My team and I are getting to close to launching our startup. We were discussing our traffic strategies today and added email to the list - basically, users can sign up for our daily emails.<p>Basically, our startup will need to handle large scale email delivery in-house. Only problem is we have no idea where to start on this.<p>Any help as to where to start reading/looking? Servers, IPs...?
I tend to use a slicehost slice to do my own outbound mail (I use Google Apps for all inbound).<p>Assuming you have a slice first you'll need to set up your DNS entry pointing to the slice and a reverse DNS entry in the slicehost manager. See these resources for more information:<p><a href="http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/9/2/mail-server-slice-setup" rel="nofollow">http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/9/2/mail-server-slice-set...</a>
<a href="http://articles.slicehost.com/2007/10/24/creating-a-reverse-dns-record" rel="nofollow">http://articles.slicehost.com/2007/10/24/creating-a-reverse-...</a>.<p>Next set up an SPF record for your domain to legitimize your new mail server:<p><a href="http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/8/8/email-setting-a-sender-policy-framework-spf-record" rel="nofollow">http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/8/8/email-setting-a-sende...</a><p>Finally you'll want to install the mail server software and configure it. I have a blog post that shows the standard config needed to configure the mail server and set up DKIM and DomainKeys to help your mail look legitimate:<p><a href="http://blog.nimbu.net/setting-up-a-postifx-outbound-mail-server-wit" rel="nofollow">http://blog.nimbu.net/setting-up-a-postifx-outbound-mail-ser...</a><p>Check out the links at the bottom of the article for more information about DKIM and DomainKeys.
I guess the first question is, do you really need to handle it in-house (especially as you acknowledge your limitations). Outsourcing to an email service will cost cash, rather than time, in a period when you have more time than cash, but may still be worth it.<p>An out-of-the box solution for a few hundred dollars a month may tick this item off a crowded to-do list, and shift developer time from database creation / html editors / unsubscribe handling / deliverability reports etc to something more productive for your business.<p>Edit: Or have I misunderstood the question?
I tend to use mailman for my newsletters. It has a templating system where you can modify the pages.<p>For example:<p><a href="http://lists.exentriquesolutions.com/listinfo/xp-dev-newsletter" rel="nofollow">http://lists.exentriquesolutions.com/listinfo/xp-dev-newslet...</a><p>Give a shout if you need some pointers on getting the templates customised.<p>The only thing is you don't get things like hit ratios etc. You will have to track those yourself. Additionally, you have to worry about things like SPF and domainkeys.<p>I did some research, and there is PHPList which some people swear by, but I found it a bit clunky.
How many emails will you send? You can setup a small server on slicehost, run a smtp server (you set it up) and write something like a quick rails app to do the work. I believe the cheapest slice on slicehost would be fine at $20 a month. Or go with Heroku and launch a rails app on it for free. It might have enough power to send out daily emails using a Sendgrid service. Sendgrid solutions are basically SMTP servers that handle a lot of things like analytics for you. Easy REST API and ridiculously simple integration with Heroku would be awesome.
Try... SendGrid, MailChimp, etc.<p>I definitely recommend using one of these email service providers (ESPs) until you're sending enough emails to justify the time/cost of setting up your own email service.
Our company is in a similar situation. We're currently looking into <a href="http://www.port25.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.port25.com/</a> (a software solution for $x,xxx) and <a href="http://www.strongmail.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.strongmail.com/</a> (a hardware/software solution for $xx,xxx).