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I've just been informed by my boss that I will be taking over our company's CRM application. It is a web-based, .NET MVC, single-code-base, multi-tenant application. As the product was explained to me, it became clear that the email feature is a nightmare to maintain. I'm looking for alternatives to doing it in-house. I'll explain:

The app logs and track all forms of contact with prospective customers... phone calls, emails, etc. Thus, one feature is the ability to send emails from within the product, and then to have any reply emails also be stored in the CRM's sql database as well.

The problems with this kind of email system built into our web-based, self-hosted CRM product are abundant, but the largest of the problems is the work we need to do to prevent our IP from being black listed. It's a nightmare. There has got to be a better way.

I asked my boss if he had looked into outsourcing the email management. He said yes, but he didn't find anything that had the features we need and still allow us the control we want.

I'll explain the features we need, and I'm hoping somebody knows of a service that might work for us.

What we need...

I envision a vendor which offers a service-based product which we can consume via some sort of API or POST. When our client sends an email from within our CRM product, we would toss over the wall (in a secure manner) to the vendor the following:

  • Body of the email
  • Sender's name, email, userid & password
  • SMTP address of our client
  • Recipient's name and email
  • Some sort of unique id that identifies this email, so that threads and conversations can be tracked.

The service would then validate the sender's email against their SMTP server, and send the email on his behalf.

The kicker would be being able to also track reply emails, and to get them back into our CRM product. The vendor could perhaps push them to us, or, every x minutes, would could query them to see if there are any replies waiting to be sucked up.

So, does any such service exist? If so, have you used it, and what has been your experience?

halfer
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Casey Crookston
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  • I'm not sure if this is the correct forum, but have you checked out MailGun and SendGrid? – Keith Holloway Oct 07 '15 at 13:44
  • I will look into those now. Thanks. And yeah, I'm aware that this might not be the best forum -- not sure where else to ask. The width and depth of knowledge here is vast. – Casey Crookston Oct 07 '15 at 13:45
  • Does IP refer to Intellectual Property or Internet Protocol Address? – Chris Nevill Oct 07 '15 at 13:47
  • Internet Protocol Address. A big problem with apps that send email is that they tend to get black-listed by agencies that watch for SPAM. Once you are black-listed, you are dead in the water, and it's a huge process to get un-black listed. We need to out source this process to a company who specializes in this, which we don't. – Casey Crookston Oct 07 '15 at 13:52
  • OK sorry was just curious. I've seen an issue where a server was being blacklisted for having a virus. Not for simply sending legitimate email though. That sounds kind of strange to me assuming you're not sending spam! I guess you're just at a much larger scale than us though. We probably only send a couple of hundred emails a day through our .NET app. Possibly also a different use case. – Chris Nevill Oct 07 '15 at 14:00
  • To avoid blacklisting, we use MailGun's API to validate email addresses before attempting to use them. It is possible that this sort of thing might help alleviate some of your problems. Check out the API here: https://documentation.mailgun.com/api-email-validation.html – Keith Holloway Oct 07 '15 at 14:05
  • Thanks Keith. I've been looking at MailGun's info. So far, this looks like something I can bring back to my boss and recommend. Thanks! (Do you want to post an answer?) – Casey Crookston Oct 07 '15 at 14:08
  • @Keith Holloway -- jackpot. Showed this (mailgun) to my boss and we are setting up a call with Rackspace to discuss. The cool thing is, our CRM app is already hosted at RackSpace, so hopefully we can get help to integrate from a single source. Looks like this might just work. Much appreciated. – Casey Crookston Oct 07 '15 at 14:43
  • @CaseyCrookston, just posted an answer. Thanks! – Keith Holloway Oct 07 '15 at 16:26

1 Answers1

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MailGun and SendGrid are two transactional email service options that you might want to consider. They offer API-based email at scale.

I know that with MailGun you can use their API to validate email addresses before attempting to use them. This may help with your blacklisting problem. Check out the API here: documentation.mailgun.com/api-email-validation.html

Keith Holloway
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