Hey All,
Today I'm going to rant a little bit about the email setup for RpNation.com:
Emails are usually a mission critical system for just about any online service where someone can sign up and make an account, where it's a social media site, forum, business, what have you.
For us emails are:
So you may be wondering: "What the hell is this derp talking about, and why doesn't he just make a Gmail account?"
Well...that is not how emails work for sites unfortunately. What we've been doing for a while is letting another company/service handle all of our emails because each email provider has different requirements. This is what determines if we can send you emails, reach or not reach spam and so forth depending on who you have. It also means, and this is the most important part, that they deal with spam reports with these providers for you so you don't get blocked as quickly. However, as you've all seen in the past we used Mandrill, one of the most popular services for emails out there (apart from Amazon SES, as well as a few others).
However that was easily starting to become $250+ so after about a year and a half of using them it just became too costly. Last year, as some of you may remember, we had a similar email issue as the one most recent one in which users wouldn't get their emails. We spent hundreds of hours getting the AOL ban lifted and to get every other email provider to send our emails directly to inboxes and not to your spam folder.
Now don't get me wrong, the reason why sites use these kinds of service is because not of resources (we have more then enough to do our own email servers) which we did and failed because it's just impossible to keep up with spam reports.
Several users who opted into conversation email alerts whenever they got a new response to either a PM or a reply on a thread began to mark our emails as spam because they didn't know any better. This marking of our emails as spam resulted in us getting us banned from sending emails to hotmail addresses entirely (that includes, live, outlook and other hotmail based email services).
These users didn't mean any harm as they were just cleaning up their inbox as they explained to me. But, after doing reporting our emails as spam 500+ times, we got nuked over night. Ergo the self doing of email servers didn't last long. We were proud when we were able to ditch Mandrill and lower site operation costs, which you all saw when it drop down to $350/mo.
Even so, returning to Mandrill was not an option because they are closing that branch of their service and merging it with their other product which is useless to us, Amazon SES is super expensive. Running it ourselves isn't a viable option as we can't keep up with reports from these companies to prevent ourselves from being banned, having to appeal, and then to reply to every email in a timely manner is just not possible.
The Solution:
Since we can't do our own email service due to the aforementioned issues and mandrill died on its face, we did our search and found a company called sparkpost.com. They do the email handling for Paypal and Twitter as well as a host of other large sites too numerous to mention. Their pricing is very competitive to other email service sites. For the same service we were getting from Mandrill at $250+, Sparkpost will do for $60-$65 so it's a godsend. We actually switched services before writing this post.
Temporary Problem:
So yes, Sparkpost is great and all, so why are we still having issues? New accounts have a daily sending limit of 10k emails. Obviously, we hit that instantly.
I already contacted them and it will take two business days to raise the daily sending limit, that's as fast as they are willing to go with a new account on their platform since they have to make sure we meet the requirements of their compliance team.
Cost:
I know we were all enjoying the site being cheaper to maintain (which means we need less money from users) and it will remain that way for as long as we can manage it. The costs for Sparkpost are being swept away as another hidden cost by the admin team (@Mordecai to be exact, who was more than generous enough to go on Sparkpost and put her card on it, so make sure to give her a thanks.). So for as long as she, the administration and I can afford it, this fee for Sparkspot won't be appearing on the monthly required costs to run the site even though it's very important.
So fear not, site costs will not go up for now. Huzzah!
Registration:
So while members are not going to get emails for notifications for the next 2 business days except for the first 10k lucky emails to go out, what does this mean for new user registration? We don't want to have the site stop growing and for users to be locked out so until Sparkpost is done completely setting us up, accounts will not require email verification. Instead, new users will require an admin to manually approve their registration. This method will obviously be a little slower but it means the site won't stop getting new users in. Once Sparkpost is finished setting up, that restriction will be lifted from new accounts and new user registration will return to the normal method of signing up then getting a confirmation email.
If you have any questions/feedback/concerns feel free to post below
!
Today I'm going to rant a little bit about the email setup for RpNation.com:
Emails are usually a mission critical system for just about any online service where someone can sign up and make an account, where it's a social media site, forum, business, what have you.
For us emails are:
- Registration Confirmation Emails (You need these to verify your account)
- Lost Password Requests
- Possible Two Step Verification (Some of our staff use these and the app, as well as users. You can secure your account here if you want, it means your account can't be taken if someone steals your password
- Opt In Notification for Threads
- Opt in Notifications for Conversations
- Among some other things that users can opt into (like when they are @ tagged)
So you may be wondering: "What the hell is this derp talking about, and why doesn't he just make a Gmail account?"
Well...that is not how emails work for sites unfortunately. What we've been doing for a while is letting another company/service handle all of our emails because each email provider has different requirements. This is what determines if we can send you emails, reach or not reach spam and so forth depending on who you have. It also means, and this is the most important part, that they deal with spam reports with these providers for you so you don't get blocked as quickly. However, as you've all seen in the past we used Mandrill, one of the most popular services for emails out there (apart from Amazon SES, as well as a few others).
However that was easily starting to become $250+ so after about a year and a half of using them it just became too costly. Last year, as some of you may remember, we had a similar email issue as the one most recent one in which users wouldn't get their emails. We spent hundreds of hours getting the AOL ban lifted and to get every other email provider to send our emails directly to inboxes and not to your spam folder.
Now don't get me wrong, the reason why sites use these kinds of service is because not of resources (we have more then enough to do our own email servers) which we did and failed because it's just impossible to keep up with spam reports.
Several users who opted into conversation email alerts whenever they got a new response to either a PM or a reply on a thread began to mark our emails as spam because they didn't know any better. This marking of our emails as spam resulted in us getting us banned from sending emails to hotmail addresses entirely (that includes, live, outlook and other hotmail based email services).
These users didn't mean any harm as they were just cleaning up their inbox as they explained to me. But, after doing reporting our emails as spam 500+ times, we got nuked over night. Ergo the self doing of email servers didn't last long. We were proud when we were able to ditch Mandrill and lower site operation costs, which you all saw when it drop down to $350/mo.
Even so, returning to Mandrill was not an option because they are closing that branch of their service and merging it with their other product which is useless to us, Amazon SES is super expensive. Running it ourselves isn't a viable option as we can't keep up with reports from these companies to prevent ourselves from being banned, having to appeal, and then to reply to every email in a timely manner is just not possible.
The Solution:
Since we can't do our own email service due to the aforementioned issues and mandrill died on its face, we did our search and found a company called sparkpost.com. They do the email handling for Paypal and Twitter as well as a host of other large sites too numerous to mention. Their pricing is very competitive to other email service sites. For the same service we were getting from Mandrill at $250+, Sparkpost will do for $60-$65 so it's a godsend. We actually switched services before writing this post.
Temporary Problem:
So yes, Sparkpost is great and all, so why are we still having issues? New accounts have a daily sending limit of 10k emails. Obviously, we hit that instantly.
I already contacted them and it will take two business days to raise the daily sending limit, that's as fast as they are willing to go with a new account on their platform since they have to make sure we meet the requirements of their compliance team.
Cost:
I know we were all enjoying the site being cheaper to maintain (which means we need less money from users) and it will remain that way for as long as we can manage it. The costs for Sparkpost are being swept away as another hidden cost by the admin team (@Mordecai to be exact, who was more than generous enough to go on Sparkpost and put her card on it, so make sure to give her a thanks.). So for as long as she, the administration and I can afford it, this fee for Sparkspot won't be appearing on the monthly required costs to run the site even though it's very important.
So fear not, site costs will not go up for now. Huzzah!
Registration:
So while members are not going to get emails for notifications for the next 2 business days except for the first 10k lucky emails to go out, what does this mean for new user registration? We don't want to have the site stop growing and for users to be locked out so until Sparkpost is done completely setting us up, accounts will not require email verification. Instead, new users will require an admin to manually approve their registration. This method will obviously be a little slower but it means the site won't stop getting new users in. Once Sparkpost is finished setting up, that restriction will be lifted from new accounts and new user registration will return to the normal method of signing up then getting a confirmation email.
If you have any questions/feedback/concerns feel free to post below
!
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) (:*)
)s for you all.
