Do you really need an Email Service Provider – ESP?
As an ESP, we are essentially just a post office that sends your emails to recipients via the outgoing SMTP server. The main function of this digital post office is to ensure your emails are delivered securely to the recipients through digital transport systems, which come with various challenges designed to make it difficult for spammers and fraudsters. These challenges are part of our daily work, ensuring a smooth path to the recipient’s inbox.
An email is usually sent and received within seconds or even milliseconds, which is quite impressive considering that an email is broken down into numerous small pieces/packets that are then reassembled at the other end in the recipient’s mailbox in a perfectly intact form.
The journey of an email to the recipient is full of interesting challenges: Will the content be flagged as spam and bounce or end up in the junk folder? Is the recipient’s mailbox functioning properly so that the email doesn’t get blackholed without a bounce message? Are there SPF, DKIM, and DMARC email certifications? These are just some of the factors at play.
It’s worth evaluating the importance of your invoices, password reset emails, product launch emails, and much more arriving correctly. Sending 1,000 emails via Bcc is a no-go—if there’s even a single error in the recipient addresses, the entire send can fail. Think of it like an old-fashioned registered letter, where a signature at the door documented that the mail had arrived. Whether it was read is another story.
Running your company’s SMTP server internally or at a hosting center might be tempting, but only until something goes wrong with a send, and the whole organization’s email capabilities collapse. It can be time-consuming and easily become a full-time job for one person. There are countless features that need to be maintained alongside delivery rules that are constantly changing and being optimized for a more secure email landscape. This is all to say that “outsourcing” SMTP is the right choice if you want a reliable email sending environment. Of course, this can also be part of various cloud solutions, each with its own advantages. However, these are often limited in terms of email volume and aren’t flexible in terms of support. GDPR and general data security also make sense to handle in a well-defined operational environment, without sending your company’s legal department into overdrive.
If you want more information about the digital post office, visit mySMTP.
