When to Use a Third-Party Mailing Service and When to Host Your Own Email Server
Mailing has been an important means of communication for centuries — romanticized with carrier pigeons and bottled messages in movies — and an everyday essential today with email and snail mail.
Heck, there’s even a book and 2013 movie adaptation about a man impersonating a U.S. postman in a post-apocalyptic earth (I want to live in that cliff-side town — where is that?). Mail always will be crucial.
Uses and Concerns of Emails to a Professional
These days, most of the mail that people deal with are digital emails. Green, nearly instant, and perhaps a bit excessive, sending and receiving email has become second nature — a practical and guiltless means of professional expression.
Of course, personalizing and controlling the distribution and receipt of email is essential, especially as an extension of your identity. Have a company? Then you’ll probably want its digital messages to read “@yourcompany.com.” Want to affect expertise and respectability? Getting an email sent to “@myname.com” may convince others how serious you are about your online identity and reputation.
Then, there’s the whole question of what kind of emails to send. Are you sending a batch of newsletters at once to your subscribers? You’ll surely want to automatically configure each distribution when the due date arrives. Do you want to send welcome emails once a customer signs up for your service or buys from your site? Would this be an automated task or is a personal emailing client for you?
Plenty of issues must be considered.
If these aren’t enough, your email domain’s credibility can come into question. Will people trust you? Will your email recipients believe this newsletter in their mailbox isn’t spam?
That’s a hard question to answer, but luckily, email targets have many ways verify your identity and legitimacy, such as SPF and DKIM records. Of course, the pivotal question — do you want to go through this? — can be especially important for server administrators because they have to decide how they’ll send out their email.
The two most accepted options include hosting on a third-party server or hosting an email server directly on your own system.
Why Use a Third-Party Host?
In a word: hassle-free. Simply, you don’t have to handle the configuration process yourself. Third-party email companies have been hosting emails for a long time and subsequently, have done it well.
Using a third-party host, you don’t need to worry about the configuration and troubleshooting of the mailing service. No need to setup your SSL certificate for your server. No worry about establishing solid delivery rates through good relations with ISP’s and blacklists.
These providers, such as Fastmail, Google Apps, and Office 365, will take care of what can be challenging, nuanced details for you. Each has a reliable service, trustworthy reputation and an SLA that ensures your mail will arrive at its destination on time.
Still, two main issues should be addressed when considering using a third party to host your email:
- Expense. It costs money to have another company host your email for you.
- Limited customization. Granted, usually any third-party provider has myriad design options and a pretty lengthy array of tools by which to custom build a message, but you’re still under its rules and features.
Why Self Host?
Why would you want to host your own mailing servers if trusted providers will do it for you?
Some of the reasons are simple:
- For the thrill of it,
- For the achievement of it (you can say you tackled this and now you host it yourself.)
- For the minimal expense. If you run it, you don’t have to pay for it.
Other reasons are more nuanced:
- You built it, and are now fully in control with how it works.
- Privacy and security. The only way someone is going to get to your content is by directly going through your server.
I won’t mislead you — properly hosting your own mailing server is complicated and demands that you ensure it’s secure. But successfully doing this will bring security, control, and peace of mind. If something fails? You already know the ins and outs. You can get the email server back up and running quickly. You can check your logs for answers. You can observe where and why things failed.
Whether you choose to contract the service with a third party or host an email server on your own, either method has its own advantages. Both do what you need: send and receive email (unless you were blacklisted for spamming, then you’re not getting through to anyone).
For those newer to the email server game or who have limited time, the situation heavily favors using a third-party provider. Heck, even for those who are experienced and have time, it’s still weighted towards using a third-party provider. The ease of use and guaranteed delivery from a third-party host can effectively persuade a typical user.
However, for those who love control of their server, really enjoy sysadmin tasks, or are strapped for cash, hosting your own email server is the way to go.
If you’re still unsure, I’d say try running your own email server (it’s free afterall), and if it’s just not feeling right, go right ahead and use a third-party service. The only real way to know is to just do it.
If you have any questions or comments about deploying an email server, feel free to tweet us, @Linode, or contact our 24/7 support: http://linode.com/support.
