CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi, I'm trying to figure out if we ought to use a hosted SMTP service, or if Civihosting's mail service is good enough. We anticipate sending about 10k emails a month to start, with up to 7000 addresses in a single mailing. We want all the e-mails to be sent within a couple hours of pushing send, so that everyone receives them around the same time on the same day.

In light of those requirements, a reply from Civihosting's support was somewhat confusing. Their service is capable of sending 3600 e-mails per hour, which seems like it would feet our needs very well. However, it then goes on to say that if sending to e-mail addresses at major providers like yahoo, hotmail, aol, gmail, we'd need to throttle to 200 per hour.

Does anyone have any experience with this, if we need to literally throttle to 200 per hour, or if we can get away with closer to the 3600 limit? (Or if we can multiply the 200 by however many major providers there are out there and get a more reasonable throttle limit?)

And maybe this is the topic of another thread: If we can't reasonably use civihosting, does anyone have recommendations for an external smtp service other than CiviSMTP (too expensive) or Sendgrid (stops sending to temporary failures)? Can Postmark or AuthSMTP be as fully integrated with Civimail as CiviSMTP can? Do other services require any additional integration work other than to set up a return channel and bounce path?

Thanks.

Hello,

There are no hard limits at the email server. However, you must have in mind that you are using a shared hosting service, and if you jeopardize the services of the remaining customers, we might be forced to suspend your account.

You must not send out more than 60 messages per minute on average. This gives you about 900 messages per 15 minutes, or 3600 messages per hour. If you inject hundreds of messages into the mail queue of our shared hosting server in a single batch, this may result in mail server overload, and we may be forced to remove the messages from the mail server queue. It is recommend that you use some throttling mechanism in your mail management software so that messages are sent in batches.

Important note: if most of the recipients are Yahoo or Hotmail users (or users of other major mail providers, e.g. AOL, Gmail, etc.), you should throttle the sending to 200 messages per hour. Otherwise, it is very likely for the remote mail servers to start deferring messages coming from our server, thus affecting the mail service of all other customers on the same shared server.

Also, you cannot use your account for sending out unsolicited mail. We would like to stress how important it is that recipients have approved to receive these messages. As few as one or two spam complaints may result in a serious report that could affect a whole server's mail service.

Basically, a mailing list is legitimate when it:

- has only valid addresses,
- has addresses of people who have explicitly confirmed their wish to receive the messages to this mailing list,
- provides instructions on how to unsubscribe, so that the recipient can stop receiving such messages in the future.

Note that in case we receive any spam complaints, we will send you a warning. If we continue to receive spam reports, we will be forced to take additional measures such as suspension of services. That is why you need to make sure that the list of email addresses to which you send messages is legitimate.

Let us know if you have additional questions.

Best regards,
Support

Thanks again Hershel (and yes, I would agree that "their" service is very good..). May I ask for clarification about those links you gave re authsmtp and postmark, in light of your posting on the other thread from which I referred you to this one (quoted below)? You say that a catch-all is all that's needed, and then you refer to a post about Postmark where DG mentions additional integration work being done for similar reasons as with sendgrid.

Quote from: jakecivi on August 29, 2014, 03:29:00 pm

Yes - thanks for the clarification - I'm wondering if bounce processing with other services (postmark, authsmtp) would be as simple as setting up a return mailbox that CiviCRM can check, or if I'm missing something.

Yes, it should be that easy. If your incoming mail server supports a "catch-all" mailbox then CiviCRM can handle bounces using that.

(your post in this thread:)

Regarding AuthSMTP, see http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,18531.msg77595.html#msg77595

Regarding Postmark: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?topic=15056.0

Regarding the others, I have no recommendations.

(DG's post from the Postmark thread:)

Some folks have developed (and shared) integration w/ Sendgrid which seems like a similar service (and for similar reasons):
http://civicrm.org/blogs/ctashian/integrating-sendgrid-civimail

It actually looks like Postmark would not work with CiviMail.

From http://support.postmarkapp.com/customer/portal/articles/64735-why-can%E2%80%99t-i-send-bulk-emails-?b_id=494 :

Quote

You should have noticed that we do not allow bulk email marketing campaigns to go out through Postmark. We’d like to explain why.

Unless I'm missing something..

Thanks for the clarification.