Delivery addons are bridges between Newsletter and external professional email delivery services. Those services are specialized on email delivery and grants reliability, up-time, speed and bounce checking.
Once a delivery add-on is installed, configured and enabled, Newsletter starts to deliver emails with the connected service. Every service allows a different speed based on the plan you choose and offer different features.
The diagram above helps to understand what happens to an email when sent from your blog. In a standard configuration, Newsletter uses WordPress to send emails (there is a famous wp_mail() function everyone can use) and WordPress relies on the hosting provider.
If the hosting provider is not good at sending emails or has imposed limits, filters, and so on, the email could not reach the subscriber, without notice.
When a delivery add-on is active, Newsletter “talks” directly to the email delivery service. The add-on works like a “translator” able to send commands to that service.
Integrated services
We integrate several professional services you can choose upon based on price and features provided. Find them on the side menu.
It’s worth noting a specific difference: Amazon SES is usually the cheaper but has a rather simple interface and it is not so quick to configure. It can anyway manage hundred of thousands of emails per day.
All other services have nice interfaces but are usually more expensive for big volumes.
The generic SMTP
If your hosting provider offers an SMTP service (may time it is included with one or few free email accounts associated with the domain), you can use that SMTP to send your emails. It is usually more reliable than the hosting included mail system (used by default by WordPress).
If you decide on an SMTP, we suggest installing an SMTP plugin for WordPress so every email sent by your site is delivered via that service. If you need to send only newsletters using the SMTP, you can install our generic SMTP add-on.
Note: some hosting providers block connections to external SMTPs.
You need an account (but it’s easy)
To connect to a service, you need an account om that service. Usually, you can signup for free to explore their features and even send a number of emails for free.
Following our instructions (specific for every service we integrate – see our documentation), you can generate the required API keys to complete the connection. You can then test the integration even before enabling it to check everything is working as expected.
Test twice (or more)
Once configured the add-on test some delivery at different email addresses and when possible check them on the service console (not available on Amazon SES). You should see the test message on their console and a status (delivered, queued, bounced and so on). If the message appears on the service console but is actually not delivered, you need to contact their service support.
Bounce checking
Bounce is a word to indicate an email address is not reachable (missing mailbox, a full mailbox, and so on). Getting the “bounced addresses” from the delivery service, Newsletter is able to keep the contact list as clean as possible, setting invalid contact as “bounced”.
Every integration has the bounce checking.
Can we recommend a specific one?
No, all services we integrated were, at the time of integration, very valuable. If you want to send a great number of emails (more than 50,000 per run) we can suggest using Amazon SES. It is cheaper but has a very very limited console.
What is the “turbo mode”
When possible we offer the ability to activate a special working mode which sends more emails in a row to increase the throughput. We cannot grant it will work on every hosting, so use with care and start with a low number of parallel engines, for example 2. Usually on VPS there are not problem at all to use even 5 or more engines.
If I use 5 engines, can I send a 5x rate?
No, usually the speed increase is not proportional, for a number of technical reasons. But you should see an important increase, anyway.
When I do a test with turbo mode active I don’t get constant speed reports
It’s ok, there are a number of factors influencing the actual speed of a simple test. The reported values are only indicative. A more precise statistical speed computer over many more deliveries is reported on the Newsletter status page.