What are you using for bulk emails particularly Kamar

[Kevin Whelan]

We have been using Kamar bulk email sends directly using our office365 but this causes the local workstation to be tied up for hours until outlook lets them thru at a slow rate.
Advantage was emails were directed thru our 3rd party signature relay so marketing were happy.

We played with kamars bulk relay option, speed was great but has large downsides, minimal signature options and changes email domain to a schoolkiwi one so all replies are funneled back through kamar causing confusion for staff now having to check two places and not getting emails on phones tablets etc. Also adds another address to parents inbox which ends up causing them confusion as well when its not our usual advertised domain. it did have the advantage of recording all email correspondence and let you see if emails were opened etc.
Another issue is kamar isn't an email client so incoming messages have no forward options etc.
 

currently on N4L bulk relay, speed is good but we have lost the ability to see if emails were opened, and the marketing people are not impressed we are sending out emails without their html banners etc.
It looks like paying for a 3rd party relay may be the only option. Has anyone done this, it seems like we can't be the only one with these issues.

[Craig Knights]

Local email relay?  Hmail or something?

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[Alistair Baird]

We use a local mail relay fro Kamar email, but lately (as about September) Kamar did an update that slowed things down to a crawl as Kevin mentioned. It's not the local mail relay, as we use that to send all our photocopy scans and server admin messages etc as well, and that still works. The local client sends through N4L relay.

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Alistair Baird

IT Manager

St Peters College 

p 06 354 4198

m 021 482 937

e bai...@stpeterspn.school.nz

[Stephen Moran]

I switched to using SparkPost when MailChimps Mandrill service was shut down and the service has been very good.  Looking now, they don’t appear to have a free tier (typical!) anymore except for their developer tier.

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[Kent]

Hi Alistair,

Can you contact our helpdesk and have us look into this for you.   While we have continuing to add functionality to school.kiwi,  we haven't done anything which would have impacted on sending e-mail via a standard smtp mail server.  Sending via google has always been an issue, mostly due to their restrictions on bulk sending plus also authentication requirements.   But, sending to a local mail (or N4L's relay) server should be reasonably quick.

Kevin,

school.kiwi allows you to set up an unlimited number of templates - each which can have their own signature embedded.  The end user just selects which one to use when they send their e-mail  (assuming they have access to the template).

It also means we have a record of all communication back / forward about a student (including opened, etc) - but the only way for us to do this is to own the domain - so the down side is the two domain issue you referenced.

Kent.

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[Grant]

We use an on-site SMTP server which sends bulk emails through SMX, which is a charged service. 

Kamar is used to send plain emails only. For newsletters and personalised emails we use e-campaign which is able to connect to a sql database.

We tried N4l bulk relay briefly but had little visibility particularly for failed emails. (We send over 3500 on any given week)

We have Office365, but do not use for any bulk email.

We have not found a better alternative, yet. (although only send bulk emails from on-site or by remote desktop)

Regards

Grant Saul 

Westlake Boys High School 

Alistair Baird

IT Manager

St Peters College 

p 06 354 4198

m 021 482 937

e bai...@stpeterspn.school.nz

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[Jake Wills]

We use an onsite relay (HMail) to the N4L mail server.

We had some issues with failed emails as well, but N4L ended up setting up a separate public IP for one of our servers to help with this, as we also send a large amount of emails.

This means we can also send mail when offsite using the N4L VPN as it passes through our school IP rather than trying to go directly to the N4L relay which doesn't work when offsite.

And all of this costs us nothing... apart from running a server for the relay (which we were running anyway)

[Landyn Frisby]

We are using N4L bulk relay for Kamar emails and for scan to email from the copiers. The downside is it is not authenticated and does not sign your email with DKIM or similar - meaning (in particular gmail) recipients of the email is more likely to end up in spam and see a warning about being non secure email. Bulk email runs (such as reports) are of a reasonable speed. My team tells me that Kamar seems to be doing a good job with identifying why a particular email has failed. 

When we switched from internal Exchange to G-Suite we abandoned any internal mail relay. 

[Blake Richardson]

We use a SMTP relay called SMTP2Go, it costs about $12 per month. They have very flexible connection options which allow older systems that don't support SSL or authentication to connect. They provide a full dashboard showing everything sends, bounces and spam reporting.

Its well worth the money.

[Fergus Stanton]

We have been using the same service for a month. Only KAMAR is set to use SMTP2Go and it seems to have solved many of the problems we were experiencing. As Blake mentioned, the reporting is very good.

[Landyn Frisby]

Thanks for sharing! Really keen to give this service a go and implement. Perfect time for budgets.

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