SMTP relay recommendations

Hi there, we've recently migrated to Joomla and I'm looking at switching my old newsletter base to NS Pro.   Previously I've been using sendgrid.com as my smtp relay but this is quit costly for us, we only tend to send out one newsletter perhaps each quarter but we do have around 3000 on our list.  We have many subscribers across universites, so we can easily be seen as spammers because a single newsletter may go to dozens/hundreds in the same organisation and I don't want to risk having my main IP blacklisted.

I could possibly pay for a cheap linux VPN and setup a relay, I'd prefer not to have to maintain it but it could be a good cost saver.  I'm interested to know what do others do and can recommend.

Thanks
Brendan

Hello Brendan and thank you for posting!
Welcome to our forum.

That is a reasonable concern. Your options depend on a lot of factors.

Before exploring relay options, here are some basic things to know:
1. NS Pro uses your Joomla configuration by default, and does not require separate SMTP configuration. If you want to connect NS Pro to a separate SMTP server, you can do so by clicking the Options button on the top right of all administrative views.
2. We are affiliated with mail-tester.com, which is an excellent service to check your spam score before sending. We strongly suggest trying it.
3. NS Pro sends emails in chunks. (called email throttling) Almost all SMTP servers consider a quick blast of 200-400 outgoing emails to be an acceptable practice to send newsletters. Sending thousands in a second will get you blacklisted quickly. You can leverage this functionality by setting the "Emails Per Send" field of the newsletter to your desired amount. The default is 240.
4. NS Pro, unlike similar software gives you full control over your email sending. Clicking the "Send" button will manually send 240 emails (or whatever you have set in Emails Per Send) and then stop. If you want it to keep sending, you can schedule the newsletter for automatic sending in the Sending Details tab of the newsletter edit page. You will need to obtain a free cron job key to do that.
5. Always include an Unsubscribe link. In NS Pro, you can add that by writing {link:UNSUB}Unsubscribe text here{/link}

If your content and sending practice are acceptable, and your recipients are aware of their subscription, you are generally good to go. Most of our clients use their own web server, and we have never had issues with them being regarded as spammers. On a few rare occasions that this has happened, we were able to remedy the problem by fixing the content and introducing DKIM and SPF records in the web server. We have had customers with up to 300.000 subscribers (that I know of).

Regarding relay, here are some things to keep in mind:
1. Setting up your own Linux VPS may not be the best option. You would have to maintain it -and protect it- yourself. It's a lot of work for 3000 subscribers.
2. Your web host (or other hosts) may offer an email-only hosting package that could serve as a relay server.
3. Remember that all relay servers must have an SPF record in your main website DNS.

I believe that you already know most of the information presented here, but as a Joomla extension developer, that's probably all I can tell you. If anyone else wants to share their experience, feel free to do so.
Let me know if this helps!
 

@Brendan I am using Amazon's SES service. It's a bit of a hassle to set it up (you have to add a few entries into your hoster's zone file), but it works quite well and it's cheap as there's no costly subscription to pay, you pay as you go and only for the mails sent out.