The NUMBER ONE, single biggest problem with email marketing is deliverability.

Everywhere you research on the Internet are people complaining about their emails never even ending up in the spam folder. This means the emails never even got delivered. No matter how hard the receiver looks, the email receiver will never find your email.

This is known as “blackholing”, or “blacklisted”.

“Blackholing” has become extremely common due to widespread abuse of cloud providers to send spam.

“Blackholing” is so common, Microsoft Outlook has effectively blacklisted entire IP address blocks of DigitalOcean and other common server providers.

“Blackholing” is so common, DigitalOcean will BY DEFAULT block port 25 for all new users (Port 25 is the default port used by email servers…by blocking port 25, DigitalOcean means they default-block email server software until you are proven NOT to be a spammer).

Luckily, there IS a way around blackholing.

The solution is known as Outbound “SMTP relay”.

“SMTP relay” means that instead of emails sent from your email server’s IP address (which has probably been blacklisted), you get a reputable third-party provider like Amazon SES to deliver your emails.

“SMTP relay” also conveniently works around DigitalOcean blocking port 25, because port 25 is not needed for outbound SMTP relay to work.

You still have your own email server! You’ve simply delegated the email-sending to Amazon SES.

And it means your email is guaranteed to be delivered. No more blackholing!

What’s even better is the price. Amazon SES can’t be beat at $0.10 per 1000 emails.