What Is SMTP Relay and Can It be Beneficial to Your Business?
While chat services and instant messaging get all the attention, the reality is that most business correspondence is sent via email. Unfortunately, spam is currently clogging the digital highway in a major way. In the fall of 2017, spam was nearly sixty percent of all traffic. At the same time, hackers threatened the integrity of business communications. SMTP relay has stepped in to solve both problems. What is SMTP relay, and how is it beneficial to your business?
An Introduction to SMTP Relay
What is an SMTP server exactly? SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. An SMTP relay service does far more than relay your emails to a trusted third party for delivery, especially bulk email. It adds an extra layer of security to protect your messaging system from spam and phishing. It does this through an application of advanced machine learning to identify spam-like trends among your outgoing email and software applications. It can pinpoint specific suspicious users and apps, shut them down, and notify the appropriate system administrator.
The Major Benefits of the SMTP Relay
There are many benefits of using an SMTP relay. For one, it protects your reputation in a way you may not know could be an issue – the reputation of your IP address. If your web server or email system starts sending out too many emails that count as spammy, it will be blacklisted. Now your legitimate emails get sent to everyone’s spam folders automatically. That hurts your reputation, since your customers won’t get your status messages and potential customers won’t see your marketing content. If they do check their spam folder and see an email that looks like it came from you, they may be afraid to open it because it is flagged as spam, which is another major issue many marketers have to deal with.
An SMTP relay can save your business a lot of time. A compromised IP address is difficult to troubleshoot without an SMTP relay in place. It provides the information necessary to solve roughly a quarter of all support tickets to web server administrators related to email delivery issues. It also prevents the slow and painful process of getting your IP address restored after it has been blacklisted.
Depending on your situation, it may be able to relay messages to various third-party relays so that your high volume of outgoing messages won’t get labeled as spam. Constant monitoring by the SMTP system certainly saves your IT team the need to do so themselves. Real time analytics could flag an employee sending out too many personal messages or accounts accidentally sending out too many marketing messages, notifying managers so it can be quickly addressed.
It only takes one mistake to accidentally infect a computer that starts sending out spam. An SMTP system won’t prevent someone accidentally clicking an infected link, but it minimizes the harm and helps you identify the issue as quickly as possible. If there is a particular email account sending out questionable messages, system administrators and managers can get reports so they can decide on which compromised accounts to block. You can set it up to ensure that every shutdown recommendation is vetted so that your spam filters don’t kill your new customer relationship management system’s email address. Good SMTP relay systems will learn that your newly scaled up email system is legitimate and won’t shut it down.
The Benefits of SMTP Relay Services
If you’re sending out a large volume of messages, an infected computer or service application competes with your business’s legitimate services for bandwidth. Implementing SMTP could save you from paying more to scale up your bandwidth or upgrade your servers to handle someone else’s spam.
SMTP sending your legitimate emails through many carefully managed IP addresses will also ensure that you don’t end up sending legitimate business messages through an IP address that’s flagged as spammy, causing a fraction of your messages to be blocked by end users.
SMTP services are run by anti-spam experts, and they’ll switch IP addresses used to relay your messages as soon as a particular IP address is blocked or compromised. You won’t have to waste time figuring out why your customer email response rate fell three percent when the real issue is the email delivery method. Conversely, SMTP relay is smart enough not to flag your standard newsletters, status emails and marketing content as spam. SMTP services are pretty affordable as well, which is well worth it considering all the issues associated with blacklisting and the debilitating effect it could have on your whole organization.
SMTP relay systems are the latest tool in minimizing spam and preventing legitimate messages from being wrongly flagged as spam. They save everyone involved time, money, hassle and a whole lot of headache.
