1.23 High Volume Emails and Enhanced Email Reporting
Organizations sending a high volume of emails may wish to consider using BluSynergy's Enhanced Email Services, typically for the following reasons:
Your email service provider limits/throttles the outbound emails sent. Many email services, whether it is in-house MS Exchange services or 3rd party providers like Google GSuite/GMail and Microsoft Outlook all place a variety of dynamic limits on the number of outbound emails sent via SMTP (the max number of emails per hour is the one that is most likely to trip)
Enhanced reporting requirements on sent emails. If you wish to see details like the status of each email sent (opened, email bounced, clicked, etc.) either at the customer/invoice level or on a bulk reporting level (e.g., all bounced emails last month).
Maintaining a clean email record / improving delivery / not getting tagged as spam. When you send high volumes of transactional emails, various email services may tag your emails as spam and the end user may never get that invoice email if she did not check her spam/junk folder. Generally speaking, using a specialized email provider improves these metrics considerably.
Basics of Enhanced Email Services
BluSynergy contracts with a reputed 3rd party email service provider and routes all your emails though this provider's email gateway (instead of sending it to your SMTP email service). Similar to techniques employed by mass marketing email services, this provider will send the emails on your behalf and your customers will still see that the email came from you (e.g., accounting@yourcompany.com) . The 3rd party email service provider adds a tracking pixel to the outbound emails and collects data such as opened emails, bounces (e.g. mailbox full), clicks, etc.
The integration between BluSynergy and the mail service provider ensures that this reporting data is pulled back and associated with each invoice/customer, so that all data is available for reporting.
How to set up Enhanced Email Services
Contact support@blusynergy.com or your account rep to discuss pricing and have this feature turned on (pricing varies by email volume).
Once they configure your organization's account, one of two options are available for you to authorize the 3rd party email provider to send emails on your behalf:
Verification via email - this is the simplest option. You will get an email with a link to verify/authorize this action. For example, if you are sending the outbound emails from "accounting@yourcompany.com", then you need to log into this email account and click through this verification link. This approach has the benefit of extreme simplicity and can be implemented in minutes. However some email clients may display the sender as something like "billing@yourcompany.com via mailserviceprovider.com" (note the service provider website after your outbound email address. GSuite/GMail is an example, and has additional information here: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1311182?hl=en . This "via..." is commonly seen when viewing newsletters etc sent by email service providers and can be removed by using the DKIM approach instead (below).
Verification via DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) - DKIM allows the receiver to check that an email claimed to have come from a specific domain was indeed authorized by the owner of that domain. It achieves this by affixing a digital signature, linked to a domain name, to each outgoing email message. The recipient system can verify this by looking up the sender's public key published in the DNS. A valid signature also guarantees that some parts of the email (possibly including attachments) have not been modified since the signature was affixed. For this approach, you will receive 3 CNAME records that your IT administrator needs to update with your DNS provider. Different providers have different procedures for updating DNS records. See the documentation provided by your DNS provider for more information. This approach may take up to 72 hours for the DNS entries to propagate across the Internet.