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Why You Should Separate Your Transactional and Your Marketing Email Sending

Tuesday, March 4th, 2025

A typical healthcare organization sends at least two distinct classes of email messages: business or transactional emails and marketing emails.

Transactonal email consists of all of the individual, personal messages sent by sales, support, billing and other departments to specific people. These messages are generally more time sensitive and it is very important that the recipients actually receive them. These messages should not be delayed by any kind of spam filtering software, if possible.

Marketing emails are messages sent in bulk to many people at once. Examples of marketing messages include company newsletters, new product offers, promotions and ads, status notices, etc. You will need HIPAA compliant email marketing for this if you are marketing into the healthcare market

Separating your transactional and marketing emails can help ensure they are reliably delivered. Using different email servers and maybe even a unique domain name can improve your email deliverability. This post will look at why.

 

Separate Transactional and Marketing Email to Improve Deliverability

Successful marketing includes building your brand reputation in the eyes of your current and would-be customers or patients. However, by its very nature, sending marketing email can damage the reputation of your email address, domain, and email servers. It doesn’t have to, but it can … and it can happen in unexpected ways.

Spam Complaints

  1. The larger your marketing mailing list is, the more people are on it who do not really want your email. This is a fact of email marketing, even if you abide by the CAN-SPAM Act and have an “opt-in” list.
  2. The more often you send email to your mailing lists, the more often these people will be annoyed by your email messages.
  3. Some of these annoyed people will complain that your email is “spam,” instead of using the unsubscribe link. This is because they are either too lazy to opt-out, annoyed by the message, don’t believe the opt-opt will work, or never even bothered to look to see if they could opt-out.

This all contributes to the generation of spam complaints. Receiving many spam complaints can cause email servers to start blocking your emails. This can be based on either your email content, your sending email address, or your sending email server IP address.

It is best to keep your complaint rate to a minimum by monitoring your complaint feed back loops, opting out anyone who complains and maintaining active mailing lists that contain only opted-in parties.

Spam Content

By its very nature, the types of email that fall into the bulk email marketing category share many common characteristics. Email filtering software is sophisticated and can often tell the difference between a marketing message and a business message. Sending many messages with spam-like qualities to a recipient server can result in your email being delayed, filtered, or blocked.

Spam-like content detection can be something as simple as the text of the required section of your email that indicates how to “opt-out.” Many legitimate messages can be classified as spam-like simply due to the nature of pattern recognition.

Email Delivery Throughput

Transactional email messages are classified as “transactional.” They are unique messages usually sent throughout the day to individuals. Marketing email messages are called “bulk” emails, meaning the same message is sent in large batches to multiple recipients in short time frames.

The sending of marketing messages can place a significant burden on your outbound email sending servers. Sending many messages within a short time frame can degrade performance and cause your business email to be delivered much more slowly if they are sharing the same outbound service.

Many marketing emails cannot be immediately delivered to the recipients and are placed in a queue to retry over time. For large marketing email lists (and especially in cases where your sending server is getting blacklisted) this can result in large email queues which slow down the delivery of both business and marketing email if sent from the same server.

Blacklisting

An all-too-common side effect of marketing email is having the sending email server blacklisted. When your server is blacklisted, by say yahoo.com, then all email to recipients at that domain will fail to be delivered. If you are sending transactional email through the same server as your marketing email then your transactional email to these same folks will also fail. This is the most critical reason why you should use separate servers for transactional and marketing email.

But how could you get blacklisted?

  • If your mailing lists have bad email addresses on them. E.g. non-opt in, purchased, spam trap, spidered, or other addresses that you should never email.
  • If your mailing addresses have lots of invalid email addresses on them. E.g. the list is very old and includes defunct addresses.
  • Your email content is frequently flagged as spam-like.

It is true that the larger your list and the more you send, the more likely you are to get blacklisted, unless you are careful about managing your subscriber base.

Shared Email Services

If you share outbound email servers with other customers of your provider, then your sending can be impacted by their behavior. If they are sending spam and get the server blacklisted, then that affects your emails as well. The only thing that protects you in these cases is the policies of your email provider. Better yet, use a dedicated server from LuxSci and don’t share your email servers with anyone else.

Recommendations for Successful Emailing

In order to reliably deliver your business and marketing emails, we recommend:

  1. Using a different domain name in the “From” and “Reply” email address for your transactional and marketing emails.  E.g. info@widget-wiz.net for your marketing email and info@widget-wiz.com for your business (e.g. sales) email. These can go back to the same person and same INBOX, but having different domains allows blocks on your marketing domain to not affect your business domain.
  2. Using good deliverability tactics and best practices for your marketing email messages.
  3. Sending your marketing email messages through email servers separate from your business email so that black lists and throughput issues do not affect your business email.
  4. Ensuring that your email provider has good policies and controls in place so that other customers do not affect your email’s deliverability.
LuxSci customers:
  • Can benefit from dedicated email server infrastructure that sends fully HIPAA compliant email
  • Can use separate High Volume accounts for bulk email. These are sent from separate servers from our business email accounts and are designed for processing mass emails.

Want to learn more, contact us today!

Tags: blacklist, bulk email, business email, deliverability, email marketing, high volume, marketing, marketing email, Transactional
Posted in Business Solutions, HIPAA Marketing
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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
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Warming Up Your IP Addresses Automatically

Monday, February 13th, 2023

There are many best practices for ensuring optimal deliverability when sending email messages. One critical factor in deliverability is IP reputation. However, how can you build a good reputation when using a brand-new server and IP address? This article will explain how to warm up an IP address to build a good reputation and improve email deliverability.

warm up ip address

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Tags: email deliverability, high volume, ip address, ip reputation, sending rate, smtp, warm up ip
Posted in LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email, HIPAA Email Compliance
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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.

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Tags: bulk email, bulk mailing, cluster, dedicated server, deliverability, high volume, server, server cluster, speed, throughput
Posted in Business Solutions, HIPAA Marketing
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High Availability High Volume Email

Tuesday, June 8th, 2021

High volume email sending is essential to the business operations of many different companies. Whether these emails involve onboarding messages to new users, form a crucial part of an organization’s marketing strategy, or are sent for a wide range of other purposes, they are often a core component of how a company spreads necessary information.

If the suitable systems aren’t in place, high volume email can go down. This stops all transactional and marketing emails from being sent, which can cause delays or disruptions to business operations. These outages can have significant effects on a company’s bottom line.

If critical email systems cannot go down, then a high availability, high volume email system needs to be in place. This creates redundancy to keep systems online in case of an outage.

high volume email

What Is High Availability?

As we discussed above, the goal of high availability is to keep an organization’s email up and running as much as possible. This is known as high availability, an engineering term applied to many systems, especially in computing.

High availability is commonly used when talking about websites–a high availability service has redundancies in place that keep a website online, even if the main server fails. In addition to the server that hosts the site itself, high availability web apps also need high availability MySQL so that databases are still accessible if the main server that hosts them goes down.

These high availability services are critical for businesses that cannot perform their core functions if their websites or databases go offline.

If a high availability service isn’t used and there aren’t redundancies in place, outages to the servers will force the site down. This means that customers will no longer be able to access the platform or some of the site’s essential services.

It’s not just websites and web services that can go down. If a company’s high volume email doesn’t use a high availability infrastructure, it can go down when a server fails. This grinds all of an organization’s email to a halt, delaying or disrupting its marketing and transactional emails.

If these emails aren’t sent and received by customers, the company won’t be able to perform many of its necessary business functions until the server comes back online. This can lead to the loss of customers, increased complaints, reduced sales, and many other serious problems. With this in mind, high availability high volume email services are critical for any organization that relies on its email to perform its core functions.

Why Do Systems Go Down?

Some of the most common reasons that online systems go down include:

  • Hardware failures bringing down critical components such as the memory, CPU, or power.
  • Crashes or bugs in an operating system or other software.
  • DDoS and other attacks against the server.
  • Excessive amounts of traffic.
  • Failure of the network.
  • Overloading the network.
  • Failures at the data center, including human error or power outages.

How Can Load Balancing Help to Give You High Availability High Volume Email?

As we discussed above, there are many reasons services could go offline. These causes of failure are inevitable, and they can occur at random. If the organization’s high volume email needs to be operational as much as possible, put redundancies in place to take over when these inevitable failures happen.

A core component of this is load balancing, which shares the workload between servers. This boosts the capacity, allowing servers to share the volume with others when they get overwhelmed by traffic. Load balancers can also detect server failures and automatically redirect traffic to healthy servers when necessary. When high volume email services are equipped with load balancing, they will continue to send emails even when a server in the cluster goes down.

Many providers have their servers and load balancers in the same place, making it easier to operate but creating additional risks. If everything is located in the same data center, a failure at the data center or in the network can still bring the email system down. Load balancing won’t help if the servers’ data center goes down because of a power outage or extreme weather.

At LuxSci, we offer a more robust alternative by placing servers in separate data centers in the same geographic region. Having servers in different physical locations makes high volume email services far more resistant to going offline. Even if one data center fails, there will be backups online at other sites.

High Availability MySQL For High Volume Email

High volume email requires databases for tracking, logging, and other purposes. If the database goes down, so does the ability to send transactional and marketing emails. If high volume email is critical to business operations, high availability databases should also be put in place.

LuxSci’s solution is its regional high availability MySQL service. This offering includes a cluster of Enterprise MySQL servers, each located in separate locations within the same geographic region. It automatically replicates the databases across all servers, with features including automated:

  • Failover and recovery
  • Zero-downtime system
  • Software updates

Our high availability MySQL service is excellent for organizations that rely on their high volume email for business operations because it makes databases extremely resistant to going offline. It’s a solution that can help organizations survive the failure of a data center all maintaining HIPAA compliance.

Together with LuxSci’s high availability load balancers, our high availability MySQL makes bulk email systems incredibly resistant to downtime.

LuxSci’s High Availability High Volume Email Solution

High availability services are highly recommended if marketing and transactional emails are critical to an organization’s operations. When you consider the costs of the service going down, it’s best to choose a solution that offers high availability.

Nothing will stop systems from failing, but with redundancies such as high availability load balancers and MySQL in place, we can ensure common failures don’t impact your business. Contact us now to find out more on how LuxSci’s offerings can help to keep high volume email systems online as much as possible.

 

Tags: backup, disaster recovery, email, high availability, high volume, high volume email, load balancing, redundancy
Posted in HIPAA Marketing, Dedicated & Cloud Servers
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