UAS CiviMail SMTP Service Launch Announcement

[shane]

Hola CCRM friends,

Well the beta is over and it has been successful such that we have decided to launch the UAS CiviSMTP on Sep 1st.  woo hoo!  UAS  http://www.uas.coop is stoked about being able to offer this service to the CCRM community.  We really hope everyone finds what we produce and provide to be very helpful. 

We will soon be publishing the official docs, for now, below is an overview of what you can expect.  If anyone has any questions, please email me at:

shane@uas.coop

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SERVICES
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We will be providing an SMTP back end for CiviCRM installations which will handle all of the email transactions between your CCRM installation and your constituents and users.

We will also be handling mailings (newsletters, etc) to your groups.  This includes the bounces, subscribes, un-subscribes, opt-outs, confirms, and replies.

For very large mailings we will be offering the capability to do batching so that emails will be sent in parallel rather than serially (one at a time).  The current implementation of CiviMail sends emails serially, but with a patch to 1.8 (forthcoming), you will get the ability to batch large mailings out to our servers and we will send the emails in parallel.

There is also a possibility that batching could assist those in limited hosting arrangements like Go Daddy.  If that is you, then send an email and we can talk about it.  shane@uas.coop

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PRICING
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5.00 / month (3000 sent emails included)
all emails sent over the initial allotment will be billed at the following rates:

@3,000+  -    $0.03 / 10 emails sent (3.00 / 1000)
@10,000+ -   $0.01 / 10 emails sent (1.00 / 1000)
@100,000+ - .$0.01 / 15 emails sent (1.00 / 1500)
@250,000+ - $0.01 / 20 emails sent (1.00 / 2000)
 
5.00 / month is the base cost.  That includes 3000 emails sent.  As soon as you hit 3001 emails sent we start billing at $0.03 / 10 emails
sent or any portion of a ten email block that is sent.

For example, if you send 3001 - 3010 emails,  you will be charged 5.03.

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SUPPORT
===================

Email support will be provided with the base accounts.  For an additional $25 / month, phone and chat support will also be made available 5 days a week 9 - 5 PST.

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CONTRACTS
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A month to month contract and you can cancel whenever you want.  So if you sign up Sept 1, we charge 5 bucks for the account which includes 3000 emails sent.  and then on October 1st we will bill for any usage above the 3000 emails for Sept.  We will also at that time charge the 5 dollar monthly fee for the next month's access (October) unless you have canceled at some point prior to the billing for October.

All accounts will be billed once a month on the last day of the month.  Accounts that are created during a month period will still be charged 5.00 and given the 3000 emails.  Even if it is the last day of the month.

[shane]

if anyone is interested in the service, you can start the application process here:

http://www.uas.coop/civismtp-application

peace,

-Shane

[Denver Dave]

How does our information get from our CiviCRM installation to the uas.coop installation?

[twowheeler]

It works by setting up your Civicrm server so that the UAS server handles your outgoing email.  The SMTP protocol allows you to ship your email to another host which acts as a gateway to the outside world.  When the emails are opened, a code in the URLs sends a message to the UAS server indicating that John Doe just opened his email, or clicked on a link or whatever.  The UAS server then feeds that info back to your server via a SOAP interface, a back door for receiving these data updates.  I can testify that it works very well, other than one bug which the gang here is working on, concerning the click through tracking.  The UAS service seems to be flawless.

[gg66]

Sounds interesting as most shared hosting accounts don't support CiviMail, will this get around that?

If you are directing click throughs & tracking through your server this may affect open rates.

i.e. Lots of spam filters will flag email as possible spam/scam if the urls used for tracking are not the same as the text used for links in the email. For eg. link shows www.mysite.com but link code through your server might be www.yoursite.com

Have you taken this into consideration?

[bob schmitt]

Good questions.

I got to meet Shane last month at developers meeting and am impressed with how he's thought through the problem. As long as you aren't spamming, the service will work for you. All it does is provide an SMPT relay to bypass mail relay restriction limits on shared hosts, and dramatically reduce the configuration time needed to get your CiviCRM install working to do email broadcasting. Plus, the pricing structure seems very reasonable.

[Piotr Szotkowski]

If you are directing click throughs & tracking through your server this may affect open rates.

i.e. Lots of spam filters will flag email as possible spam/scam if the urls used for tracking are not the same as the text used for links in the email. For eg. link shows www.mysite.com but link code through your server might be www.yoursite.com

I’m not sure how does exactly UAS’s service work, but I assume it doesn’t really change the emails in any way. In this case, both tracking of the opens as well as URL click tracking is done with tracking URLs pointing at your server, not UAS’s.

[Matt2000]

Piotr is correct. The click-through links, etc, point to your own server.

[DaraghOBrien]

Not sure if it is a niggle caused by the firewall in my day job, but I can't seem to access the application form on www.uas.coop/civismtp-application. The link directs to the main page of the site and when I search for CiviCRM and SMTP on the site any link to the 'application form' brings me to 'Recent Featured Articles'.

I've even signed up as a 'web-ally' of UAS (nice use of civicrm).

Is anyone else having similar difficulty?

[Dave Greenberg]

I chatted w/ Shane about this earlier today and he said there was some changes in the UAS content / site that caused this. I think it should be fixed shortly.

[DaraghOBrien]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the update. I thought I'd gone and regressed to being a 'dumb user' again. And after getting all that therapy to evolve myself... 

civismtp looks like it will solve a problem i'm having (shared hosting provider) and help speed up the roll out of my project.

Daragh

[Denver Dave]

We've never gotten the IMAP2SOAP to work on our server - do we need the PERL scripts working on our server in order to use the UAS service?  Potentially, this might be a nice combination for us, our server seems to handle the load just fine, but we are starting to reach the limit of the number of emails that our server would like us to send.

Dave

[Piotr Szotkowski]

We've never gotten the IMAP2SOAP to work on our server - do we need the PERL scripts working on our server in order to use the UAS service?

As far as I remember – no. But do please check with Shane/UAS Co-op.