Switching From SparkPost To A Team That Runs It

Not exactly, starting with pricing: it is based on delivery, not seats. You pay for mail that actually reaches somebody: a flat monthly figure with a clear rate above it. There is no contact count to police, no per user pricing, and no tier you get moved into because your customer base grew last quarter.

Yes. Give us the address and roughly when the message should have gone out, and we will tell you whether it was accepted, bounced, or rejected, and what the receiving server said about it. This is the question that makes delivery logs worth keeping. Without them, the honest answer to it is a shrug.

Everything comes with you. Your DNS records stay on your domain because they were always yours, and we hand over your templates, suppression list, and sending history in a standard format. Thirty days’ notice ends the service. We will also tell you what to point your site at next so your mail does not simply stop.

Your application sends it to one person, because that person did something. A receipt after checkout. A password reset. Shipping notices, account verifications and order confirmations all sit in the same category. None of it is scheduled by anybody. Somebody is on the other end waiting for it, which is why a few minutes of delay, or a spam folder placement, comes back to you as a support ticket.

Tolerance, mostly. Marketing mail goes out to a list on a schedule, and anybody on that list can opt out of it. Transactional mail goes to one person who did something, and nobody can reasonably opt out of a receipt they are owed. Put a newsletter in the promotions tab and you have lost an opportunity. Put a password reset there and you have locked a customer out of their own account.

Because they leave your web server unsigned. WordPress hands the message to whatever host it happens to be running on, stamps it with an address on your domain, and publishes nothing that says the host is allowed to send as you. A mailbox provider reads that as a message that might be forged, and filters it. Send the same mail down an authenticated path with the records published and most of that disappears. What remains is reputation, and reputation takes a little longer.

It is the share of your mail that reaches an inbox instead of a spam folder or a rejection. Delivery rate, bounce rate and complaint rate are the numbers we track, and we keep watching past them for the placement problems those rates can hide. A message can be accepted by the receiving server and filed straight into spam anyway. So acceptance, on its own, measures very little.

Above 99 percent delivered is normal for transactional mail. Anything under 98 percent is worth opening up. Bounces belong below 2 percent and complaints below 0.1 percent, because both feed straight into how providers treat everything else you send. The looser benchmarks quoted for marketing campaigns do not transfer here: a receipt goes to somebody who handed you their address minutes earlier, so the address should be good.

A subdomain, and it comes with the service. Application mail on its own subdomain builds its own reputation, kept apart from the address your staff write to customers from. That separation earns its keep on a bad week. If a run of dead addresses causes trouble, the trouble stays on the subdomain, your primary domain is untouched, and your team carries on emailing customers normally while we sort it out.

Three DNS records, and between them they prove the mail is really yours. SPF lists the servers allowed to send for your domain. DKIM signs each message, so tampering shows. DMARC tells a provider what to do with a message that fails either of the other two. Publishing all three is table stakes now. Getting them aligned with one another is the part that trips people up.

Twenty five thousand delivered emails a month. A store taking a few hundred orders usually sits well under that, even with order confirmations, shipping notices and account mail counted together. Guessing at the figure up front helps nobody, so we tell you where your volume actually landed after the first full month.