What We Can Do in 2021 as Your ESP

 It may have been a while since you reviewed the features that Dundee Email List Services offers based on the Lyris ListManager platform.  After all this email program is over 20 years old, but always up-to-date.  That just proves it’s stable, competitive, well tested and continues to deliver email to millions of people worldwide.

Our competition grows yearly. Review their new features, you’ll find that their new features are usually one of our standards.

And if they don’t do what we do, they have their reasons:

So let’s dive in and review.

Besides everything listed here: we can accommodate any size design, attachment, file, and type of file.

Each ESP, whether they state it or not, have some type of limitation on the size of an email or the number of emails you can send through their system;   and their reasons why.   The reasons vary but the bottom line: they say attachments degrade performance. 

When someone sends large attachments with Lyris ListManager, and they do, we and the customer, do not see issues with performance.  Granted large email attachments take up more bandwidth than their smaller counterpart; and more bandwidth translates into more costs.  An ESP that is charging by list members only will lose money if they allow large attachments, or an unlimited amount of monthly email. 

We allow both because we charge accordingly: Our fees are not based on list members.

Not allowing large emails, may be a sore point with some customers, so they are told by their providers, (whether true or not (who’s to say)) different reasons why attachments aren't allowed.

Some of their reasons are listed here:

1. Email servers are not designed to transfer large volumes of data. Really?  What about the huge email servers used by yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail? They process trillions of large data in seconds for trillions of mailboxes every hour of the day.
2. Mail servers scan incoming data for viruses and other issue, which takes up too many resources and ultimately affects the server operation. I can’t confirm this, but I can only say we never have run into this, incoming or out going mail with millions of emails passing through our servers.
   
   
3. It’s an insecure way to send email. Email servers have a limited number of ports to receive data, so they are more vulnerable to DoS attacks. When I read this, I’m not sure what it has to do with sending and receiving attachments. I’ll probably write them and ask.

   A long time ago, we had a T1  feeding internet to our office, (plus several other T1's for our dial up customers).  There was no cable internet at the time, only dia lup, ISDN and T1’and T3’.   My son, Joe played DOOM, one of the few online games at the time, and he was fast, because of the T1 connection.  Much faster than (apparently) the modem connected player he was winning against.  This upset that player so much so, he launched a DoS attack against our servers.  I only found that out, because the FBI called to tell us our server was under attack – the FBI was tracking down this guy and noticed all this commotion on our network.

4. There may be limits on the recipient’s mailbox which prevent attachments to be downloaded. Our email program sends both a text and html message that delivers to the inbox in the best format, (text or html) for the receiver.  If the recipient selects text, there will not be an attachment.

   On rare occasions the recipient has a smaller inbox so the attachment will not be delivered.  That’s something that can be addressed by the list owner directly to the recipient.  The sender can also include a URL if desired.

5. It was also noted when an attachment is included with an email message, the size of the message is increased. (This is covered in number 1) The competitors go on to say when an email is sent with an attachment, and only a small percentage of recipients want the attachment the list owner is forcing the remaining recipients to download the attachment anyway.  The email client normally allows a user to reject, view or download attachments.

   And as a list owner; your opted-in list members will know what type of email you are sending. You’re not forcing an unwanted download. 

6. Attachments contain malware and viruses. This is true in some cases however we are running mailing lists. We scan everything. 
   
   People on some of these lists, expect email with attachments.  In our system it is impossible for non- list members to send an email to a list of recipients.  List administrators control the size of the email.  They can ban attachments and/or limit the size of the email message.

And then there are somethings that our competitors  tout that that we have always offered:

Unlimited A/B testing –  we call this split testing.  And yes, it’s unlimited, you can test anything.  We also have a wizard to guide you through this process. 

Lyris ListManager has always included autoresponders; and you can schedule email far in the future (Your list subscriptions has expired, Happy 21^st Birthday, etc.) and triggered emails (i.e. Thank you for your purchase, your next appointment is and so forth)

Pre-write your messages, send them out at specific times, day, week or even a year in advance.

Our list owners could always create custom forms, survey’s, alerts, notifications, use segmentation, and suppression lists.  Receive deliverability reports or make their own reports, with tracking tools. And we can text to mobile devices.  You can also establish a drip campaign to distribute relevant information to your targeted list members, at specific times, which can translate into more sales. 

Some ESPs include descriptive information that may indicate delivery issues.  When we receive a complaint, it generates an automatic email ban to exclude those email address from receiving emails. 

And the list goes on.

Drop and Drag templates?  No we don’t have drop and drag but we have something better.   We can direct you to a website that only does email templates, its free, you just copy the code and drop it in the ListManager editor.  We also have several responsive design templates in ListManager just waiting to be used.  AND we can design a custom template just for you- no charge for the first one.  AND of course, you can use the editor to make your own too, it’s easy and fun.

There is a difference in pricing too.  We charge by the number of emails sent, not by the number of contacts.  And we allow multiple lists under one owner, with as many administrators as needed. We also send out under your domain, private IP, and the best technical support in the world. No AI’s just real people, that’s not my opinion, its true. 

We never give you the run around, we’ll work until we know the reason why something isn’t working: right down to finding out why that one email isn’t being delivered.  

We also do discussion lists!

Free 30-day demo

Prices start at $10 a month for unlimited sends.