Well, deliverability and being self-hosted might not go well together these days. There is a LOT you need to go in terms of setting up the relevant infrastructure; the newsletter software is just a tiny fragment of it. And even if your carefully crafted infrastructure works now, it can suddenly stop, just because some big e-mail hosting service decides they implement a major change (see e.g.: http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article109/google-ipv6-smtp-res...).
See, I get your point, but my experience is different. All the transactional emails of my SaaS are sent out with PHP's mail() which is obviously the worst infrastructure setup you can get and only a fraction is marked as spam for my receivers.
Same is true for my contact form. A copy is sent to the receiver. This works with my providers SMTP server and again, not that many problems with deliverability.
In my limited experience, sending newsletters doesn't have to be a science project.
Yeah, but you aren't pumping out 250,000 emails from that domain every day, are you?
That's where the whole deliver ability lark comes in, and is why we offload non-transactional emails to the likes of bronto and adestra. One less thing to worry about.
Is there a, say, ballpark figure on the volume you need to send before switching to a SaaS becomes an interesting option? E.g., i have a newsletter with about 300 subscribers that i'd like to host somewhere else, and i don't think will ever reach more than maybe a couple of thousand readers.
I never thought about that. I only see that hosted newsletter software is too expensive. My requirements:
- Send maybe 2,000 transactional emails per week
- Send a few hundred autoresponders ("newsletters") per week
- Once a year or so, send 70,000 emails to all users who signed up
I neither want to have an email list with 70,000 people in it where only a fraction regularly receives an email. Nor do I want to pay several hundred bucks for the occasional broadcast to the entire user base.
And also: I won't use non-German newsletter providers for privacy reasons. This is probably way too strict and kind of an illusion, but that's just how I run my business.
