" dedicated server Archives - LuxSci

Posts Tagged ‘dedicated server’

Infrastructure Requirements for Marketing and Transactional Email

Friday, June 14th, 2024

To design an appropriate email infrastructure, organizations must understand the types of emails they plan to send. Outside of regular business communications between colleagues, marketing and transactional emails are used to communicate externally with clients and customers. Although they are often lumped together, transactional and marketing emails serve different purposes and require different hardware configurations to successfully send emails with good deliverability.

marketing and transactional email

What are Marketing Emails?

Marketing emails primarily contain content intended for a commercial purpose, like advertisements, promotions, or other marketing messages. Marketing emails are sent to groups of contacts that are prospects or customers to influence them to make a purchase or take a commercial action.

Some examples of marketing emails include:

  • Customer newsletters
  • Promotional offers
  • Event invitations
  • Other types of sales communications

One significant difference between marketing and transactional emails is that recipients must explicitly opt-in to receive marketing emails. It is against CAN-SPAM rules to send unsolicited marketing emails to people who have not consented to receive them. The penalties for non-compliance can be quite severe. Always allow individuals to opt out of marketing emails to stay compliant.

What are Transactional Emails?

Transactional emails are messages that relate to previous interactions or commercial relationships with a company. Users trigger email sending by taking specific actions, and the emails contain only information that is critical and relevant to the recipient.

Examples of transactional emails include:

  • Transaction receipts
  • Order updates and shipping notifications
  • Password resets and security notifications
  • Appointment reminders
  • Review requests

Transactional emails facilitate an already agreed-upon transaction or update a customer about an ongoing transaction. Transactional messages are exempt from most provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act, and recipients do not have to opt in to receive emails. For example, when someone orders a pair of sneakers online, the company does not need permission to email them when the order ships out.

How do I know if an email is a transactional or marketing message?

The email content determines whether a message is transactional or marketing. Some emails can contain both messages. We recommend asking three questions to ensure compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act:

  1. What is the primary purpose of the message?
  2. Whom is the message sent to?
  3. Is the content misleading or deceptive?

First, what is the primary reason for sending the message? If the purpose is to remind a client of their upcoming appointment, that should be evident. Organizations can include a marketing message (perhaps offering them a coupon to use on additional services at their appointment). Still, the subject line and main message should emphasize the upcoming appointment.

Secondly, is there an existing relationship between the organization and the recipient? Did the recipient willingly join a mailing list? Or purchase a product from the company? The answer, in combination with the purpose of the email, will identify what type of mailing this is.

Finally, do not try and launder marketing messages as transactional emails. Sending an email with a misleading subject line like “Your Order Status” containing little to no information about a recent order is not permitted by CAN-SPAM.

Infrastructure Requirements

Most organizations need to send both types of email. The email sending requirements for sending bulk marketing emails differ from transactional emails. Marketing emails are one message sent in bulk to a large list of recipients. For example, a list of previous customers is sent an email promotion announcing a sale on sandals. Sending one email to thousands of recipients at the same time requires different memory and CPU than messages sent on a one-to-one basis. It typically does not matter if the sandal promotion reaches the recipient’s inbox at 10:00 am or 10:15 am. The message contents are not seriously time-sensitive. In the case of a marketing email, sending volume is more important than sending speed.

On the contrary, transactional emails are sent on a one-to-one basis and can be highly time-sensitive. Emails like password resets and order confirmations must arrive in the recipient’s inbox immediately after submission. This requires a different server configuration from marketing emails because speed is more important than sending volume. Designing different server configurations for marketing and transactional email is highly recommended to achieve sending goals.

At LuxSci, we design custom server configurations to meet the volume and throughput requirements for organizations of any size using our HIPAA compliant infrastructure.

HIPAA Requirements

Both marketing and transactional emails could fall under HIPAA regulations. Any communications that imply a relationship between a healthcare provider and a patient should be encrypted and follow HIPAA requirements. LuxSci provides both a Secure Email Marketing platform and Secure High Volume Email services to support the emailing requirements for HIPAA covered entities and their associates.

Contact LuxSci today to learn more about configuring an email infrastructure to support high volumes of marketing and transactional emails.

Tags: dedicated server, email marketing, email throughput, HIPAA email, marketing email, Transactional email
Posted in HIPAA Email Compliance, HIPAA Marketing
Comments Off on Infrastructure Requirements for Marketing and Transactional Email

8 Ways to Maximize Email Throughput: Send More Email, Faster

Tuesday, September 5th, 2023

Sending high volumes of email messages is more complex than sending a quick message to a colleague. To reach a large contact list in a timely manner, it’s essential to understand ways to maximize email throughput. In this article, we lay out eight best practices for sending more emails faster.

person sending emails on laptop

1. Use Concurrent Connections

When sending an email message, the emailing program connects to the servers, establishes its identity, and passes the message through. When sending emails in bulk, connecting to the server can take up a lot of time. For example, if you send 1,000 messages, the program must connect to the server 1,000 times. Many sending programs can be configured to make more than one connection at a time. If you make ten connections simultaneously (e.g., concurrently), you could send those messages about ten times faster. That is a significant speedup.

However, you don’t want to make too many concurrent connections. The more connections you make at once, the harder the server must work to process the mail. The server will become overloaded at some point, and the average time to send a message will increase. You want to avoid pushing the server to the point where it struggles to keep up with sending, as that will only make it operate slower. Instead, use a modest number of concurrent connections to take advantage of parallel sending and allow the server to efficiently process all the messages.

We recommend keeping concurrent connections to ten or fewer if you use public cloud servers and share capacity with other bulk senders. Single dedicated servers can support between 20-30 concurrent connections (or more depending on the factors discussed below), and dedicated server clusters can support as many as you need (depending on how large a cluster you have).

2. SMTP Pipelining

The next way to maximize email throughput involves utilizing SMTP pipelining. First, let’s look at the regular way messages are sent via SMTP:

  1. Connect to the SMTP server
  2. Establish SSL or TLS encryption, if configured
  3. Authenticate the sender’s identity and permission to send
  4. Upload the list of recipients and message content
  5. Disconnect

When sending small messages, the time taken by steps 1, 2, 3, and 5 is very significant relative to the time it takes to upload the message data. With SMTP pipelining, the connection is reused for successive messages. For example, when sending three messages, the process looks like this:

  1. Connect to the SMTP server
  2. Establish SSL or TLS encryption, if configured
  3. Authenticate your identity and permission to send
  4. Message 1: Upload the list of recipients and message content
  5. Message 2: Upload the list of recipients and message content
  6. Message 3: Upload the list of recipients and message content
  7. Disconnect

Not repeating the connect-authenticate-disconnect steps for every single message saves time and sends messages faster. SMTP pipelining should always be used if supported by your email-sending program and outbound email service.

3. Multiple Recipients in One Message

Imagine sending the same message to 1,000 recipients. If you send these one at a time and it takes one second to process, it takes almost 20 minutes to send 1,000 messages. Instead, if you include all recipients in the BCC line of a single message, it will take only about 1-2 seconds to upload the message to the server (though it will still take the server some time to deliver it to those recipients).

Sending messages to multiple recipients using BCC allows you to upload messages to the server much faster.

There are two downsides to this method:

  1. The received message may appear more SPAM-like since the recipient would not see their email address as the “To” recipient. BCCs are more SPAM-like than messages individually addressed (because it is so much easier and faster to send this way).
  2. A single message sent to 1,000 recipients may take longer to be delivered as the mail server will not generally parallelize delivery to the recipients but will process them sequentially. This may not be important if the delivery time is not time-sensitive.

LuxSci’s Secure High Volume service allows you to send to up to 1,000 recipients in each message. Customers with dedicated servers and clusters can have this limit increased to suit their business needs.

4. Smaller Messages are Better

A significant factor in maximizing email throughput is reducing the time it takes to upload each message to the server. To see the difference, let’s look at an example — sending a one-megabyte PDF to 1,000 people in 1,000 separate messages.

Case 1 – The PDF is attached to the message, and it takes ten seconds to upload the large message to the mail server. It takes 10,000 seconds (almost 3 hours) to send 1,000 messages with the attachment (unless you use some of the other strategies for maximizing throughput mentioned above).

Case 2 – The PDF is placed on a website, and a link is included in each message. The email message is only ten kilobytes (100 times smaller than in Case 1) and can be sent about 100 times faster. That’s less than 2 minutes without any other optimization.

As you can see from the example, it is best to remove images and other attachments from bulk messages to decrease the message size. Images can be hosted on a website and displayed in the message by linking rather than including the image content every time. Attachments that are not sensitive can be similarly hosted on a website and linked to. Reducing the size of your email messages significantly impacts sending speed and helps maximize email throughput.

5. Clean Mailing Lists are Important

Email messages should only be sent to contacts who have opted into communications or with whom you have established business relationships. These are the standard terms for using any reputable bulk mailing service.

Even if you follow the rules, mailing lists get stale as people change addresses, domain names go defunct, etc. Removing invalid addresses and only sending messages to clean mailing lists is imperative. Why?

  • Bad Domains. Sending an email to an email address whose domain name is no longer valid can delay sending while the program determines if the domain is bad. Determining that the domain is good and the email should be delivered takes less time. The delay caused by expired domain names can slow down your sending.
  • Defunct Addresses. Sending emails to invalid email addresses looks like spamming. Recipient servers like Yahoo!, AOL, McAfee, etc., are very sensitive to the number of messages that come through to defunct email addresses. If they see a lot of these, they will either block emails or slow down the rate at which they process them. This will result in more delays and potential non-delivery to valid recipients.
  • Waste of Time. Attempting to send messages to invalid recipients also wastes time and money.

You should take advantage of tools available to track what recipient email addresses are failing and actively remove them from your mailing lists.

6. Insecure Sending is Faster than Secure

While encrypting your username, password, and message contents is always recommended, this encryption will slow down email sending. It requires extra processing by the server and the sending machine. Using encryption also requires more bandwidth to transmit the data.

So, if you want to maximize email throughput, we recommend not using TLS or SSL when connecting to your bulk SMTP server. However:

  • Ensure that the username and password used to authenticate the message sending is not used for anything else. It is not your administrator user, the password is not one of your “standard” passwords, etc. You must assume that this username and password could be compromised.
  • Do not grant this user any permission except for sending emails. At LuxSci, you can restrict it from using the web interface and any other services.
  • Change the password often- weekly is recommended.
  • Use tools to check that no one else is using this credential to connect to your SMTP service. LuxSci provides alerts and reports about logins, which you can use to be sure that no one else is accessing this user account.

If the credentials are compromised, and you have followed these guidelines, the worst thing that could happen is that someone could send email through your account until you change the password or hit your sending limits.

7. Use an Appropriate Email Program

Many programs that are good for regular email sending are terrible for bulk email messages. Don’t bother trying to use Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Gmail, and similar programs to send high volumes of email if you are interested in sending speed or efficiency. Why? Such programs:

  • Generally, do not support concurrent connections
  • Might not support SMTP pipelining
  • Cannot efficiently handle large mailing lists (more than hundreds of recipients)
  • Get bogged down and can be very slow when sending many messages

These programs are not designed or optimized for high volume sending. Instead, use a program explicitly designed for bulk mailing, like LuxSci’s Secure High Volume or Secure Marketing, which supports maximizing outbound email throughput in the ways outlined above.

8. Increase Capacity

If you try the above solutions and still need faster delivery times, you may need to increase your outbound server’s sending capacity. At LuxSci, we offer tiers of capacity that allow you to create a fully custom solution to meet any throughput requirement:

  • Shared – Your account shares a single server with multiple other accounts. The server’s capacity is shared, and your sending throughput (i.e., maximum concurrent connections, maximum recipients/month, etc.) is restricted to maintain enough capacity for other customers. Your outbound IP reputation is also shared with others.
  • Dedicated – A dedicated server gives you complete control over the sending server resources and IP address. You get all the capacity to yourself and thus can attain a much higher throughput. Your IP address is not subject to other customer’s actions to help you maintain a good reputation.
  • Cluster – A dedicated server cluster may be a good solution if you need to send many messages very quickly. It consists of two or more outbound servers behind a load balancer. The more servers you put in the cluster, the higher your throughput can be. Another benefit of a dedicated server cluster is having multiple sending IP addresses for reputation management and failover to make your sending more resilient.

Which option is best? It depends on the number of recipients you want to reach per month. Also, if you need to send to large numbers of recipients in a very short time frame, you may need a dedicated or cluster solution. LuxSci’s team of email experts can help design the correct configuration to suit your throughput requirements. Contact us today to get started.

Tags: bcc, concurrent connections, dedicated server, email list clean up, email list hygiene, email spam, high volume, multiple recipients, outbound email, secure high volume, secure marketing, smtp, SMTP Pipelining, ssl, tls
Posted in Business Solutions, Dedicated & Cloud Servers, HIPAA Marketing, LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email
No comments »

The Benefits of Dedicated IP Addresses vs. Shared

Thursday, December 22nd, 2022

Choosing a dedicated or shared IP address may seem like an inconsequential decision, but it can significantly impact the effectiveness of your patient engagement efforts. Learn why dedicated IP addresses are preferred for transactional and marketing emails in the healthcare industry.

dedicated ip address

What is a Dedicated IP Address?

An IP address is a string of unique characters that can be found in the headers of your sent emails. Internet service providers use them to identify the origin of the email message. ISPs use the IP address’s reputation to determine if the message is spam and should be delivered to the recipient.

Dedicated IP addresses belong to your organization and cannot be used by other customers of your email service provider. By having a dedicated IP address, the server’s reputation and delivery power are a function only of the organization’s sent mail. Dedicated IP addresses have several advantages, including:

  • No shared resources with other senders
  • Reputation management and brand safety
  • Improved email deliverability
  • Easier to troubleshoot blacklisting issues

We will discuss the benefits of dedicated IP addresses and what they mean for your organization later.

What is a Shared IP Address?

In contrast, a shared IP address does not belong to your organization and is shared among the customers of an email service provider. Shared IPs are the default option for many email service providers. Upgrading to a dedicated IP usually incurs an additional fee, so many organizations get started using a shared IP address. It is a cost-effective solution for some smaller organizations with limited or small sending needs. No IP warm-up is required since the address is active and in use, meaning it’s easy to start sending quickly. However, as organizations grow and their sending needs increase, they may be frustrated with the following:

  • Slow email delivery
  • Undelivered emails
  • Emails frequently flagged as spam
  • Blacklisted IP addresses

When email becomes a critical business channel, it’s often time to switch from a shared IP to a dedicated solution.

The Benefits of Dedicated IP Addresses for Patient Engagement Emails

Healthcare organizations that rely on email should strongly consider using dedicated IP addresses to improve trust and ensure critical communications are sent on time and are received in patients’ inboxes. If patients cannot receive critical information about appointments, prescriptions, or other healthcare needs, it will negatively impact their experience and may cause them to choose another provider.

No shared resources with other senders

When sending substantial quantities of time-sensitive emails, your sending speed may be limited by others using a shared IP address. Important emails (like password resets and appointment reminders) can get stuck in long sending queues, and you will have no control over when the messages are sent out. In contrast, you have complete control over your sending speed and resources when using a dedicated IP address (or multiple IP addresses). External users will never slow you down.

Reputation management and brand safety

Another perk of using a dedicated IP address is that you can match it to your company’s DNS records. To do this, your mail server’s IP address to send outbound emails must have a “Reverse DNS.” This is the responsibility of the email service provider (at LuxSci, we set this up automatically). If set up incorrectly or missing, you will have significant deliverability issues.

When someone performs a reverse DNS lookup on a company’s dedicated IP address, it will clearly identify the sender and provides additional information about the company. This data builds trust and improves your reputation with ISPs.

Improved email deliverability

The main reason many choose dedicated IP addresses is to improve the deliverability of their emails. If email service providers do a terrible job vetting their customers and allow spammers to use their service, bad actors can quickly contaminate reliable IP addresses. When using dedicated IP addresses, you can control the IP warm-up process and prevent employees from engaging in spammy practices. By having full control over your IP reputation, you can improve the deliverability of your emails and prevent them from being flagged as spam.

Easier to troubleshoot blacklisting issues

Though most ISPs will not acknowledge “whitelists,” senders using dedicated IP addresses can subscribe to Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL) programs to help minimize complaint rates. If you participate, ISPs will forward complaints from users about emails sent from your organization’s IP addresses.

Even if you can’t get on a whitelist, understanding when and why your IP address is blacklisted is valuable information. When using a shared IP, it’s impossible to know why it was blacklisted. Another user could have sent spammy content, used a paid list, or sent a large mailing to an old contact list. To get off the blacklist, troubleshooting the issue, fixing it, and avoiding future mistakes are essential to increasing reputation and staying out of the spam filter. It’s easier to identify which emails are generating spam complaints when you aren’t sharing IP addresses.

Conclusion

Consider using dedicated IP addresses if your organization uses email for patient engagement efforts. They provide the reliability and reputational benefits you need to execute these campaigns at scale. Contact us today to learn more about how to engage patients with personalized email campaigns.

Tags: dedicated ip, dedicated server, email deliverability, email delivery, email spam, ip address, patient engagement, spam complaint
Posted in HIPAA Email Compliance, HIPAA Marketing, LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email
Comments Off on The Benefits of Dedicated IP Addresses vs. Shared

Send Fast, Send More – High Volume Bulk Email Server Clusters

Wednesday, June 8th, 2022

LuxSci’s Secure High Volume bulk emailing service provides excellent deliverability for HIPAA-compliant mass mailings, including newsletters, appointment reminders, and other types of transactional emails. Using email server clusters is an effective way to send high volumes of email in a scalable manner.

It is often the case that customers require either:

  • Sending to large numbers of recipients (millions to tens of millions or more in a month)
  • Sending many messages quickly (in short bursts)

In either case, the mail server needs to handle large numbers of concurrent connections and process large mail queues quickly.

Read the rest of this post »

Tags: bulk email, bulk mailing, cluster, dedicated server, deliverability, high volume, server, server cluster, speed, throughput
Posted in Business Solutions, HIPAA Marketing
No comments »

What is Managed Web Hosting?

Tuesday, January 18th, 2022

When setting up a new website, users must decide how it will be hosted. In this article, we discuss some of the options with a special focus on HIPAA compliance.

managed web hosting

Read the rest of this post »

Tags: dedicated server, hipaa, hipaa compliance, hipaa compliant web host, managed web hosting, self hosted, web hosting
Posted in Dedicated & Cloud Servers
Comments Off on What is Managed Web Hosting?

« Older Entries