Transactional bulk email messages are those that have mostly similar content and which go out to recipients as needed.  These may be to the same set of recipients over and over, or to new recipients every time.  What makes them “bulk” is that the number of messages sent can be quite large … much larger than you could hope to send through a normal business email account.

Examples of transactional bulk email messages include:

• Payment receipts
• Password reminder emails
• Auto-responders
• Notifications
• Trial account follow up reminders
• Welcome or sign-up messages for your web site

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Generally, when you send an email message and it fails to be delivered, you get a “bounce back” to inform you of this.  This delivery failure notification system is inherent in the way email works and does a good job, in general.  However, it has some serious limitations:

• The failure notice is spam filtered or otherwise lost, you will never know the message wasn’t delivered.
• Email spoofing is prevalent and that can cause you to receive all kinds of “backscatter” failure notices about messages that you never sent.  As a result, you may be blocking or deleting failure messages or may merely not notice a real failure notice amidst the back scatter garbage.
• The failure messages are long and in varied formats.  It may be difficult for the average person to determine the actual reason for the failure.
• If you have many failure messages (e.g. because you are sending out a newsletter) it is hard to convert a bunch of failure messages into a list of failed recipients together with the reasons for the failures.
• It is not simple for a manager to get reports of send failures by his/her staff … which may be very important so that business opportunities are not lost.

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What happened to that email message that I sent 3 days ago?  It “never arrived!”.

Our Support team fields this kind of question on a daily basis.  Usually the message never arrived because the address was misspelled, the message was never actually sent, or it was filtered by the recipient’s servers.  There are many other reasons why messages “disappear” as well.

Customers sending email to mailing lists (e.g. those using LuxSci High Volume services), often want an easy way to find out what addresses failed and why, and to know for sure what messages were delivered properly.

Now, LuxSci customers can see for themselves exactly what messages have been sent and track them to learn what the disposition of any particular message to any recipient is at any time.  The new reporting tools are fast, easy, and no longer require the assistance of Support.

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Many major Internet Service Providers (e.g. AOL, Hotmail, MSN, Comcast, etc.) have FBLs “feedback loops” for reporting SPAM complaints by their users.  I.e. if a user “marks a message as Spam”, information about that message and the fact that it was considered “Spam” by the recipient can be sent back to the originating email server, for example LuxSci.

LuxSci has participated in feedback loops for a long time .  Now we have greatly extended our participation by:

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LuxSci is pleased to present our latest feature for improving the secure email experience for Microsoft Outlook users — the new SecureLine Plugin for Outlook!

This tool integrates the outbound encryption features of the LuxSci WebMail interface into Outlook versions 2007+, allowing our SecureLine users to easily send encrypted messages to any email address via SecureLine Escrow, TLS, PGP, or S/MIME (based on the recipient’s encryption capabilities).

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Frequently we are approached by customers who have automated systems that need to send out secured emails on demand and without any manual interaction.  These could be web site response systems for sensitive information, health care labs emailing results which need to meet HIPAA compliance, or other situations where the email messages must all be secured.

LuxSci’s SecureLine service provides a means for encrypting some or all outbound email messages using any combination of 4 different email encryption techologies: SMTP TLS, PGP, S/MIME, and SecureLine Escrow (secure message pickup).

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LuxSci has greatly revised its High Volume and Premium High Volume bulk mailing services based on customer feedback and people’s wish lists. We have made the pricing simple and straight forward and the service very flexible.

Basic High Volume Bulk Email

This service is for sending outbound email via SMTP. You can use it for corporate email, sending newlestters, smart hosting, and legitimate bulk mailing. The price is determined only by how many recipients you need to send to each month.  Prices range from $10/mo for 15,000 recipients/month to $240/mo for 200,000 recipients/month.  For larger quantities of recipients, we have dedicated servers starting at $250/month (with no setup fee).

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When sending outbound email from an email program (like Outlook or Thunderbird) or from a mobile device (like iPhone or Blackberry) that is not using Premium MobileSync, your program or device connects to our outbound email servers using an Internet protocol called “SMTP” (The Simple Mail Transport Protocol).

An email server, however, does lots of different things in addition to sending outbound email.  It may allow checking of email via POP or IMAP, or checking your address book using LDAP, or other things. So, when your email program connects to the server it has to specify what it wants to do (i.e. send an email).  It does this by connecting to a numbered “port” on the server.  Port number “25″ is the Internet standard for “regular outbound email”.

However, because port 25 is standard for outbound email, many ISPs, wifi networks, hotels, airports, and other locations that provide Internet access will arbitrarily block any connections to servers (except perhaps their own) on port 25 in order to stop spammers from using their services for the sending of spam, viruses, or malware and to prevent their IP addresses from being black listed.

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Public cloud servers are great for many things; however, sending email is not one of them.

Why Cloud Servers are Bad for Sending Email

The IP address spaces used by the major public cloud vendors (i.e. Amazon, Rackspace, etc.) for their cloud servers are well known and are generally black- or gray-listed by anti-spam systems. Additionally, many of the IP addresses in use by these systems are already “polluted” from previous abusive use by spammers.  When you set up a new cloud server, you could be easily assigned a “bad IP”.  Even if you do not inherit a bad IP reputation from the previous user(s) of your new IP, your server is still in the general set of IP addresses of the cloud and thus considered a possible spam source.

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The Beta period is over! LuxSci now offers its Mobile Sync service to all new and existing customers.

Mobile Sync provides real-time automatic synchronization of your LuxSci Calendars, Address Books, and Tasks with your mobile device(s).  Premium Mobile Sync also includes outbound email and Push Email for real-time email updates without the significant battery drain that IMAP and POP incur.  Mobile Sync is:

• Quick and easy to setup (easier than setting up a regular email account on your phone)
• Fast and reliable
• Very secure (available for use in HIPAA accounts).

New customers can select “Mobile Sync” when customizing their order/package.  Existing customers can add Mobile Sync using the “Upgrade Wizard” in their account administration area.

Read more: Mobile Sync at LuxSci.

Please contact LuxSci Sales if you have any questions.