Multiple Mail Server advice requested ...
 

A new project we are taking on has close to 1 million opt in emails. Looking for some general advice on setting up a small farm of servers to handle the outbound volume.

Any solid advice from the community would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

you should be able to do that with 1 server :2 cents::2 cents::2 cents:

Handling the outbound volume will (probably) not be a problem, deliverability will be unless you know what you are doing.

Starting out with a fresh domain with fresh IPs sending out a million mails a day will (probably) not get your e-mails to inbox.

You should talk to some people that does this stuff for a living. I'll PM you a Skype contact that can help.

The server can easily handle sending the million + emails. What we are more concerned with making sure the million + people receive their emails. We don't want to be go constantly flagged by the SPAM police, where we go from being temporarily blacklisted to white listed to being temporarily black listed again. And we don't want to find to learn that most have gone to the junk folder through the filtering process.


Markul, I have replied to your PM - thank you, and have already send a contact request out via Skype.

As someone who has been involved in mail for years on one level or another, here is my advice......

Don't bother, you'll waste your time and $$$......

Unless you are an experienced mailer with connections for IPs etc and you REALLY know your shit, you are FAR, FAR, FAR better off partnering with an experienced company / team and letting them manage the list for you. They will be able to make 5 - 10X+ more than you will make trying to mail yourself. If you do it this way, You'll take 50% and you wont have to do ANYTHING but collect your $$$ . Im assuming you aren't experienced, since you are here asking for help.
Ive seen SO many people do this. 1mm records is honestly not a lot in the email world. Its certainly not enough to bother setting up your own mail system, buying IPs, software etc etc. Not to mention the massive learning curve. Mailing is not easy, even for the guys who have been doing it for YEARS. Trust me, let someone who does this for a living do it for you. The 50% you make will be WAY more than you get close to netting doing it yourself.

Best of Luck!!

Maybe talk to ynot mail?

This is your best advise unless you are willing to invest the time and money.

I have also been in the mailer space in one way or another for almost a decade. You really need to know what you are doing in regard to filters and deliver-ability, segmenting your lists, cleaning out all of the garbage and traps. If you fail to do this, your IPs will not last long and you will either be terminated for abuse (complaints, RBL, SBL), or you will need to keep rotating out ranges.

While finding clean ips is fairly easily if you have the right connections, it is not every for everyone. It is obviously also costly to do so, which does not even get into domain rotations and the rest involved. As you can see from the advise above, their is some decent investment involved and this does not even get into the TIME factor of learning. The mailer space, filters, throttles, and moving parts are ever changing so you always have to be tweaking and trying new things if you want to stay ahead of the curve and make money.

Good luck.

There is some great advice here.... Anyone can send out mail, but sending out right so it lands in inboxes takes a lot of time, money, and effort.

Let me know if you are interested in YNOT Mail. We can get your emails into the inboxes.

Anyone know of some reputable companies who will mail on other people's lists? I've got a solid 5 mil emails, but no experience in mailing.

JA$on, thanks.

We are not permitted to outsource the management of the list, and are motivated to learn this aspect of marketing by email.

Well, I think learning any new skill is a good thing. Just know going in you will NOT make money from those 1mm records, not even a chance. As long as you are willing to invest whatever you make (plus more) to begin to learn the business, then at least your going into it with reasonable expectations :) If you have access to large amounts of data beyond that 1mm moving fwd and so, want to really put into it what it takes to learn the business, then I wish you luck.

P.S. Find someone who can teach you. If you try to figure it out by trial and error it will take 5X as long and cost 10X as much.

There are mailing platforms out there that will help you, and provide you good data on a revshare basis if that is something you are looking at. Some will even provide you a robust MTA server for sending. You would still have to purchase clean ips and GRE tunnel them back in. However, a good platform for volume mailing is going to have a decent price tag.

As for the rest, that is all true. There are many ways to mail and you really have to understand spam filters, offers, creatives, RBL's, ip sourcing, different ISP throttles for inboxing versus junking (as some providers like an AOL or yahoo may only allow so much per hour). Some ISP's will require rDNS while others don't. Then you have FBL and data scrubbing to maximize your delivery and minimize the grief.

All of this takes time, trial and error, and as you can see... a decent dollar once you start adding things up. All of this being said, if you are looking to just send out a newsletter once a month, that is a completely different ballgame and you should adjust revenue expectations accordingly. You can get by on a less robust platform and fewer clean ips. However, that will not eliminate the need to understand the rest of the things that go into delivery and spam filters. Keep in mind, none of this even gets to the most important part, which is finding offers that CONVERT assuming you can inbox them.

Good luck. Very rewarding and profitable if you can figure out all of the moving parts, but this is a full time job to do on volume.

Good advice in here. With all due respect, I would say much the same. It's not your core competency, pay a professional service to manage mailing the list. I'd suggest YNotmail. The learning curve is too steep to start from scratch and chances are the list is shit, anyways.

Brad

Ask Hillary.

lots of opinions here, but you know..everyone has one right... we currently run our own mail server, we started in 1998 and have had ours running non-stop since. Its worth it to do yourself and is not that hard. Just keep track of your bounces and check some to see if they were bounced due to blacklisting, get it unlisted then fix what caused the blacklisting. google,yahoo and others will soon be using DMARC for mail auth, just add it and the others, simple. good servers at leaseweb, ours is in the Netherlands. but you will only need 1 server, just get a good processor lots of RAM and fast hard drives in your server. Also don't get list software that just blasts it all out as fast as possible, get one where you can meter it, ours is set to 13,000 an hour. it takes along time to send but multiple lists, send them 6-12 hours apart at around 13,000 an hour and you should be good.

Beware of the guy Hillary used! :2 cents::1orglaugh

serious advice.
if you really want mails to end up in inbox.

AMAZON SES + SENDY.CO

Thank me later.

If you have not cleaned up and segmented your data before going to an ESP you could be terminated quickly. Generally you want to take your best stuff, like your opener/clickers files, to an ESP where you have solid chance of inboxing based on their trusted netblocks and whitelisting. Most ESP's have a complaint tolerance and if you're over it than bye bye birdie.

:2 cents: