Many web hosts struggle with email deliverability. They struggle with getting their customers’ emails delivered safely and securely. Why? Well, because where email is concerned, spam is a huge issue. In September 2017, spam accounted for over half (59.6%) of all email traffic. So it’s no wonder that this spills over into the hosting industry and makes life difficult for web hosting companies.

An SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) relay service can help protect your hosting company by ensuring outbound email is delivered safely and securely; protected from spam and phishing.

How does it work?
An SMTP relay service, such as MailChannels Cloud, uses sophisticated algorithms and machine learning approaches to spot spam-like trends in the stream of outgoing email coming from your servers and applications. Additionally, MailChannels Cloud pinpoints the sending entity (whether it be a user, application, or server). When a flow of email traffic begins to look suspiciously “spammy,” MailChannels Cloud shuts it down and generates an informative notification that you can process either via an API webhook, or a human-readable email message to take action against the spammer.

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10 reasons to use an SMTP relay service

1. Protect your IP reputation
Ending up on blacklists can cause a lot of damage to your IP reputation—jeopardizing relations with your customers or potential customers. An SMTP relay service protects your IP reputation as it doesn’t allow any spam to leave your server(s).

2. Save valuable time
Without an outbound spam filter, a compromised IP can cause a lot of headaches for web hosts. It was estimated through a MailChannels survey that 25% of support tickets are caused by email delivery issues.* Your employees’ valuable time could likely be spent elsewhere more efficiently.

3. Email is important
Almost everything we do online involves an email address. From signing up to social media accounts to retrieving forgotten or stolen passwords, email is a constant. Because of this, it’s important to get email delivery right. To your customers, where email is concerned, there is no room for mistakes.

4. An SMTP relay is a guarantee
When email delivery issues occur, it is common for legitimate email to end up in junk folders, or to be blocked completely. With an SMTP relay in place, you can rest assured that sent email is going where it should be going.

5. Spam is a constant
Just as email is a constant on the internet, so too is spam. Spam shouldn’t be underestimated and strict measures should be taken to protect your operations from possible threats.

6. It only takes one
It doesn’t take an entire compromised server for things to go awry. Just one single compromised account can put your operation in jeopardy, so it’s important to get things right from the start.

7. A small price to pay
While nobody likes paying out money for a service, a small monthly fee pales in comparison to dealing with blacklisting and the frustrated customers and support tickets that inevitably come along with compromised email delivery.

8.Run by experts
Running a hosting company, whether big or small, is no easy feat. Having to deal with unreliable email delivery issues is something we can take off your plate. We have a team of specialized developers and a 24-hour monitoring service; meaning you can rest easy in the knowledge that a team of experts is taking care of your email.

9. Trusted technology
Our SMTP relay service analyzes all of the email leaving your servers, detects the spam and sends a report so you can identify and block compromised accounts. Legitimate email is delivered through thousands of carefully managed IP addresses that you don’t have to worry about because they’re run by anti-spam experts.

10. Peace of mind
Allow yourself to run your hosting company without having to worry about blacklisting, spam, unreliable email delivery and other issues. It has been shown that 98% of IP addresses managed by MailChannels are ranked as ‘good’ or ‘neutral’ by Cisco SenderBase.*

* To learn more about SMTP relay services and how they can help your business, you can download our whitepaper, Why Use an SMTP Relay Service.

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This blog post was updated March 2018