Our web hosting services are not intended for large mailings, type newsletters. To send newsletters, there are lots of different services on the internet that you can use. What to keep in mind, however, is to really make sure that the newsletters are sent from Europe, from e-mail servers located in Europe. This is because of GDPR. Companies have been dropped in Europe (Germany) for using US services that send newsletters from / via the US (Mailchimp). It was dropped to send mail as such by Mailchimp on servers found in the United States and therefore became the subject of FISA702.

Ideally, a European company should be used as well, but these are not yet as well developed and above all more expensive.

The following services we have experience in sending e-mail, type newsletter.

Sendy

Sendy , https://sendy.co, is a solution based on using Amazon AWS to send email. This is the most affordable way to send newsletters, Amazon's service Amazon Simple Email Service is a very affordable solution. The cost is about SEK 1 per 1000 mail sent. Then about SEK 1 is added for each GB of space that attachments take. In practice, it will not cost anything at all for most people. Read more about Amazon's pricing here.

Sendy is a program that you install on your own web host, on your own domain name. Sendy is then a portal from which you administer and send your newsletters. The cost of Sendy is a one-off cost of about SEK 700.

Amazon is certainly an American company, but they have data centers in Europe, and even in Stockholm. This means that it is possible to set up e-mail messages so that they are from Stockholm, ie within the EU. Statistics etc. containing personal data is handled by the program Sendy on your server and is within European jurisdiction, e.g. from Register Domain, then you can feel pretty confident about meeting GDPR .

How to do it then? There are detailed instructions on Sendy's website, but we will briefly describe the steps here.

1. Create an account on Amazon AWS , https://aws.amazon.com. Creating the account is free. You must specify the payment method there, ie you must enter your credit card. Be sure to choose the right region when you are on Amazon, ie type Stockholm. see this picture.
2. Buy a license for Sendy on Sendy's website
3. Install Sendy on your website, e.g. as a subdomain or in its own directory
4. Create a user on Amazon AWS to use in Sendy to send email
5. Now it's clear. You can now send 250 messages a day. Do you need to send more you report it to Amazon then they increase at that limit.

It is simpler than the steps express, but if you need help with that, we can help you with that for 6 support coupons (about SEK 1,500). You can also buy the Sendy license through us, the cost is then 1.5 times the cost on Sendy's website plus VAT.

You can sign our additional service for transactional email, see below, and use this for Sendy. You will then have to do the complicated procedure to join Amazon SES .

DadaMail

DadaMail is a cheaper variant of Sendy. DadaMail is completely free even though they offer paid support on their website. DadaMail can be installed and maintained with Installatron, which is part of all ours web hosting accounts.

DadaMail can be linked to any of the services below, such as Amazon SES, Sendinblue, Rapidmail and so on.

There are also other free options in Installatron, such as. phplist.

If you sign our additional service for transactional email, see below, we offer to integrate this with you DadaMail. E-mail will then be sent via Amazon Stockholm, but all e-mail and information about subscribers etc will then be stored on our servers that fully comply with GDPR.

Amazon Simple Email System (SES)

Amazon SES is a simple smtp service that is extremely affordable, currently it costs about SEK 1 per 1000 sent emails. In addition, it costs about SEK 1 for each GB of email sent.

The great advantage of Amazon SES is that it is a purely smtp service, not a hocus pocus that you want when sending mail for marketing, type follow-up of who opened the letters, and how they clicked on different links in the letter. Amazon SES does not change the content of sent emails by posting tracking, nor does any of the contents of the letters by Amazon.

The major disadvantage of Amazon SES is that they are under US jurisdiction and thus are within the scope of the US Patriot Act. One implication is that their infrastructure for Amazon SES is entirely within the EU, within Sweden actually, so sent emails are never sent outside the EU if the recipient is within the EU, and sent emails never take the road around the US if they are to be sent elsewhere. FISA702 is hardly relevant to this service.

Another disadvantage is that it is quite difficult to activate the service. Amazon is complicated routines, a square support and an administrative console that is completely impenetrable.

We have activated Amazon SES in production ourselves and that experience has not been perfect right away. When you first create an account on Amazon SES, you only get one Sandbox to send mail in. You can only send mail to verified email addresses and domains, which in the real world does not work. To get a production account you have to apply for it. This application must specify what to use the service for. Although we filled in this, we received an immediate response that our request was denied. The answer is clearly an automatic answer without anyone looking at what we submitted. This is what the answer looked like:

Hello,


Thank you for submitting your request to increase your sending limits. We are unable to grant your request at this time because we do not have enough information about your use case.

If you can provide additional information about how you plan to use Amazon SES, we may be able to grant your request. In your response, include as much detail as you can about your email-sending processes and procedures.

For example, tell us how often you send email, how you maintain your recipient lists, and how you manage bounces, complaints, and unsubscribe requests. It is also helpful to provide examples of the email you plan to send so we can ensure that you are sending high-quality content.

You can provide this information by responding to the correspondence, in the console link below. Our team provides an initial response to your request within 24 hours. If we are able to do so, we will grant your request within this 24-hour period. However, if we need to obtain additional information from you, it might take longer to resolve your request.

Thank you for contacting Amazon Web Services.

From this letter you can see what is expected of you if you want to use Amazon SES .

It took a few rounds of Amazon support before we were approved. Amazon support is very square, it consists of ready-made answers that are complicated to understand. However, it fell into the fact that what was needed were some records in the DNS zone for the domain from which we would send mail, before it was finally approved.

It is a cumbersome procedure to be approved by Amazon SES. It is an excellent service, all data they send is kept within the EU, but above all, they do not save the actual sent mail on their own servers, like most other services do, and they do not enter tracking code as the others do. It is a pure SMTP service.

Sendinblue

Another option is Sendinblue , https://www.sendinblue.com Sendinblue is a French company, a company under European jurisdiction and thus fully under GDPR. They store data on Google and Amazon, but they state that this data is encrypted (.look here). This can be a problem, however, Sendinblue does not like it in the conversation we had with them.

What sets Sendinblue apart from Sendy / AWS above is that Sendinblue has as its primary business idea to send email, which Amazon AWS does not have. It means, for example,. that Sendinblue is careful to follow up the reputation of their email servers carefully so that they do not end up on different block lists.

Sendinblue is a complete service for sending newsletters. In their portal you can create newsletters and send them directly from the portal. You can also send so-called transactional e-mails, ie from your own app, eg. Wordpress, or from their own email client.

Sendinblue stores sent mail for a period on their own servers so you can see them from the portal. Sendinblue inserts tracking code into the sent email. It is standard for services like this. They offer to remove it, but it happens then for all domains for which they send mail.

Sendinblue is the most affordable European alternative. They offer a plan for free where you can send 300 letters a day for free. Their simplest larger plan costs about SEK 250 / month for 10,000 letters a month.

Rapidmail

Rapidmail is a German company with servers in Germany and a large number of positive reviews on, among others, Trustpilot. Rapidmail offers both transactional email and email marketing.

They also make integrity within the EU one main priority.

Tracking of sent mail is offered, it can be set individually for each domain for which it sends mail. We do not know whether sent mail is saved by Rapidmail to appear in the console, but probably not.

Rapidmail is much more flexible than Sendinblue, but at a slightly higher cost. For newsletters, their price starts from about SEK 125 / month. For transactional email, they offer free 1000 a month and then step up to about SEK 800 / month for 50,000 letters a month.

Flowmailer

Flowmailer är holländsk, med servrar i Nederländerna. Det erbjuder allt du behöver för transaktionell e-post och är helt klart en premiumprodukt, som du kan se i funktionerna, API, support och ansträngning som läggs på ombordstigning nya kunder.

Det rejäla priset finns också där, men det kan säkert vara värt det. Flowmailer erbjuder inte e-postmarknadsföringsfunktioner (nyhetsbrev), det är rent fokuserat på transaktionell e-post, men mycket omfattande. En mycket bra kandidat.

Bonuspoäng för deras prio på integritet.

Registrera Domän

Vi erbjuder en tilläggstjänst för transaktionell e-post. Kostnaden är 33 kr/månad för 10.000 brev per månad, plus en uppstartkostnad på 500 kr. Priserna inkluderar moms. Denna tjänst kan inte jämföras med de ovan vad gäller funktioner för att skicka nyhetsbrev. Det är en tjänst för att skicka e-post, ingenting annat.

Denna tjänst kan användas för att skicka e-post direkt med SMTP, användarnamn och lösenord tillhandahålls för detta. Ni kan använda denna tjänst genom er e-postklient, eller via er webbapplikation, t.ex. webbshop, WordPress.

I tjänsten ingår också att vi sätter upp SPF/DKIM/DMARC för er domän, för att minska risken för att skickad e-post hamnar i mottagarens skräppost. Se Vad-ar-SPF-DKIM-och-DMARC för information.

GDPR Jurisdiction: US (Amazon SES)

Summary

Newsletter

If you want a portal to create your own newsletters and manage them, and your mailing lists, through this, then DadaMail, Sendy, Sendinblue and Rapidmail are the options.

Cost: DadaMail, Sendy, Sendinblue, Rapidmail
Simplicity: Rapidmail, Sendinblue, DadaMail, Sendy
GDPR: Rapidmail, Sendinblue, DadaMail, Sendy
Features: Sendinblue, Rapidmail, Sendy, DadaMail
Our recommendation: Sendinblue

Transaction email

If you just want a service to send email, then the Register Domain, Sendinblue, Rapidmail and Amazon SES are the options that we have experience with. Flowmailer is also an alternative, but since we have no experience of this we have excluded it.

Cost: Amazon SES, Register-Domain, Sendinblue, Rapidmail
Simplicity: Register-Domain, Rapidmail, Sendinblue, Amazon SES
GDPR: Rapidmail, Sendinblue, Register-Domain, Amazon SES
Features: Sendinblue, Rapidmail, Amazon SES, Register Domain
Our recommendation: Register-Domain

There are several options not mentioned. One that should be mentioned is Elastic Mail Probably it is the best option for newsletters, comparable to Sendinblue, but cheaper. elastic Mail is founded in Canada, but with a solid presence in Europe, mainly Poland. They use French OVH's infrastructure and as a Canadian company they probably do not have to comply with the US Patriot Act and US FISA702. It can withstand evaluation as well.