Looking at Vultr and experimenting with it, I just noticed they have an Anti-spam Policy - Vultr.com that would prevent me from sending 200k-300k emails per month from Discourse, which is the case for our rather small community.
Please share your experience with sending multiple emails with other hosting providers. This policy is reasonable but disappointing. Why do they limit me if I am not doing anything wrong. What do you think? I sent them a request and they answered this:
On our platform we consider the size of emails that you plan to send as “bulk,” and unfortunately we do not allow that type of activity.
What about Hetzner, DigitalOcean and other popular ones?
I think a lot of Discourse communities use an email delivery service.
eg Mailgun, Sparkpost + lots of others, some have free plans but for 200k-300k you’ll probably have to pay.
I’m using one, but then with lots of different social projects it’s becoming too expensive.
So I’m wondering if anyone can share their experience in sending that many emails from a VPS. Is it usually prohibited by sort of an antispam policy, or the Vultr case is rather an exception?
TBH, Sending email from a VPS isn’t a good idea as there is a strong chance that the IP that You get may already be blacklisted by some or the other spam filter and the emails that You send may end up in the junk folder (or even worse, straight up rejected)
Cloud companies gotta hate that. You can’t blame them. Their IP can get blacklisted if you send spam (even though you just swear you won’t, but they don’t know that). So that IP may affect another client of theirs.
And if You get an IP in the same subnet, It’s a really strong chance that that would also get blacklisted in not time if You start to send 100k++ mails a month from that IP.
EDIT:
I’d Just like to add that in my experience with mailgun, they guys have been proven to be really strong at their commitment and I have spent a lot of time interacting with their support, tweaking my configurations just to make sure both, my domain and their IP stand in a Good sending reputation despite of large volume of emails that We’re sending.
if You can allocate some budget to email service provider, I’d highly suggest trying them out.
Most of them have their own stack of IP addresses and their own Hardware to handle all the sending and relaying stuff. So most of the stuff they use is usually owned either by them or a parent company.
I believe you’re talking about spammers… Valid services like MailGun probably is immune to blacklisting simply because, well, they’re a email service.
For spammers, the fact that cloud providers don’t like them sending bulk email is not stopping them from actually doing it…
No, they’re not! indeed their Shared IPs are blocked by outlook and yahoo for most of the times, They contact them proactively to get their IPs white listed though.
Cloud providers don’t like it because of spammers and the overhead that is incurred into getting their assets white listed once some bad guy (e.g. spammer) has dragged it to a bad reputation.
MailGun basically has a full-time anti-spam support team who respond to complaints and, as said before, pro-actively try to stay whitelisted. That’s why they’re so expensive; it’s part of the cost of doing business for them.
You really should have a transactional email service manage your transactional emails. For deliverability if nothing else. Sendgrid’s free plan is pretty generous, I’m sure other exist.
Nope, there are just 2500 users, 200-250 active registered users daily.
There should be digest emails once per two weeks, plus PM with groups, plus mentions and replies notifications, so it all sums up to 200-300k emails per month.
For 200k emails it’s $50+ per month… Twice as much as the hosting itself Simply can’t afford it.
Well, that’s a lot of email traffic to a bunch of people. Sounds more like a mailing list.
Maybe you should consider throttling the emails. However, if your users simply don’t login, but watch everything, they’ll still be getting lots of notification emails…
Our hosting service at [www.Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting)](https://www.communiteq.com) includes complimentary email sending. We haven’t really set hard limits on the amount yet but a rule of thumb would be the page limit amount of each plan divided by two.
So the Professional plan would support around 250,000 outgoing emails per month for no extra charge.
The only thing that we forbid is sending bulk invites to people that did not explicitly volunteer their email addresses.
