Email hosting, any recommendations?

[freek]

Hey all, i have a quick question and would love to get some input.

First some context: I have ecommerce business that is doing quite well on a dutch platform, this year i have started focusing more on amazon and shopify. I use an automated software for the dutch platform which works really well. By recommendation of @BlackMagician i have started playing around with klaviyo for shopify which has worked great so far, still lots to learn though. (As a sidenote i would also love to know how i can send emails to amazon customers as i currently can only see a phone number?)

I now want to look a bit more proffesional and start to use info@domainname.com customerservice@domainname.com etc instead of companyname.info@gmail.com. I already have the domain names and tried to set this up via shopify but they only offer the forwarding of emails and as far as i know when a customer responds to this email and i respond back they see the @gmail.com domain again. Also can't even use their forwarding system as i didn't purchase the domain via shopify.

So my question is what is the best emailhosting setup? I know i can google this stuff but last time the recomendations and experiences from the forum helped me out a lot. Thanks in advance!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[rpeck90]

I use Namecheap's Private Email service which is extremely cost effective.

It does have periods of planned maintenance each month which isn't ideal but doesn't impact deliverability. I've used them for years and have recommended them to numerous others.

I think you are getting confused between email hosting and email marketing.

To "host" emails (to have the means to accept inbound emails and send them), you need something like I've recommended above (or Office365/Gmail); to use your domain to send emails via the likes of Klaviyo or Shopify, you need to add some DNS records to the domain in order to authenticate it (this can be done without any email hosting at all).

If you'd like me to explain anything on a more specific basis, I would be happy to do so.

 

[freek]

I use Namecheap's Private Email service which is extremely cost effective

Thank you, i used them to but the domain names as recommended by @MitchC, so will definately look into this.

To "host" emails (to have the means to accept inbound emails and send them), you need something like I've recommended above (or Office365/Gmail); to use your domain to send emails via the likes of Klaviyo or Shopify, you need to add some DNS records to the domain in order to authenticate it (this can be done without any email hosting at all).

Thank you for clarifying!

If you'd like me to explain anything on a more specific basis, I would be happy to do so.

Awesome! I will try to work it out first with namecheap, if i can't figure it out i would love to take you up on that offer

 

[rpeck90]

Thank you, i used them to but the domain names as recommended by @MitchC, so will definately look into this.

Thank you for clarifying!

Awesome! I will try to work it out first with namecheap, if i can't figure it out i would love to take you up on that offer

No problem at all - Namecheap are a great company when it comes to inexpensive domains, hosting and emails. I've been with them for 17 years and it's great to see them recognized for their commitment to service.

I'm here if you need clarification on anything!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[eqttrdr]

Don't forget about the new rules coming into effect regarding sending emails as well.

 

[freek]

Don't forget about the new rules coming into effect regarding sending emails as well.

Which rules are you talking about? And do you mean on amazon?

 

[Black_Dragon43]

I use Namecheap's Private Email service which is extremely cost effective.

It does have periods of planned maintenance each month which isn't ideal but doesn't impact deliverability. I've used them for years and have recommended them to numerous others.

I think you are getting confused between email hosting and email marketing.

To "host" emails (to have the means to accept inbound emails and send them), you need something like I've recommended above (or Office365/Gmail); to use your domain to send emails via the likes of Klaviyo or Shopify, you need to add some DNS records to the domain in order to authenticate it (this can be done without any email hosting at all).

If you'd like me to explain anything on a more specific basis, I would be happy to do so.

Interesting, that Namecheap plan seems to be quite good, it’s even cheaper than what we use which is Rackspace at $1/mailbox for cold outreach emails.

For business emails, Zoho is good and free, unlike Gmail (although I pay for Gmail as part of G Workspace, I just don’t use it LOL)

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Bounce Back]

Depending on what you are going to do with it I am pretty sure namecheap can even redirect for free to another free email you have somewhere else.

Also if you have paid protonmail it support custom domains. Pretty convenient because you can keep checking a single email address and not miss things.

 

[rpeck90]

Interesting, that Namecheap plan seems to be quite good, it’s even cheaper than what we use which is Rackspace at $1/mailbox for cold outreach emails.

For business emails, Zoho is good and free, unlike Gmail (although I pay for Gmail as part of G Workspace, I just don’t use it LOL)

I was going to mention Zoho but didn't want to complicate matters.

I'm not familiar with the Rackspace setup you've mentioned! Perhaps you could explain it as a potential option?

I originally got Namecheap because I already had my domains with them and it was a good price.

If you're using RS for outreach email, could you perhaps use one of the SMTP services such as SendGrid for outbound sending and then some sort of email forwarding service for inbound responses?

That way, you're not having to set up new mailboxes if one gets blacklisted.

To briefly explain, you could have a script to send emails via a set of addresses set up in an SMTP relay (SendGrid/Amazon SES etc), with each email having a "forward" alias set up at the host level to forward responses to a real mailbox. This way, you would not need a physical mailbox for each outbound address. Sending emails this way only needs validation at the DNS or service-provider level (to ensure you own the domain etc): -



Namecheap provide a rudimentary email forwarding system if you use their DNS, but I've found Cloudflare to have a vastly superior system which gives you the ability to add a bunch of logic using "Email Workers" and several other powerful features: -



This would give you the means to route responses to suit your requirements and vastly reduce the amount of overhead you'd need to be running multiple physical mailboxes with Rackspace. The above is all part of Cloudflare's free package and SendGrid would cost depending on how many emails you're sending. Their free tier is quite generous.

Obviously, I don't know your specific set up, but from what you've mentioned before, as long as you're not outright spamming, it may be a way to help improve efficiency.

Rich

 

[rpeck90]

Which rules are you talking about? And do you mean on amazon?

I believe he's referencing GMail + Yahoo's push toward email sender verification at the DNS level. There is an article about it here: Understanding Gmail and Yahoo DMARC Requirements - dmarcian

Each time you send emails from a domain name, there are several DNS records which providers look up in order to verify whether you are allowed to send emails from the domain or not. For example, if I send an email from @google.com and my server is not included in google.com's DNS records, the receiving server will likely label it as spam.

A great website you can use to see this sort of thing in action is Newsletters spam test by mail-tester.com - if you send an email to the address listed when you visit that site, it will show if your domain is set up properly.

The DNS records responsible for email sender verification are: -

- SPF record - this a TXT record which describes which servers are permitted to send emails for the domain
- DKIM record - a public/private key pair used to verify senders in an extremely granular way
- DMARC record - a set of rules which are triggered if the emails fail verification checks

If you set up the above for the servers or services you wish to send emails from, you should not have any problems. You can read about how to do this for Shopify here: Setting up your email I'm not sure what Amazon entails.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Black_Dragon43]

Very good Rich, thanks, it’s something I haven’t thought about before. We already use SendGrid for all our transactional emails, and yes all domains are already managed via Cloudflare. Your solution also caters to the problem of multiple inboxes. Wasn’t aware of the Email Workers feature on Cloudflare, that’s neat!

The risk here is ofc, SendGrid taking action to protect their sending IPs. Not sure how hawkish they are, though for the first time in years, Zoho blocked one of their IPs assigned to my own transactional emails, so I stopped getting my own invoice notifications LOL. And they shrugged their shoulders, and said they can’t really do anything (I mean, ofc they can, more like they don’t WANT to do anything). It’s been fixed after about 2 weeks.

Atm we run everything via Namecheap domains, managed in Cloudflare, emails hosted via Rackspace, cold outreach managed through Instantly.ai to centralize messages in 1 inbox.

Paying around $49/mo for accounts, and adding all the costs involved in terms of supporting cold email overall, it gets to around $480/mo.

Cold email is responsible for less than 10% of our clients. So it’s not very efficient but the team is reluctant to let it go, because it brings some clients every now and then… actually some of our longest staying, best paying clients came from it. And obviously the ROI is certainly there, despite the costs.

It could definitely be better managed though — I have little idea what’s happening with it nowadays, it’s never been a major area of my focus.

 

[rpeck90]

The risk here is ofc, SendGrid taking action to protect their sending IPs. Not sure how hawkish they are, though for the first time in years, Zoho blocked one of their IPs assigned to my own transactional emails, so I stopped getting my own invoice notifications LOL. And they shrugged their shoulders, and said they can’t really do anything (I mean, ofc they can, more like they don’t WANT to do anything). It’s been fixed after about 2 weeks.

I think all of the SMTP providers are rightly careful about the types of messages they are sending. Transactional emails are mostly cut-and-dry; the difficulty comes from "marketing" emails and the scope of complexity in handling them. I'm not sure why you'd have an issue with invoice emails, but Zoho's lack of impetus is quite common - tier 1 support is mostly there to deflect unless higher level intervention is required.

Instantly.ai looks like it's got you covered, so it wouldn't be worth the time/effort required to fiddle with it, especially if it's not accounting for significant amounts of revenue. I guess the key factor is your "physical mailbox" bottleneck - a solution to which being a system like I mentioned above.

The only way to know if that would be worthwhile would be to try it to see if it gets banned. However, I suppose if that's a primary concern, it's likely for good reason lol. Either way, perhaps you can make use of the Cloudflare / SMTP idea elsewhere - it's a good pattern because it limits technical overhead, especially at scale.

 

[Black_Dragon43]

think all of the SMTP providers are rightly careful about the types of messages they are sending. Transactional emails are mostly cut-and-dry; the difficulty comes from "marketing" emails and the scope of complexity in handling them. I'm not sure why you'd have an issue with invoice emails, but Zoho's lack of impetus is quite common - tier 1 support is mostly there to deflect unless higher level intervention is required.

Ah, no, not Zoho support. So my invoice notifications are transactional emails, they are sent through SendGrid’s SMTP + IPs. One of these sending IPs got blocked by Zoho which is where my IMAP is.

So naturally I reached out to SendGrid to change the sending IP and remove that one from my pool, which they refused to do. I didn’t even bother reaching to Zoho, because I’m well aware they must have had good reason to ban that sending IP (they are shared, so someone probably sent some spam with it).

The only way to know if that would be worthwhile would be to try it to see if it gets banned.

Correct, without testing you never know!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Jon822]

I use SendGrid and they are phenomenal but I think they are mostly tailored to code-based options. Someone else would have to vouch for their non-technical options.

 

[freek]

No problem at all - Namecheap are a great company when it comes to inexpensive domains, hosting and emails. I've been with them for 17 years and it's great to see them recognized for their commitment to service.

I'm here if you need clarification on anything!

Thanks again for the recommendation, everything is set up and connected with shopify. They have very clear instructions on how to do the DNS settings, it was very easy to do.

However i would love your help on 2 more questions
Do you use the email portal from namecheap? ( Private Email - Web-Based Business Hosting Solution ) if not how do you send and where do you receive your mail?
Do you know how i can make a standard template for email replies? (with logo and greetings etc)
Do you know how i can set up automated replies? (for out of office hours etc)

Thanks in advance!

 

[Bounce Back]

Thanks again for the recommendation, everything is set up and connected with shopify. They have very clear instructions on how to do the DNS settings, it was very easy to do.

However i would love your help on 2 more questions
Do you use the email portal from namecheap? ( Private Email - Web-Based Business Hosting Solution ) if not how do you send and where do you receive your mail?
Do you know how i can make a standard template for email replies? (with logo and greetings etc)
Do you know how i can set up automated replies? (for out of office hours etc)

Thanks in advance!

https://privateemail.com/appsuite/signin

Other questions I haven't done personally but you can do all that in outlook if you sync your namecheap privateemail in there (or opensource/free email clients like Thunderbird).

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[rpeck90]

Thanks again for the recommendation, everything is set up and connected with shopify. They have very clear instructions on how to do the DNS settings, it was very easy to do.

However i would love your help on 2 more questions
Do you use the email portal from namecheap? ( Private Email - Web-Based Business Hosting Solution ) if not how do you send and where do you receive your mail?
Do you know how i can make a standard template for email replies? (with logo and greetings etc)
Do you know how i can set up automated replies? (for out of office hours etc)

Thanks in advance!

Good to hear things are set up.

In terms of setting up PrivateEmail, I use the standard portal - mainly to keep everything centralised.

If you wanted to use another (Gmail/Outlook), you would need to connect it to the PrivateEmail IMAP server.

The settings for this are here:

General Private Email configuration for mail clients and mobile devices - Email service - Namecheap.com

Learn more about General Private Email configuration for mail clients and mobile devices. Find your answers at Namecheap Knowledge Base.

www.namecheap.com

Tutorials which provide insight into how to connect are as follows: -

• Private Email account setup for sending emails from the Gmail interface - Email service - Namecheap.com
• Private Email account setup in Outlook 2019 - Email service - Namecheap.com

Email templates is not something I know much about. From what you're asking, it sounds like you might want to look at something like ZenDesk or some other form of customer support system.

The most I am aware of is changing the signature, which can be done by following the tutorial here: How to create signature for Namecheap Private Email - Email service - Namecheap.com

Out of office replies can be done quite easily: -

How to create vacation notice in Namecheap Private Email webmail - Email service - Namecheap.com

Learn more about How to create vacation notice in Namecheap Private Email webmail. Find your answers at Namecheap Knowledge Base.

www.namecheap.com