geartalknet.com. Each of the DNS records for the 6 shared IP forums has a valid SPF and TXT file that has "include geartalknet.com" as well as set to soft fail. The two forums with dedicated IP addresses both reverse to their domain names and both have valid SPF and TXT records.

Here's my SPF and TXT entry: "v=spf1 mx a include:geartalknet.com ~all"

Yet for some reason some email providers - some of which are very large - will block the emails.

 

another thing to check is if your IP addresses are clean and not on spam blacklists http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check

Mandrill has nice tools for reputation tracking to see exactly why you have poor delivery rates for emails http://help.mandrill.com/forums/22301078-Reputation-Context

 

Of course, yes. They are all clean IPs. I check them frequently.

 

do you have a lot of invalid email addresses? have you done anything to clean your list of invalid email addresses?

 

I'm sure I have a large number of invalid emails dating back from 2003 when we switched to PHP/SQL software. Is there some way to clean the emails in my VB databases??