So you’re the IT guy at some company, and the marketing team is bugging you to put together “an email blaster thingy” so they can send email marketing campaigns. First of all, if they actually used the word “blast” you need to immediately revoke all their internet access, and go ahead and punch them in the gut. As head of IT, you’re pretty much obligated to do that. Or, if you’re a more peaceful kinda nerd, you can simply print out this guide, and drop it on their desk: [Spam lawsuits: what's the worst that can happen?]
Okay, back to the topic at hand. If you’re the stubborn or paranoid kind of IT person who really, really, really wants to build your own email delivery engine, and you don’t want to use a service like MailChimp, that’s cool. But setting up a mass email infrastructure (with great deliverability) is hard, and there are things you’ll need to know about selecting your MTA, pitfalls in cloud-computing IPs, selecting the right hardware, proper bounce handling, ISP rate limiting, security concerns, abuse monitoring, blacklists, reputation services, and on and on.
You’ll need to get your hands on some kind of super-secret, industry-insider, reveal-all kind of guide. Our new Deliverability Engineer, Brandon, just wrote that guide…
Email Delivery (for IT Professionals) – 1.4MB PDF
Nice work, Brandon. Your first project after joining MailChimp is expose all our delivery secrets?
Seriously, this stuff is really hard. If you’ve gotta do this on your own, we want you to do it right. We’ll tell you the knobs and switches you’ll need, but we’re not going to tell you the exact settings (c’mon, that’s the fun part!). And hopefully, some people out there will come away with an appreciation for how complicated mass email delivery really is, and just use MailChimp.
Total information overload! I respect the system and after reading this I am even more thankful we use you guys! There was a fleeting moment in 2009 when my company entertained the idea of doing this themselves…yikes!
This great, really great. It will help us justify the nominal fees (by comparison of running our own system well). This kind of transparency is what I call “confident expertise” and something I look for in vendors. Obscurity often means insecurity, in my experience.
Hi Ben, I love the way you posted this article everything you’ve said is cool to me and I’ve also download the file for future purpose I just graduated in I.T and this topic of yours might be useful to me. Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge.
Would be lost without you guys. Keep up the great work.
I’d love to but your terms of service don’t allow me to setup MailChimp for use with my client as the subject matter falls into the content types which “might generate higher spam reporting” — despite everything is opt-in as per CAN-SPAM.
Oh well…
Unfortunately, the “generate higher spam reporting” part that you quote is a sad reality of sending bulk email. People forget they signed up to things, or they’re lazy and report stuff as spam (instead of unsubscribing). So even though they’re false reports, IP ranges get blocked. We have hundreds of thousands of users sharing IPs, so it’s a real risk for us. There are realistic thresholds that the ISPs set to accommodate false reports, but certain types of content really do generate more false reports than others. For some clients, you’d need to either setup a custom solution, or find an ESP that specializes in higher-risk content (or has a higher tolerance for it).
So what kind of services would you recommend that specialize in higher risk content because it would be hassle for us to set up our servers?
I’m sorry to say I honestly don’t know of any services like that.
Hi Ben,,we have been using your services from last few days but we have been deactivated.. Now the thing is we are doing everything by books but cant figure out where is the issue..Anyways now what..if we are genuine how should we do it
can you please update your PDF link? Currently it’s an invalid link.
The PDF guide link is 404!
Thanks. Broke when we recently redesigned and moved our website to a new host.
Should be fixed now.