Ⓜ️Velocity MTA FAQ
Is Velocity MTA free?
Yes, it comes included with the EmailDelivery.com platform at no additional cost.
How does the MTA license work?
Velocity MTA is licensed separately from the ESP platform, and you can install Velocity MTA on unlimited servers with unlimited IP addresses.
You can run Velocity MTA on remote servers or on the same server as the ESP platform.
All of the Velocity MTA installations can point back to the same single ESP platform installation for unified management and reporting.
What is an MTA?
MTA is an acronym that stands for Message Transfer Agent or Mail Transfer Agent.
Ultimately, MTAs undergird all of the email delivery happening across the entire internet every day.
No matter which ESP you're using, the final step in the email delivery process happens when an MTA connects out from an ESP to the mailbox provider your message is being delivered to at Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, iCloud, or anywhere else a contact has an email address.
An MTA is simply a software package that conforms to the SMTP standard and can deliver email through any IP address on the server it's installed on without any third-party dependencies.
MTAs handle email delivery autonomously and don't use external services like an ESP, API, or SMTP Relay, in fact, the reverse is true: ESPs, APIs, and SMTP Relays need an MTA.
The "gold standard" commercial MTA for ESPs and high-volume senders has long been PowerMTA, with some well-known competitors being MailerQ and Green Arrow, all three of which are priced to extract tens of thousands of dollars from their customers.
What is Velocity MTA?
Velocity MTA is a PowerMTA alternative that comes integrated with the ESP platform for end-to-end interoperability at every level.
Velocity MTA enables you to purchase inexpensive IP addresses from your preferred hosting provider and to use them exactly like a dedicated IP from an email service provider that was charging you exorbitant monthly fees.
Is SMTP Relay in the ESP platform handled by Velocity MTA?
All of the SMTP Relay implementations in the ESP platform work independently of Velocity MTA, and unless you explicitly install it, Velocity MTA is not even running.
Velocity MTA is integrated with the ESP platform through a special connection, does not accept SMTP Relay connections directly, and must be connected to a Customer Account using a Postal Route to be used for SMTP Relay just like any other Connection Type such as Amazon SES, SparkPost, or Mailgun.
Can I pay someone to install and configure Velocity MTA for me?
We provide extensive documentation on every aspect of Velocity MTA installation, configuration, and reporting. Most people with a reasonably technical background should be able to follow them.
Igor Kucurski from Fiverr will install and configure Velocity MTA including setting up all authentication and sending the first test messages to verify everything is working properly for $60:
What are the benefits of using Velocity MTA?
Eliminate monthly IP leasing and plan costs from an ESP where you're paying for every message sent, every contact stored, and for access to 'special' features with additional sales pressure on upsells, consulting, monitoring, AI, and various other snake oil.
Sending from your own IP addresses is like sending for free.
The only "fingerprint" is you, your sender reputation isn't dragged down by your ESP and questionable customers that have snuck onto their network over time. If you're a good sender, it's even arguable that an ESP's established reputation can only hurt you.
When you run the MTA, you're the one in control:
Use 1 IP or 10 IPs, use 1 domain or 10 domains, stick with a preferred provider for all of your IP addresses, or purchase 1 IP at a time from 10 different networks and spread your infrastructure out, all of these choices are yours alone as the sole postmaster and administrator.
You can assign different IPs for transactional, marketing, and real-time triggered automation mail, and use custom warmup schedules, caps, and throttles on a per-ip basis.
And, of course, with EmailDelivery.com, you can also become the vendor, which means you can be the one who leases dedicated IPs to your own customers and clients and charges them for every message sent and every contact stored.
How does using the MTA with my own IP addresses differ from sending through an ESP?
ESPs start you out on a shared IP pool that has had thousands of people sending on it for years, they've already established a sender reputation with mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and iCloud.
The ESP has staff that does some level of quality enforcement on the mail being sent by their customers to try and maintain that sending reputation, although the effort put into this varies greatly between ESPs and even between different IP pools at the same ESP.
As a new sender at an ESP, you inherit the benefits of their sender reputation: your email will be accepted by the mailbox providers, delivered quickly, and go to the inbox more often than the spam folder.
This is an initial benefit of hiding in the herd. You're a drop in the ocean of thousands or tens of thousands of other senders, and unless you do something especially egregious, the mailbox providers are going to let your messages sail through and pay you no mind.
However, this carefully maintained balance can be disrupted if an individual sender grows too large, with their sender reputation having an outsized influence on the combined reputation of the herd, stamping the entire IP pool with their fingerprint.
This is one reason why it's common for senders who exceed a certain sending volume at an ESP to be moved to dedicated IPs. This threshold can be as low as 25,000 messages per month on some ESPs, or as high as 300,000 per month on others. Most are somewhere in the middle.
The ESP doesn't want the reputation of one large sender to overpower the rest of the senders because if that lone sender screws up, and no one is minding the store, they can take the entire IP pool down and the rest of the senders down with them.
The reverse is also true:
The largest sender can have their sender reputation harmed by the bad senders in the herd and random spammers signing up to every ESP daily with fake blogs and products that don't exist.
Moving someone to a dedicated IP is also where sales can get involved to push people into contracts, volume commitments to lower their CPM, and upsells for dedicated deliverability specialists with dubious promises, jargon, and mumbo jumbo. All the stuff our self-hosted platform was created to help you avoid.
Once an ESP moves you over to dedicated IPs, this is pretty similar to using your own IP addresses with Velocity MTA.
You may or may not receive some extra reputational benefit from a dedicated IP at an ESP if the ESP continues to use their established domain(s) for the return-path and DKIM double signs your mail, but any potential benefit here will wear off as sending volume increases.
Where can I get my own IP addresses to use with Velocity MTA?
Many large hosting companies such as Digital Ocean and Vultr do not allow their IP addresses to be used for email marketing. You can host the ESP platform there, but you need to put the MTA on an external hosting provider who allows email marketing from their IP addresses.
Default blocking of outgoing port 25 is not uncommon, depending on the policies of any given hosting provider. You may be able to request port 25 access by opening a support ticket, potentially with justification of who you are, how you will use it, and how you'll prevent abuse.
Hosting providers popular with our customers who are using Velocity MTA:
Racknerd - $15/year per IP address Contabo - $2/mo per IP address Namecheap - $4/mo per IP address OVH Hetzner - $2/mo per IP address Amazon Lightsail Oracle Cloud Servermania
How do I guarantee I get a clean IP? What about blacklists?
If you're buying inexpensive IP addresses off the shelf from VPS providers, more likely than not you'll be on a couple of inconsequential blacklists no matter who your host is.
Even major hosting providers like Digital Ocean who block port 25 and disallow all email from their network have most of their IP ranges listed by the same blacklists as hosting providers who freely allow email marketing without any due diligence applied to their customers in this regard.
If you pay real money for a block of portable IP addresses and become the owner of that network, such as a /24 that you're going to have routed on your behalf at a datacenter, you should of course expect those IPs to be completely clean with no blacklists, prior history of abuse, or email marketing sending history.
However, at a VPS hosting company with thousands of no-strings-attached customers who come and go daily where you're paying $1 or $2 for an IP address, you're going to have to set your expectations appropriately.
You're getting an IP randomly assigned out of a giant pool and the hosting provider doesn't necessarily keep an inventory of who had what IP and what they were doing with it, and in all reality probably doesn't even have a way to know that to begin with.
Hosting providers that freely allow email marketing can attract bad senders, so their pool of IP addresses will be a mix of pristine IPs with no prior sending history at all, and IPs that have been stepped on by Godzilla, King Kong, Hydra, Mothra, and Cthulhu in rotation and all at the same time during a house fire stampede on Thanksgiving caused by deep frying a turkey the size of the Chrysler Building.
For this reason, Racknerd allows you to swap out a bad IP for free within 72 hours if you got one splattered with turkey grease:
Increasing your odds of winning the IP lotto 🎲
If you can form a trusted relationship with a hosting provider who is closer to a Digital Ocean type of company that is willing to work with professionals, and doesn't just allow anyone and everyone to email from their network, you'll get far more consistent results than with a cowboy provider who operates fast and lose and doesn't really care what anyone is doing as long as they're not attracting attention and high profile blacklisting.
There are off the beaten path and under the radar hosting providers that allow email marketing from their network who have near perfect chain of custody on all of their IP addresses, their IPs are directly owned by them or their parent company, and have never had their network abused by legions of organized professional spammers.
These providers have a high likelihood of assigning you an IP with no prior sending history the first time.
However, you have to find them yourself via trial and error, and when you find them, don't share them with others, this is how they stay that way.
How do I know if a blacklist is 'inconsequential'? How do I determine if my IP is 'bad' or 'good' ?
Inconsequential blacklists are those that seem to list almost every IP they can find on the entire commercial internet.
They look up every IP owned by every hosting provider, reseller, and datacenter and just block everyone and everything accumulating millions of IPs in their blocklist.
In general, if a blacklist isn't being used by the most important mailbox providers like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, broadband providers like Comcast and AT&T and whatever the domains are that comprise over 80% of your contact list, you gotta just not care about that blacklist if you're paying $2 for an IP address.
Sometimes email marketers can become preoccupied by delivery perfection and obsessively monitor and litigate every nickel and dime blacklisting that will never earn them a nickel or a dime even if it were removed anyway.
Our advice: don't make perfect the enemy of the good.
If there are no issues with your technical setup, and you're sending from a domain either without prior sending history, or with an established positive sending reputation, and you're sending on an IP without any prior sending history, your messages should start out in the Gmail inbox even if you're on 5 blacklists that list 20 million IPs each.
If you get one of these dreaded messages, and there are no other obvious potential explanations, most likely it's either caused by your IP address or your domain already having established a negative reputation with Gmail directly, and not because of any other unrelated blacklisting by Tinpot Terry's IPs of Terror:
What's an IP warmup schedule like?
If you research IP warmup schedules, most of the "advice" is from outer space. 🛸
You'll notice these warmup pages and PDFs are commonly 10 years old or more and tell you that you'll be sending millions of messages in two weeks.
Think about how much has changed everywhere else in the last 10 years, how is it possible these documents could still be valid?
The next thing you'll notice about public IP warmup strategies is that when they deviate from a sketchy spreadsheet someone spitballed 12 years ago, the guides and recommendations are intentionally vague.
More often than not, they say almost nothing.
The reason why IP warmup guides are vague is because ESPs feel pressure from customers to make IP warmups happen as quickly as possible, but no one actually knows what 'as quickly as possible' is.
The reputation systems at mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and iCloud are opaque, black boxes relying on a combination of manual tuning, machine learning, and third-party software and data from anti-spam security vendors. Even the engineers responsible for maintaining these systems may not fully understand the results they produce.
Because of the dual pressures of having only a vague understanding of how these systems work and customer impatience, deliverability experts are mostly making it up as they go along: arbitrary judgment calls, doing more art than science, crossing their fingers, and generally relying on the world's most dangerous words: "in my experience...". 🤞
This is realistic advice from Microsoft, you should set your expectations for a six-week warmup schedule to start establishing a positive sender reputation:
This advice from Google is a warning, they will block your mail if you're a new sender who sends too much, too fast:
As Gmail is the primary domain of concern for email marketers, we'll use it for our example below and throughout the rest of this document.
An IP warmup works like compound interest:
You start out on day 1 sending a number of messages so small it seems both pointless and hopeless, a mere 54 days later, you'll be sending 300,000 messages per day.
A safe, reliable, and realistic warmup schedule is to start by sending a small number of emails on day one to only yourself, colleagues, friends, and family, somewhere between 5 and 20 messages to Gmail.
Make sure everyone opens the message.
Once you've reached 20 messages total sent in one day, the next day start increasing the number of messages sent by 20% per day.
Following a schedule of modest 20% daily increases, you'll see the magic of compounding in action:
20
66
194
4,180
64,600
300,000+
Sending over 300,000 messages per day for free - by starting at only 20 messages just last month!
With Velocity MTA you can create an automated warmup schedule that will enforce these daily limit increases, so you can't accidentally overshoot and blow up all your progress halfway through.
During a warmup, start by sending to only your most engaged contacts, only adding less engaged contacts when it becomes necessary to pad your sending volume so it still continues to grow every day.
Same-day responders, automated real-time triggers, and transactional email are best for getting started.
Gradually add contacts over time based on how recently they've opened or clicked a message: 0 days, 3 days, 7 days, 10 days, 14 days, 21 days, 30 days.
It might look something like this:
Always pull openers OR clickers instead of only openers, 15%-20% of your clickers won't be in your openers segment because they didn't trigger an open pixel when they clicked.
That's really all there is to it. You're a deliverability expert now. Welcome to being a brain genius 🧠 💡.
The secret ingredient isn't technical ability or esoteric knowledge but actually just consistency and patience.
What are the pitfalls, caveats, and challenges to using an MTA?
You have to send wanted email.
You can't warm up an IP address sending cold email or dormant data, there's no herd to hide in, it's just you.
Gmail, Yahoo, and other major mailbox providers are processing billions of messages per day and have been doing so for many years, they scan each message for known patterns associated with unwanted mail, and it's all augmented by machine learning.
To put it into perspective, see this quote from Google's recent announcement on enhanced Gmail protections:
It's like that old canard about the court ruling on obscenity: they know unwanted mail when they see it.
And as your sending volume increases, more scrutiny is applied.
In an unprecedented move, Gmail and Yahoo jointly acknowledged this when they announced starting Feb 1, 2024, they were making public their policies for applying additional requirements on bulk senders for the first time.
Gmail has set the threshold for being identified as a bulk sender at sending 5000 messages in one day.
How is a positive sender reputation established?
Your complaint rate is 0.2% or less:
This means 2 out of 1000 people click the spam button.
You have a reasonable open rate:
No one knows exactly what the right number is and it may be different for each sender. You'll hear estimates like 5%, 8% 11% or 20%.
The important thing is just that the mailbox provider is seeing evidence that some of the people want to read this mail some of the time, and that when they open the message, they aren't getting mad at it.
If your complaint rate increases with your open rate, the complaint rate will cancel out any positive impact from more engagement.
For your own well-being ignore the debate, noise, and FUD about the validity of open rates you may be seeing online right now. This is fueled by a mix of the effects of Apple Mail Privacy Protection, widespread bot problems, plus the usual conspiracy theories, speculation, personal anecdotes, rumors, and misinformation.
Your sending volume increases slowly over time at a consistent rate:
See the warmup section above on this topic.
You have a low bounce rate:
If you use a bounce cleaning service that actually works, like email oversight, your bounce rate on Gmail and other major domains should start around 1%.
If you're using emaildelivery.com to send your email marketing campaigns, your bounce rate on major domains should stay well under 1% if you send every day.
When you see high bounce rates on your list, that's usually going to be an aggregate number caused by lots of small domains with hygiene issues, delivery problems, and user churn.
Large mailbox providers like Gmail Yahoo and iCloud shouldn't have accounts regularly expiring en masse.
Use the list-unsubscribe header and honor unsubscribes after one click:
Don't send even 1 additional message after someone has opted out.
Don't send an automated 'you have been unsubscribed' email after someone has unsubscribed.
Deliver your messages to contacts prioritized in order by who opened and clicked most recently:
EmailDelivery.com does this by default, unless you disable it.
Create segments and systems for contacts who haven't responded in the last 90 days to move them onto their own separate low-engagement infrastructure:
Details here are beyond the scope of this document.
Click 'Show original' on Gmail and 'View raw message' on Yahoo and verify your DKIM, SPF, and DKIM are all marked as 'pass'.
How do I get insight into my sending reputation?
Most of the advice you see about this topic is silly and useless, such as checking your senderscore, using Talos, and websites that create an arbitrary scoring system for your messages based on spam assassin.
It's vital to sign up for Google Postmaster Tools, make this the first thing you do.
Use Google Postmaster Tools as a proxy for how your mail is being scored more generally across all mailbox providers.
Google Postmaster Tools will simply tell you exactly how Gmail views your sender reputation with reports like these:
Be on the lookout for soft bounce error messages from Gmail such as "Our system has detected this message is likely suspicious...."
When you see "Our system has detected..." from Gmail, you're in trouble.
This means your reputation is in the gutter and unless you pause sending or dial the volume down, it will quickly escalate into a permanent block.
Unfortunately, the specifics of these messages are not accurate or reliable. They may tell you that your domain is suspicious, but if you move the same domain to a new IP pool, your reputation will seem to be instantly restored, and everything will run smoothly and without error.
Like most things related to email delivery and deliverability, you'll need to experiment and do some research on resolving this issue as there is no single piece of advice that can be given on how to handle it other than "stop doing what you're doing right now".
If I'm doing everything right and not seeing the results I think I should, what can I do?
Most large mailbox providers provide a method for bulk senders to apply to have their sending issues remediated.
When you pay a consultant for deliverability help, after they tell you the same thing you've read on the web hundreds of times in your life, they usually just go to these pages and request a pardon or at least a commutation.
Google's sender escalation form.
Yahoo's sender support request form.
Microsoft OLC support form for outlook.com/hotmail.com/msn.com/live.com.
You can also look into sender certification through Validity and see if it may be right for you.
How do the upcoming changes at Google and Yahoo affect me and my IPs?
Although there definitely have been some important technical and implementation changes related to the joint announcement by Google and Yahoo, any negative impact by the new guidelines would mostly affect senders who would have never gotten traction using dedicated IP addresses in the first place.
See more here:
In our view, this has actually been a very positive change.
Gmail and Yahoo have always adopted a 'security through obscurity' model, maintaining a cloak of secrecy with any advice given on improving deliverability being deliberately vague and ambiguous out of fear of helping the spammers.
They didn't wave the white flag on this, but they at least waved a small napkin, admitting the spam problem continues to get worse and being uncooperative with good senders hasn't produced any positive benefits for either side.
Bookmark the Yahoo sender hub and Gmail bulk sender guidelines and check them for updates a couple of times a month.
For instance, Gmail just added that TLS is now a sender requirement only a few weeks ago.
Does Velocity MTA do IP rotation?
Yes.
We get this question a lot and sometimes the thinking behind it can be a bit misguided.
Unless you are a sophisticated sender with a proven strategy, or your domain(s) has a good reputation with an established history of high-volume email delivery, just adding more IP addresses to the same domain and rotating IPs is more likely to get you blocked than increase your sending volume in 2024.
If you add 3 new IPs to a new domain and try to do a warmup 3 times faster you'll start seeing responses from Gmail like these after about 1000 messages:
"Our system has detected this message is likely suspicious...."
How do I resell my Velocity MTA IP addresses to my customers?
The best way to use Velocity MTA to earn money from your customers is by selling them their own dedicated IPs.
ConvertKit charges $250/mo for a dedicated IP by reselling a SendGrid IP address that ConvertKit pays $30/mo for at $220 profit.
And that's before any charges for the ConvertKit plan the customer is on.
Pro Tip: You could do that too by using SendGrid with your EmailDelivery.com ESP platform, in addition to Velocity MTA.
Charging $50-$150 per month just for a dedicated IP before additional costs is not uncommon at many ESPs.
If you pay $15/year for a clean IP address from Racknerd, and charge your customer $100/mo just for the IP before any charges for sending volume and contact list storage, that's already $1185 profit.
Earning $2500/year from a $15/year IP address is not at all unrealistic with the right customer; as always, this is going to come down to your customer acquisition and sales abilities.
You do not want to resell a shared IP pool or IP addresses you are using for internal email with Velocity MTA unless you really know what you're doing, and even then, you probably still don't.
Even for the most experienced postmasters, running a shared IP pool successfully is very challenging and fraught with danger, peril, and hazards.
Some of the most successful ESPs with the biggest budgets and expert staff such as Brevo and Maropost can have shared IP pools with poor delivery.
Here's what emailtooltester had to say about the state of Brevo's email deliverability in 2023:
The point here is not to single out Brevo.
Trying to control what other senders are doing and keep them from destroying your sender reputation is like herding cats, times a billion, times infinity. Even if you have so much money you're always the top result in Google Ads for email marketing related search terms every day in every major city around the world like Brevo.
Our advice:
Stick to low-hanging fruit and keep your senders isolated from one another and from you, unless you're outsourcing shared IP pool delivery to the professionals somewhere like Amazon SES or SparkPost. FYI: Your EmailDelivery.com ESP platform supports that too!
What is the downside to using an MTA? Why wouldn't everyone do this?
Usually, the first deterrents are the cost and complexity of the technical implementation.
PowerMTA has a 500 page manual, and that's before you've even started contemplating how to integrate it with ESP software so you can actually use it.
We've greatly reduced the complexity of running an MTA down to just a couple of settings and pages in the UI, with sane defaults that will cover most use cases.
Another deterrent is the off-the-shelf options for email marketing software that can be integrated with an MTA have long been underwhelming, causing many people to attempt to roll their own, which can easily spiral out into a lengthy and expensive boondoggle on its own.
Lastly, just like a dedicated IP at an ESP, when you're using your own MTA you're the only one responsible for your sending reputation, you need to build it up from scratch, and the benefits of being on a shared IP pool at an ESP with years of sending history on their IPs and domains are lost.
Sending through your own IP addresses with an MTA requires patience and discipline, you need to do a long and slow warmup and carefully establish a positive sender reputation over time with the mailbox providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and iCloud.
Who is Velocity MTA for? How do I know if I should use this?
You send significant enough volume that an ESP would push you onto dedicated IP addresses.
You have a pristine sender reputation and want to isolate it from the influence of any other senders.
You want privacy, control, and to own your tech and keep it in-house or even on-premises.
Also, if you're just a geek and like to tinker with stuff and see it work, that's also a totally valid reason.
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