Not so Simple Mail Transfer Protocol - Mon, 28 Mar 2016

@Sparkpost to the rescue. As I recently mentioned, it’s been over 4 years since my last Behold Newsletter. This was something that I really had intended to get going again.

In 2010, I was having trouble with the mailing service that I had been using, and I started looking for a new one. Back then I selected LuxSci. They worked well for a while, but then when the Netfirms site moved, they had some glitches and they couldn’t handle bounces any more, so I had to pay for and set up an email account at LuxSci simply to accept the bounce emails so that I could process them and remove the bad addresses from my list.

For another year or so, I continued to use that SMTP service. I was paying a monthly fee whether I used it or not, plus the monthly fee for the bounce email address. But that I could have lived with.

The real problem was the sending of the newsletters. About 300 or so would go out fine in batches of 60 and then it would stall. I’d have to manually restart it, and maybe another 400 would go. Then again, and again. I remember it took me all night once to get all the newsletters out, and I had to babysit it. That was no good.

I spent a couple of weeks going through the phpmailer code. Ugh. Did I ever tell you I really really really hate the PHP language. Well, I do. And I spent days on it and tested it 100 times and couldn’t get it to work any better. I couldn’t spend any more time on this, so I let it lay dormant for a while.

Over the next couple of years, I looked for another solution, and thought I had found one. It was called Mandrill. It was recommended to me by someone technical I know who was using it. It was more than just an SMTP service, but had a programmers interface built into it. The sweet thing was the pricing. “The first 12,000 emails per month are always free.” After that, it was 20 cents per thousand. How could I go wrong? I was ready to go with it.

But I never quite got to that point. I spent the last couple of years developing Versions 1.1. and 1.2 of Behold without the opportunity to breathe and set up the new system for the newsletter. When I started working on version 1.2.1 about 4 months ago, I said to myself that I’m definitely going to start the newsletter up again after I release this version. And then I’d implement Mandrill.

About 2 months ago Mandrill suddenly changed its pricing structure. They went to $9.95 a month for 25,000 emails. That was still bearable. But shortly after they changed again and started selling in blocks of 25,000 emails for $20 a block. And with that, they decided they’d use Mandrill to promote their parent service MailChimp and now required a subscription to the MailChimp service at $20 a month to use Mandrill. Okay, now I’m completely done over with this company before I even got started. Others were upset as well: ”In hostile move, Mandrill gives all developers 60 days to switch to paid Mailchimp service”.

So it was time to look for something else. There were a few companies trying to take advantage of Mandrill’s faux pas. The one I noticed first was Pepipost. Note the bar at the top of the screenshot of their page which says: “Coming from Mandrill? Meet the Free Alternative”:

That sounded cool. 25,000 free emails a month. So I tweeted:

Shortly after I tweeted that, I saw this tweet: (**Note: Before reading too much into this tweet, see the comment by Sachin of Pepipost as well as my response)

So I took a look at Mailgun and Sparkpost. Sparkpost had an unbelievable offer:

I went down there, found Sparkpost is the SMTP service for programmers using the same fantastic platform that their parent company Message Systems uses. And they’re serious about helping developers as well.

Okay. Did it work? Well, it took me a couple of hours to set everything up. What I didn’t know was whether the 300 to 400 email jam-up 4 years ago was something on my end (Netfirms or phpmailer) or if it was the fault of LuxSci. So then the big test. I sent them out and help my breath. And wow! They were going out, uninterrupted at a rate of 3,500 per hour! No more staying up all night and babysitting. It was simple and it worked.

This was using SMTP to send out each email individually exactly as I had been doing it previously with LuxSci, but without the glitches. This should do me well until I get close to the 100,000 free limit. When I do, I’ll likely spend some time to use Sparkpost’s Application Programming Interface (API) tools and send the newsletter to them just once along with a list of the recipients which should speed things up even more. I’m not yet sending the bounces back to my website to automatically handle them, and I will set that up for a future mailing. For now I just manually downloaded them to a file.

So 4 years went by and I had about 10% bounces (i.e. people on my list who changed email addresses) that I’ve now deleted from my Newsletter list. This agrees with the natural decay rate of about 2.5% per year that I’ve observed in the past.

Hopefully Sparkpost will serve me well up to 100,000 mailings a month and beyond.