Setting up a dedicated SMTP Server

If you're sending a high volume of email, or you want full control over your sending reputation, you can purchase a dedicated SMTP server for your Transpond account. This guide walks you through what a dedicated server is, why you might want one, and how to set it up.

What is a dedicated SMTP server?

By default, your emails send through Transpond's shared server pools alongside other customers. A dedicated server gives you an SMTP server used exclusively by your account, so your sending is segmented away from shared pools. This means your sending reputation is entirely your own, built and maintained based only on your own sending behavior.

How to buy a dedicated server

1. Go to Account Settings > Servers in your Transpond account.
2. From the Servers page, click Add a Server.
3. Select Purchase a Server from Transpond.
4. Give your server a name. This is just for your own reference, so something descriptive works well.
5. Choose which Transpond domain to use with the server. Any available domain will work here, so pick whichever you prefer.

Pricing

Dedicated servers cost £39.99 + VAT per month. You can cancel at any time, so there's no long-term commitment.

Warming up your new server

Transpond is a fully managed email marketing platform, which means we look after a lot of email servers on your behalf. Whenever you send a marketing campaign, automation or transactional email through Transpond, our team of experts checks the servers it’s sent through to make sure there are no issues, such as denylisting or blocks.

Why does a server need to be warmed up?

When we add a new mail server to our sending network, we could simply add it to our server rotation and have it start sending tens of thousands of emails straight away. The problem is that the outside world (other email servers and providers like Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail) has never seen this server before. Suddenly, it’s sending large volumes of email with no history or reputation behind it.

At first, everyone blocks the IP address, so very few emails reach your contacts’ inboxes. Even if the IP isn’t blocked, many providers will cap how many emails they’ll accept from the new server.

The solution is to gently show the outside world that the server is “OK”: it won’t cause problems, it isn’t set up to send spam, and it’s used by genuine people emailing genuine subscribers.

This gentle approach is called “Warming Up.” It works by limiting how many emails the server can send each day, starting very low and gradually increasing the number over time. This gives other mail servers and services the chance to see that the server isn’t causing issues and is building a good reputation. If a provider has set a sending limit, they’ll raise it as the server proves itself.

How does Transpond warm up your server?

There's no hard and fast rule as to how fast or slowly you should warm up a new server, but over time we have experimented and found the following warmup rules work pretty well.

How does this affect me?

Most of our customer never need to know, or worry about warming up. Transpond warms up a server automatically in the background whenever we add a new one to a pool, and we share the email load between new servers, and established servers to avoid any noticeable slow down.

However, some customers do use their own dedicated mailing servers. If you do have your own dedicated mail servers with Transpond just remember that we are automatically warming up your servers from the moment they are added to your account, so take note of the email rates because you might find campaigns take a little while to send for the first few days.