SMTP relay services and how they work
What if we told you that being an all-knowing mail specialist isn’t required for your company’s email deliverability?
With the specialized help of an SMTP service provider, organizations can send bulk emails without interruption, maintain the sender’s reputation, and prevent being blocked. Here’s everything that you need to understand about it.
What does an SMTP relay mean, exactly?
An SMTP relay is just a service that enables email messages to be sent from one server to the other.
Consider an Olympic relay race: the email (a transactional/promotional/marketing) seems like a baton. The runners represent the SMTP servers that pass the baton to each other until the final line is reached.
If you don’t want to employ an SMTP relay service to handle your mail sending, you can set up and maintain your email infrastructure, build up a strong IP reputation, and direct email bounce and spam complaints yourself.
There are five key benefits of using an SMTP service.
Three major factors influence your ability to send emails successfully:
- Your email infrastructure’s SMTP
- Sender credibility
- The information of your communications
To comply with the latter, you don’t have to be an email expert—many marketers are aware of the need to avoid spam trigger phrases in subject lines and content and keep their copy free of typos. We’re also sure your team isn’t spreading phishing scams or connecting to questionable content.
However, the first two criteria, email infrastructure, domain or IP reputation, can cause senders trouble. You could set up and maintain the company’s own SMTP email server. Still, to create a good reputation with inbox providers, you’d need to be technically skilled and used to monitoring, diagnosing, & solving deliverability issues regularly.
Not everyone has the time (or the experience!) to accomplish it.
To summarise, organizations use SMTP relay services to improve email deliverability without worrying about the technical aspects endangering their capacity to send.
Here are five advantages of using SMTP relay services:
Your transmitting infrastructure becomes your SMTP relay provider:
Internet service providers (ISPs) use your domain and IP address reputation to determine if the emails are forwarded to your recipients’ inboxes or sent straight to the spam folder.
A good bulk email marketing server includes your firm in a list of reputable senders and uses various techniques to protect your firm’s IP reputation.
You can’t handle the reputation of the sending IP if you maintain your SMTP server on a common virtual machine (VM), which implies that you could be using it with someone sending unwanted mail.
Businesses can use SMTP relays to transmit large amounts of email.
To deter spammers and criminal actors, several ISPs or webmail providers impose email transmission limits. This is since these services are designed for user mail instead of application email, such as order confirmations. This might limit your company’s capacity to grow, engage, and assist its customer base unnecessarily, especially if you send a lot of emails.
The good news is that you can grow and expand the email volume when needed with SMTP relay services.
Relay services for SMTP provide you with data insights and deliverability concerns.
Clients who transfer through their own servers to the idealSMTP relay service frequently tell us that they previously couldn’t get a complete image of their deliverability. For example, they had no way of knowing that many of their messages were bouncing or why.
Emails sent, bounces (including the sort of bounce), spam notices, spam complaints, detailed error codes, and more are all collected by SMTP relay providers.
Relay services for SMTP provide you with data insights and deliverability concerns :
Clients who transfer through their servers to idealSMTP relay service frequently tell us that they previously couldn’t get a complete image of their deliverability. For example, they had no way of knowing that many of their emails were bouncing or why.
Emails sent, bounces (including the sort of bounce), spam notices, spam complaints, detailed error codes, and more are all collected by SMTP relay providers.
SMTP relay providers have user-friendly interfaces that save time ;
Unlike a self-managed server, all SMTP relay services ship with a simple, appealing user interface (UI). Anyone in your organization can quickly locate, surface, & understand email information with an improved user interface. It also reduces back-and-forth and tedious searches for email information.
Imagine you’re perplexed by a consumer who claims they didn’t receive a purchase confirmation. You may quickly discover the message in question and view the bounce codes with a clean UI.
How does the SMTP relay server work in practice?
You couldn’t send email to anyone outside the domain without SMTP, which is an issue because, more than likely, your company uses transactional or bulk emails to communicate with subscribers and customers on a daily basis.
Your email client or app establishes an SMTP connection when you send an email, and your server connects to the SMTP server of your receiver. At each step of the sending process, they use a variety of SMTP instructions, or short words, to transport data and enable authentication.
Your email address, the recipient’s email address, and the contents of your message are all sent over to the SMTP client. Your emails will be sent if everything checks out okay.
What to look for in SMTP relay services
Here are some pointers to help you narrow down your options:
- Examine their documentation to check if their requirements are clear and easily comprehended.
- Choose email providers with a high level of service and resources. If you have a delivery problem, whether one message or 100,000, you have a reaction and a solution as fast as possible.
- Check a highly prominent social media platform like Twitter/Facebook to discover what, if anything, current or former customers are criticizing or raving about.
With the best SMTP server service, you can relax.
There is no warm-up time, provisioning process, or complicated server to configure when you sign up with idealSmtp: we’ve already done the hard work of building a reliable SMTP email infrastructure. You’ll be fully operational with lightning-fast mail delivery as well as a team of professionals once you’ve created your account.
