It used to be that to send an email, you had very few choices and even less control over what happened once the message was sent, how many emails you could send, or how you connected to the Internet to send email.  Well, times have changed, the Internet has evolved, users are more savvy, and expectations are much higher.

Today, LuxSci offers five different ways to send outbound email, each geared to particular uses and needs.  In this article, we will describe each method, examine the pros and cons, and end with a  feature chart.  Our goal is to make your outbound email shopping experience straightforward and to provide you with an email service appropriate for your needs.

Standard LuxSci SMTP Services

This is the oldest, most flexible, and most widely used service that LuxSci offers — it has been around since 1999.  If you order an account that contains an “SMTP License,” then you will be using our Standard SMTP service to send outbound email from your email program (i.e. Outlook, Thunderbird, Mobile Phone, etc.).  SMTP is very powerful and flexible, and offers:

• Support for sending email using your choice TLS or SSL for transmission security; this can be forced to only send messages using transport encryption.
• Support for sending email over a variety of alternate SMTP ports to get around firewall and ISPs blocks.
• Support for sending messages up to 200MB of total encoded size.
• Support for sending messages to up to 1000 recipients at once.
• Support for email anonymization, which hides your sending IP address, location, and computer/email program information.
• Support for all of LuxSci’s “standard outbound email processing tools”:
  • Captures copies of all sent email to an auditor, backup, or archival email address on a per-user and/or per-domain basis.
  • Controls the maximum sizes of sent email messages (to change default settings).
  • Integrates with basic and premium email message archival.
  • Adds personal or domain-wide taglines or disclaimers to the end of all outbound messages.
  • Automatically encrypts all or some outbound email using SecureLine end-to-end email encryption.
  • Scans the content of sent email messages for words, phrases, or regular expressions.  Matching messages can be blocked, sent to an auditor, or auto-encrypted.
  • Restricts your users from sending email to specific addresses or domains.
  • Restricts your users from sending to anyone but specific addresses or domains.
  • Restricts your users from receiving email from specific addresses or domains, or from all but specific addresses/domains.
  • Sends copies of all messages sent from an email client to your server-side sent email folder (no IMAP needed).
• An audit trail of all messages sent, including subjects, recipients, sizes, and message ID codes that can be downloaded and viewed in Excel.
• Tracking of sent messages for you in cases where there is a question as to delivery.
• Flexibility to send using any “From” address that you like.  Our acceptable use policy requires that this be an address that belongs to the sender.
• Connection to these services from any IP address in the world.

The limitations of the Standard SMTP service include:

• No support for bulk mailing of any kind, as per our acceptable use policy
• No more than 300 messages per user per day
• No more than 3000 recipients per user per day
• Authentication with a username and password is required for sending any messages.

LuxSci Standard SMTP with SmartHost User

Sometimes you need to use LuxSci as a smarthost — i.e. you need to have your server connect to ours, authenticate as one particular user, and forward all outbound messages sent by your users on your server though our server — and you need to use some of LuxSci’s “standard outbound email processing tools”.  High Volume outbound email does not support our oubound email processing tools.  Using Standard SMTP, you will quickly hit the limit on the maximum number of messages one user is allowed to send per day.

Solution

LuxSci’s Standard SMTP services come with the option of specifying that a user is being used as a “smarthost”.  In this case, the “From Address” of each message sent through that one user is taken to be the login of the actual user sending the message. Our system treats the message as if it were sent from that person, instead of the smarthost user.

Advantages:

• All standard outbound email tools work and behave as if the user denoted in the message “From” address actually sent the message him/herself via Standard SMTP.
• Each user’s sending is monitored and limited as per the Standard SMTP Limits.  If one user hits his/her message per day limit, then it will not affect any other users — even though all the messages are coming in through the same smarthost.
• Each user’s sending is logged in each user’s account — so you can easily get per-user audit trails and sending histories, just as if each user were sending through our servers directly using Standard SMTP.

Limitations of Smarthost:

• Each “From Address” must correspond to a user in your LuxSci account that has SMTP permissions.  If you have 1000 users on your server, you need to have these 1000 users mirrored in LuxSci so that the system can make the correspondence.
• No support for bulk mailing of any kind, as per our acceptable use policy.
• Each individual user can send no more than 300 messages per day.
• Each individual user can send to no more than 3000 recipients per day.
• Authentication with a username and password is required by the smarthost user for sending any messages.

LuxSci WebMail Services

WebMail has been around almost as long as Standard SMTP. If you have email hosting with LuxSci and prefer to use a web browser to login to our web site, then you can send outbound email using our fast AJAX-based WebMail interface.  This service is very powerful and flexible.  WebMail includes:

• Logging in over SSL for transmission security; this can be forced, so that you cannot send without transport encryption.
• No need for alternate ports — if you can reach our web site, then you can send.
• Alternate web-based interface, the Xpress portal, that works well on mobile phones and PDAs.
• No limit on the number of messages that you can send in a day.
• No limit on the number of recipients to whom you can send messages in a day.
• All email is anonymized — there is no record of your IP address, location, or computer/email program information.
• Support for all of LuxSci’s “standard outbound email processing tools”.
• An audit trail of all messages sent, including subjects.
• Tracking sent messages for you in cases where there is a question as to delivery.
• WebMail can be Private Labeled to look like your company and/or have your Logo and Colors.  In this case, you can also specify a custom “tagline” to all messages sent from WebMail.
• Sending with any “From” address that you like.  Our acceptable use policy just requires that this be an address you should be using
• Connecting to these services from any IP address in the world

Limitations of WebMail:

• Support for sending messages up to only 50MB is total raw size.
• Support for sending messages to up to only 90 recipients at once (30 each in the To, Cc, and Bcc fields).
• No support for bulk mailing of any kind, as per our acceptable use policy.
• Logging in with a username and password to one of our web-based interfaces is required for sending any messages.

LuxSci High Volume Outbound Email Service

This is one of the newest additions to the LuxSci service menu and allows for the sending of legitimate bulk email over SMTP. The advantages of High Volume email include:

• Supports the sending of legitimate bulk email
• Choosing your sending limits in terms of recipients per day and month and outbound bandwidth per day and month so that they meet your needs.
• Support for sending using your choice TLS or SSL for transmission security; this can be forced, so that you cannot send without transport encryption.
• Support for sending over a variety of alternate SMTP ports to get around firewall and ISPs blocks.
• Support for sending messages up to 100MB is total encoded size.
• Support for sending messages to up to 1000 recipients at once.
• Support for email anonymization, which hides your sending IP address, location, and computer/email program information.
• Audit trail of all messages sent, including subjects, recipients, sizes, and message ID codes.  This can be downloaded and viewed in Excel.
• Tracking of sent messages in cases where there is a question as to delivery.
• Adaptability as a smarthost for existing internal company email servers.
• Due due this being an SMTP-only service, it is very simple and easy to use and set up.
• Connecting to these services from any IP address in the world

Limitations of High Volume Email:

• The messages sent must meet our High Volume acceptable use policy.
• There is no support for any LuxSci’s “standard outbound email processing tools” (unless you use the “Premium High Volume” service).
• Each “From” address that you wish to use must be approved by LuxSci support; we will also approve entire domains.
• We will not approve the sending of any email that is “From” any free email address, i.e. like “gmail”, “hotmail”, “mail.ru”, “AOL”, etc.

LuxSci Outbound Message Filtering SMTP

Some of LuxSci’s premium email filtering services come with “Outbound Message Filtering“.  This can be used by customers using LuxSci SMTP and WebMail services or who wish to connect directly to the outbound filtering server instead of LuxSci’s normal SMTP servers which provide the Standard and High Volume SMTP services.

This SMTP service is the perfect solution when:

• Authentication with username and password is not required.
• Add standard tagline or disclaimer to the end of every message is required.
• Anti-virus scanning of outbound email is required.
• Monitoring of outbound email content for unwanted keywords or phrases and deny/quarantine/allow matching messages is required.
• Controlling the types and sizes of attachments that your users are allowed to send is required.
• TLS support on port 25 for transport encryption is required.
• Sending messages up to 100MB in total encoded size is required.
• No limit on the number of messages that you can send per day is required.

Significant limits to Outbound Message Filtering SMTP:

• (*)You can only send messages from IP addresses that your administrator has added to an “allow list”.  If you travel regularly or your address changes frequently, this solution will probably not work well.
• (*)There is no support for sending through alternate SMTP ports.  If you can’t use port 25, you are out of luck.
• (*)There is no way to enforce use of TLS when sending to be sure that transport encryption is always in effect.
• (*)No support for IP address/location anonymization.
• (*)No support for any of LuxSci’s “standard outbound email processing tools”.
• You can only send to up to 100 recipients per message.
• No tolerance for bulk mailing — you can can be shut down without notice if bulk mailing is detected.
• (*)No audit trail of sent messages accessible to users or account administrators.
• (*)Tracking sent messages for you in cases where there is a question as to delivery may take some time.
• You can only send from addresses in your domain.

(*) True unless you are also using LuxSci SMTP or WebMAil services.

Time To Compare!

To help you digest all of the information presented, we have assembled the most significant points in tabular format.  If you have any questions, please contact LuxSci Sales.

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