Email Marketing

There are two related parts to email marketing: making sure that your content is in good form; and making sure that it is actually delivered which is purely technical in nature.

They are related in that all major email service providers (GMail, HotMail, Yahoo!, Comcast, Verizon, etc) scan email content on the receiving side with some heuristics to determine a 'spam' score in addition to other more 'technical' measures.

Audience

http://emailclientmarketshare.com/ shows that GMail, which only accounted for 4% of market share in early 2013, accounts for 15% at the end of 2015. Know your market. Know the current devices and technologies in use to read email.

Content and Tools

You want to do an email campaign. You need to know what works and what doesn't in email these days. Email is not the web. It's worse.

A good tool to use for managing your Email Marketing, and actually your entire Customer/Constituent Relationships is CiviCRM. Marissa Porter of Arete Imagine (now Wanna Pixel) created responsive email templates for CiviCRM (The templates are included with CiviMail view single column)

Another possible tool to use is the 'Simple Mail' extension to CiviCRM. Built by Compucorp, this is supposedly a simpler interface than the standard CiviMail.

But even with these great tools, you still need help.

1. The email standards project http://www.email-clients" page that shows which email clients actually fare well in an ACID test, and those that don't (looking at you Gmail and Hotmail)
2. Campaign Monitor offers a number of guides, including a complete breakdown of the CSS support for every popular mobile, web and desktop email client on the planet. They also offer hundreds of free to use templates and design examples.
3. Premailer (http://premailer.dialect.ca/) is a cool service that will allow you to test your email content before you send it. It will convert CSS styles to inline style attribues. It gives you HTML and CSS warnings (including those from the Email Standards project). It will also generate the text-only version for you. Premailer is written in Ruby, with a lot of help from Nokogiri, Hpricot and the Sinatra framework (goodbye eruby). The source is available on GitHub. As of 2014, there was discussion of making a 2.0 version, but it's 2015 now and there isn't a separate branch, so maybe the "new version" is just being incrementally built into the current.
4. Putsmail (https://putsmail.com/) is another free option to test your email messages. It's owned by 'Litmus' (litmus.com) which is a paid service if you need more. And emailonacid.com is another paid service.

Technical

This Rackspace article covers the 3 types of DNS records you need to know about for Email delivery: http://www.rackaid.com/blog/email-dns-records/

Aside from domain SPF records, one option you have for sending is SMTP relaying your mail off to your service provider such as Google Apps. See

• Mail routing and delivery: Guidelines and best practices
• Google Apps SMTP settings to send mail from a printer, scanner, or app
• SMTP relay service setting

for how to configure your Google Apps domain for SMTP relaying. Note too that you should set the 'Comprehensive mail storage setting' when using systems (like issue trackers) that deliver mail on behalf of users, via the SMTP relay and you wish copies of those messages to be stored in GMail.

If you are going to send larger volumes of email that surpass the limits of your Google Apps account, you will want to use the services of SendGrid, Dyn, MailChimp (Mandrill) etc. SendGrid actually has a free service tier for < 17,000 messages per month. These services can not only handle the deliverability aspect, but also handle bounces on transactional email messages too.

Postmaster

Comcast and others have their 'Postmaster' websites with tools and info for help

1. http://postmaster.comcast.net/index.html Comcast
2. https://postmaster.aol.com/ AOL
3. https://mail.live.com/mail/services.aspx Microsoft / Outlook.com

Unfortunately, your hosting provider may be crippling your email service without even advertising the fact. https://warrenguy.me/blog/ipv6-digital-ocean-crippled

Email Handling within specific Apps

Many apps not only rely on email, but the built-in mail system is often insufficient for real-world needs. So, you must look to extensions, plugins, or otherwise configure the system to talk to an actual SMTP server.

MediaWiki

Usually, people install MediaWiki in internal environments where 'mail()' might actually work. But if you've got something public facing, your going to need something beefier. Looking at the mw:Manual:Configuration_settings#Email_settings, you might think you can use mw:Manual:$wgSMTP, however you first need to install PEAR Mail for that (unless you run bleeding edge 1.27 which nobody does yet), and there are a ton of problems with that , so use one of the mw:Category:AlternateUserMailer_extensions providers where there is an extension like

1. mw:Extension:SwiftMailer
2. mw:Extension:Mailgun
3. (there is no integration for SendGrid but they might sponsor me to write it todo Write an extension for MediaWiki that is based on the SwiftMailer extension and publish to mw:Extension:SendGrid)

The actual implementation is a straightforward hook implementation

CiviCRM

The documentation for CiviCRM has a fairly comprehensive guide to setting up your email. http://book.civicrm.org/user/current/advanced-configuration/email-system-configuration/, but it can be daunting and complicated even for someone experienced with mail delivery (e.g. Setting up the Return Channel depends on your choice of provider, and will degrade your spam reputation if not done properly).

CiviSMTP is a provider that caters exclusively to CiviCRM so it's a good choice for Civi installations. Other service providers are listed and compared here

Drupal

Has integrations for

1. mailjet maintained by Commerce Guys, experts in Drupal and leaders in Drupal Commerce

Email Services

Many organizations turn to service providers like MailChimp for online email marketing. However MailChimp just took away free developer accounts. If you're going to have to pay, then you should probably consider multiple vendors to find the one that fits the bill.

1. Google App Engine
2. Mailgun has a Managed service for higher end needs. MailGun
3. MailJet has lots of integrations
4. Elastic Email has good walkthrough of setting up SPF and DKIM

Be sure to check their network status pages to get an idea of how well they are serving their customers.

1. http://status.mandrillapp.com/
2. http://status.sendgrid.com/history
3. https://support.google.com/a/answer/3547347
4. They cut off their free developer accounts giving users 60 days to test and implement a new solution or pay for a MailChimp account
5. listed at mw:Extension:SwiftMailer

Cascading Style Sheets = A technology that deals with the presentation of content on the web

HyperText Markup Language = structured text that uses logical links (hyperlinks) between nodes containing text.

Domain Name System. An Named Host to IP Address lookup system

Sender Policy Framework

PHP Extension and Application Repository = a collection of code started in 1999 to enhance the utility of PHP.