SendGrid the best for sending transactional emails?

Paper_Chase

Paper_Chase

brb gym
Apr 23, 2009
1,499
21
0
Vancouver, Canada
Creating a user system for one of my websites. When they sign up they have the option to sign up for the newsletter as well.

They receive the confirmation email for the newsletter from MailChimp, and another user confirmation email from my server. The MailChimp message always hits the inbox, while the message from my server always ends up in the spam/junk.

I figured using SendGrid would help my server emails get to the inbox better. The look pretty good to me, I'm going with the $79.99 a month version that gets us our own IP to send from. Any other recommendations you guys have?

Any help is appreciated!!
 


Interesting. Now would you continue using mail chimp to send your emails or switch over to a tool like phpmail and have it sent through send grid?
 
I've heard good things about authsmtp.com and amazon now has a service for that as well that may be worth investigating.

You may want to have a sysadmin just make sure you are following best practices first for mailing from your server (reverse dns, HELO hostname, SPF, DKIM, etc)
 
Last edited:
CLKeenan said:
Interesting. Now would you continue using mail chimp to send your emails or switch over to a tool like phpmail and have it sent through send grid?
Click to expand...

I've thought about that. My initial thought is to stick with MailChimp, as they make it easy to do things like target users by location, target by segment, re-send confirmation emails to users, etc. I know all of this can be done if I coded it myself, but I'm really only a novice php programmer, and would rather focus on other things. Plus the cost of MailChimp isn't that high to really justify me spending hours on trying to duplicate things MailChimp does out of the box.

Are there any really good reasons to do all the newsletter mailings from my own server?
 
The only good inboxing services I've ever seen are those that are privately owned, and you need to know the owner to purchase the service. Keeping those babies white listed is an almost 24x7 job.

Find one of those guys, or pickup 20 VPS accounts, setup proper SMTPs on them all, and rotate while having software constantly checking blacklists every 10 mins.
 
We had the same issue with deliverability from our own server. Been using amazons service for transactional emails via maichimps API for a while now. Pretty slick and dirt cheap, it ends up being a few bucks a month for thousands of forgot pw emails, etc.
 
Spades said:
We had the same issue with deliverability from our own server. Been using amazons service for transactional emails via maichimps API for a while now. Pretty slick and dirt cheap, it ends up being a few bucks a month for thousands of forgot pw emails, etc.
Click to expand...

Yea, that is the other option I am considering. With amazon's service do you get click tracking, open analytics, etc.?
 
Paper_Chase said:
Yea, that is the other option I am considering. With amazon's service do you get click tracking, open analytics, etc.?
Click to expand...

Nope. Amazon SES statistics are limited to the basics: sent volume, bounces, complaints, etc. You may be able to use Google Analytics to do click (tracking pixel) and open (append query vars) tracking.
 
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