Interspire Partners with SMTP.com for Easy Email Sending

If you're sending an email campaign to hundreds, thousands or millions of subscribers using SendStudio, then you're going to need a reliable mail server. There are three options here, however only two will get the job done:

1. You can send the emails out using your web host's mail sending engine. This option is fine if you're sending only a few hundred emails per month, however as soon as you go over this, your host may impose email sending restrictions which makes it impossible to send.
2. You can buy your own dedicated server from someone like RackSpace.com (our former host) or SoftLayer.com (our current host) and configure it to send emails. Our server sends out 100,000+ emails per week without any problems, but the catch here is that you need an in-house systems administrator to monitor the server or you have to know what you're doing.
3. The final option is to use a third party to send your emails on your behalf. We've just partnered with SMTP.com who have been in the email sending business for over 10 years. Basically you can lease your own mail server, which you then use to send your emails. You can send hundreds, thousands or even millions of emails each week, and they take care of white listing, dealing with all of the email providers (such as Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, etc), etc - so you don't have to. You can focus on creating the emails and profiting from email marketing, and SMTP.com will focus on the sending.

Today I want to talk a bit about our new partnership with SMTP.com. If you're hosted on a shared web host, then there's a very good chance they limit the number of emails you can send each day/week/month, which is fine if you don't send too many.

If you plan to send hundreds, thousands or millions of emails, your shared host's mail server won't do. You'll need your own mail server. Here's the step-by-step way to get your own mail server, set it up in SendStudio and start sending millions of emails, without ever having to worry about if your host will ban you for sending emails or the stability of your mail server (which SMTP.com take care of):

1. Grab a copy of SendStudio if you don't have one already.
2. Go to http://interspire.smtp.com and sign up for an account. "Email relays" simply mean the number of emails you can send each month. There are different plans depending on your needs.
   
3. Create a user account in SendStudio and click the Email Settings tab. Choose the "Specify a custom SMTP server option" and type in your SMTP.com account details which you will receive after completing step 2 above:
   
   
   
4. Click "Save" and you're ready to go.
   
5. Now when you come to send your email campaigns and autoresponders, they will be sent through your new SMTP.com mail server and not your host's mail server.

Everything else will be the same - you can still see all statistics including click-thru rates, open rates, etc. Bounce handling remains the same and you still have all of the features SendStudio has to offer - without worrying about whether your web host will actually send the emails correctly.

SendStudio 1.4 (coming next week) has built-in details about SMTP.com, however you can still signup and use your new SMTP.com mail server in SendStudio right now. All Interspire customers receive a discount on the SMTP.com prices as well: http://interspire.smtp.com/

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below.