5. Choosing the right smtp server

The single most important piece of your E-Marketing campaign is the mail server, or smtp server. This is the machine that actually does the work of sending out your email.

In a small operation, to a confirmed opt-in list of people (<500), it is probably ok to use your own ISP email server and account to send out the mail. However, if your ISP limits you to a certain number of emails per hour or per 24 hours, you will need to make sure your AR has the ability to throttle your campaign.

For example, with Mailbox Studio, you can send a certain number of emails, pause for a specified time, and then send more. Or, you can send a batch of emails, then shut down for a period of time, reawaken, and start sending again. At first glance, these may appear to be the same thing, but in reality, they are quite different. In the first instance, the throttle limit applies to each campaign individually, while in the latter, the limit applies to the total number of emails sent out.

Your AR should give you the ability to send out email using multiple smtp servers. You could use your own ISP for contacting your own friends or current customers, etc. and use an external ISP for mailing to your lists to recruit new customers.

Your smtp server has a very important IP address attached to it. It is imperative that you take steps to protect the "reputation" of the IP address, because spam filters use the reputation to decide if they will permit your message to reach it's intended recipient. You can check your server's IP reputation here: www.senderbase.org

Some of the larger ISPs will employ proprietary methods to determine the reputation of your server. And, big ISPs like hotmail (MSN), AOL, and Yahoo have very specific rules you must follow to get your email delivered.

For example, one rule they use is that you cannot have more than 5 simultaneous connections to their server. (TECH TALK: An SMTP connection is one "HELO" session with the target MX server). What this means is, it is difficult to get mail delivered to these domains if you are using a LINUX mail server running sendmail. Sendmail has no easy way of limiting the number of simultaneous connections. A Windows server, running IIS, however, can be configured to limit the smtp server to 5 connections per domain.

In my mailing operations, I always try to send out hotmail, aol and yahoo emails using a Windows server, and use a linux server for everything else. The explanation for this will be in another lesson.

If your server gets blocked, there are ways to detect it, and in most cases, get removed from the block list. But, if you are spamming, you will just get added back, and eventually, you will get a permanent block and you can never send mail to that domain (and if you get a SpamHaus RBL block, you might as well close that server down.) Here is a good place to check the various spam lists to see if you are on one: www.MXToolbox.com

Later lessons will explain how to get off most of the block lists, and how to avoid getting on them in the first place.