What is SMTP? … and Why Use It?
Why use SMTP? If you’re sending email, you already are. The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is fundamental to modern communication. It’s the technology computers use for sending, receiving and relaying email messages between devices and into your inbox. SMTP is the critical process that ensures the smooth operation of email communications on the Internet.
When you send an email, SMTP is responsible for transferring your message from your email client (such as Outlook, Gmail, or Apple Mail) to the recipient’s email server. From there, the recipient’s email server uses a protocol like IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) or POP3 (Post Office Protocol) to deliver the email to the recipient’s inbox.
Why do you Need to Know About SMTP?
With any luck, you won’t. But if your messages are going to junk, bouncing or just disappearing, you might need to read on. If people are struggling to use your website, you might need to read on.
How SMTP Works
The process of sending an email via SMTP involves several steps:
- You Send Your Email: You compose an email and click ‘Send’.
- SMTP Connection: Your email client establishes a connection with your SMTP server.
- Message Transfer: The email is transferred from your SMTP server to the recipient’s email server.
- Recipient Retrieval: The recipient’s email server stores the email until the recipient retrieves it using their email client.
SMTP works on a request-response model where commands are sent from the client to the server, and responses are sent back from the server to the client. Common SMTP commands include HELO, MAIL FROM, RCPT TO, DATA, and QUIT.
When SMTP Goes Bad
Email is great; vast amounts of it are successfully sent every day, and almost all of it arrives successfully … just like that!
Email can be tricky. Because SMTP ‘relays’ messages from server to server, there are several places where the chain can break and the message lost. Normally you’ll get an error in your inbox “Message Undeliverable” or similar. But sometimes your message just vanishes into the ether. It can take specialist software to assess just where your message went.
The most common sign that SMTP is misconfigured is your messages turn up in junk. If you’re using a major mail provider (Gmail or Outlook) it’s very unlikely to happen to you. Google and Microsoft spend a great deal of effort ensuring their email works reliably. These days they pretty much set the standard.
So for personal use, stick with a known provider and you should be fine,
Time was, most web servers would work as pretty effective web servers; clients would use their web server to manage their company email too. But those days are over: the level of authentication required to ensure email really will arrive safely are beyond the scope of anything except a dedicated mail server.
Why Does this Matter for Your Team?
Your team will expect emails to work perfectly. If you’re not getting your messages through your team cannot function adequately.
If you haven’t already, we’d recommend you move your general email handling to Google or Microsoft. We’d like to support the little guy, but hours of customer support struggles have led us to the conclusion that nothing else works as well.
Why Does SMTP Matter for Your Website?
But your website is a different matter. We’ve established that webservers aren’t very good at sending email. To make it worse, it tries to send them when you’re not there to check what’s going on (e.g. customer order completion or replace missing password). You may never hear your transactional emails email aren’t getting through, you’re just disappointing and annoying your clients.
Fortunately providers are offering SMTP services specifically for web servers. Brevo, PostMark, Google all offer the service with generous free allowances. It can take a bit of configuration but the results can be transformative.
Conclusion
Fixing email deliverability so no one’s favourite job but we’ve done a lot of it. We have the tools to test and the experience to see what might be going wrong.
If your message isn’t getting through, try talking to us.