Email under own domain name is the most complex and least discussed part of a website. It is possible to instruct a person to install the required packages on a server and run WordPress (or just use some shared hosting) but properly configuring the email under your domain name demands many years of experience. When we are talking around configuring the email under our domain name for Email Marketing, the work becomes more difficult. Most of the hosting providers often bundle many essential services into their packages including email hosting services so that the customers automatically get unlimited email accounts against their domain without paying anything. This “free email” service uses the server of the host and this is what we are talking about to avoid.
What are the downfalls of using your host for email marketing
Email plays an important role in digital life as it is the primary medium to keep you and your customer’s informed. Most of the agencies have designers and developers who do not have the knowledge to setup the mail server properly. It means that you may have:
- Huge spam in inbox
- Security vulnerabilities
- Your sent email landing in the receivers’ spam boxes
- Poor delivery rate
- Email address marked by the third parties as spammy
- Domain marked by the third parties as spammy
There are serious issues and can affect your business. The spam detectors use is the IP address of your web server. That is important if you send emails from there. Small businesses typically opt for cost-saving plans which are readily available. In this kind of setup, you are tied to an IP address that your host has configured for outgoing email. If a client suddenly spamming, there is a chance the IP address could get blacklisted for spam. Web host blocks the emails marked by third parties as spam before they are even sent out. It is near impossible to dig what is happening.
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Too many parameters to configure
There are too many things to properly configure (they are designed to decrease spams and fraudulent emails) such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DMARC, DKIM for different reasons. Many of these things are under development and standard often change :
1 | https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/27910/txt-vs-spf-record-for-google-servers-spf-record-either-or-both |
DMARC is an important thing to set up and that is difficult to set up when you are using a web host’s mail server.
There are a lot of testing tools of these parameters only for testing the deployment. It is extremely difficult for an individual or a small business to set up the mail server side which will properly work forever.
In short – it is impractical to use the free email under the own domain name offered as a bundle by the web hosts (or install some free software on their server). When we are sending a ton of emails, then we need to regularly check all of the parameters. Emails consume a lot of places and proper encryption is not easy. These are some of the reasons why we never publish a guide on “how to configure mail server on CentOS/Ubuntu”.
What is the solution?
A web hosting server is not for becoming an mail server for email marketing. If you are sending bulk emails then:
- Either use a third-party professional email marketing software
- Or use a transactional email service provider
- Or use both of the above
You need to invest the required time to configure things like that of DMARC. But in this case, you need not think about server-side configuration, wrongly getting marked as spammy, space and most importantly – security breach.
Apart from the technical part, find and read the blogs on email marketing from CopyBlogger, ProBlogger, IntercoolStudio and so on.
Conclusion
What peoples will commonly ask – what you recommend which is free or cheap. GSuite and Zoho once had limited free services which no longer available. Hover charges 5USD/year and Namecheap charges 10USD/yr for hosting email. The free tier of SendGrid (transactional email service), AWS (transactional email service) are some options you can also think about. However, these mentioned are not what are known as “Email Marketing Software”. Regardless of your industry or business, email marketing can help you to expand your brand and you should think about SendX, SendinBlue, Active Campaign, HubSpot, MailChimp, Aweber to name a few. Some of the providers included Artificial intelligence for certain tasks, some offer intelligent personalized emails.
