Our company would like to start our own SMTP server in house for email marketing. Unfortunately the information we've found so far to do so seems kind of contradictory to other sites we found with information. What would be the best way to do your own SMTP server? What hardware/software requirements are needed? We plan on using SendBlaster 2 as our mailing program. We're working with our ISP to see if the ports needed are open (25 is the port we need from the research I've found) and we're trying to get them to give us a static IP address. I'm probably overlooking lots of stuff here as I'm completely unfamiliar with any kind of networking. Sorry for the noob questions, and thanks in advance for any help/tips you guys can provide.

not sure about the smtp stuff, but do NOT use sendblaster 2.. its horrible

Originally Posted by dvs one

not sure about the smtp stuff, but do NOT use sendblaster 2.. its horrible

I knew I'd get some good advice from here

What about sendblaster makes it horrible? We want to have some kind of analytics in the program to evaluate the marketing, something that will take care of the opting out, allows scheduling of campaigns, has built in templates + the ability to create our own templates, opt out, opened mail, and received mail reports.

The only other program I found close was email marketing director, and atomic mail sender. Both of which were missing the opened mail report which we figured would probably be one of the best features for analyzing the campaigns.

Any advice would be appreciated!

Oh before I forget, I found some sites with SMTP server software. What is SMTP server software? The whole reasoning behind doing our own SMTP server is we don't want our customer list information going through anything but our servers.

Well sorry i cant answer all your questions but for my needs sendblaster was horrible.. I guess i was doing more blackhat mailing.. sounds like it may fit your needs if you dont need: proxy support, multiple/rotating subjects, rotating servers, and some more options.

how about Atomic Sender ?

you won't beable to, i tried building an smtp server and it wouldn't even bulk folder for many major email providers. you just have to buy smtp relays from a company on the "inside"

How many email addresses do you have? If it isn't much then I'd recommend a third party like mail chimp or aweber. Creating a server yourself brings a long many headaches. You can pm me if you want more information on making on.

If you really want to keep it inhouse, i'd recommend interspire to start. Very simple and easy to navigate and has nice graphs for reporting.

Well a SMTP server is easy. But a SMTP server which get a high inbox rate is another scenario.

My advice would be to go for a VPS or a dedicated which allow mass mailing.

It would be instant set up and if you ask your provider to tweak it for you, it would be a no hands job for you.

The only cool thing with send blaster is their built in mailing template creation that you can export to others mailing softwares.

I would also recommand Interspire it is reliable, powerful and convenient.