gpg: Signature made Wed Oct 27 20:23:46 2021 UTC
gpg: using DSA key 0E4236CB52951E14536066222099B64CBF15490B
gpg: Good signature from "Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andrew James Smith <andy@strugglers.net>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (UKUUG) <andy.smith@ukuug.org>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (BitFolk Ltd.) <andy@bitfolk.com>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (Linux User Groups UK) <andy@lug.org.uk>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (Cernio Technology Cooperative) <andy.smith@cernio.com>" [unknown]
Hi Ashley,
On Wed, Oct 27, 2021 at 08:19:13PM +1100, Ashley Norris wrote:
> So, my question for this list is whether anyone can suggest an
> email service provider that has pricing suitable for a smaller
> customer sending/receiving only 1k-5k emails per month?
>
> are the guides against setting up your own email infrastructure
> exaggerating the issues?
If you're sending important transactional email like invoices and
order receipts, or marketing mail, then I don't think those guides
are exaggerating and it might be wise to use an email service
provider. However, I/we do not use one and so I cannot give any
recommendations.
I would like to give an anti-recommendation of SendGrid, who in
2019 were acquired by Twilio. Since that time the amount of outright
phishing mail and blatant spam that no one ever signed up for has
exploded in volume and they don't seem to have any desire to stop
taking money from those senders.
However, despite my anti-recommendation SendGrid are used by some
massive companies so their deliverability is likely to be high. I
can only criticise them on a moral level, unfortunately. They are
"too big to block" (like Google and MS).
As regards sending mail from BitFolk infrastructure, I don't believe
there is any particular problem compared to well-managed address
space anywhere else. We work hard to deal with compromises swiftly
and that keeps our entire netblocks from being singled out for
blocking.
These days, not having a bad reputation is sometimes not enough.
Even having no reputation is sometimes an impediment to
deliverability, and you can only get reputation by sending very
large quantities of email, which is why I would tend to recommend an
email service provider for email that really matters.
If you're serious about sending/receiving email I'd recommend
joining the "mailop" mailing lsit:
https://www.mailop.org/
Linked on that page is "Best Practice for Servers" and that article
goes through some of what you'll need to do to maximise your
deliverability. You'll see it's quite a technical burden. Even more
so if you have untrusted folk sending through you.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
