Q1: What is Pepipost?
PepiPost is a cloud-based email delivery engine. It helps you deal with the challenge of timely delivery of your transactional and triggered emails to the inbox of your contacts.
Are you confused with the term- Transactional email ?
Transactional emails are those which are generated automatically from your website or any application because of the customer's activity like signup, order confirmation, forgot password, cart abandonment, welcome/followup series, feedback emails and lots more.
Q2: Why using Pepipost is important?
There are 3 kind of emails that are sent today, personal emails, marketing emails and transactional emails. Email like forgot password, sign-up verification, online purchase all of these email are critical for your customer experience. Due to very nature of the emails it is recommended to use email deliverability specialist, thus Pepipost is important. It is an expert in delivering transactional emails and tracking the customer activity.
Q3: What is the difference between simple SMTP relay/email server and Pepipost?
a. A simple in-house or 3rd party SMTP relay is only a pipe to ‘relay’ the client’s email to the recipient(s) over the Internet. There is no focus on improving deliverability and very little reporting other than delivery status
b. Pepipost is a much more sophisticated email delivery service that focuses on Deliverability and Reporting. It also gives you automated suppression on hard bounces, Unsubscribes and Abuse complaints.
Q4: Can I generate email with personalized attachments with Pepipost?
Pepipost doesn’t generate attachments or personalize attachments. It can send personalize attachments if any application is integrated which is equipped to generate these emails with personalize attachment and push it to Pepipost.
Q5: What reports can I view with Pepipost? Are they real-time?
a. Reports which you can view on Pepipost are:
i. Delivered
ii. Bounces
iii. Opens
iv. Clicks
v. Unsubscribe
vi. Spam (abuse)
vii. Invalid email – eg. Frank@gmail – ids which are syntactically incorrect
viii. Dropped – will record or suppress all bounces, unsubscribes and abuse complaints
b. Other information that clients can view includes:
i. Reputation Meter – It shows health of email activity considering unsubscribe, spam complaints, hard bounces.
ii. the number of email credits remaining (for prepaid customers)
iii. email logs
c. Yes these reports are real time
Q6: Can I track Open and clicks of emails sent via Pepipost?
Yes Pepipost tracks opens and clicks in the email. Pepipost replaces the links in the body of the source email with its own URLs. This is the standard method that all email marketing services use to track clicks. These URLs will of course redirect to the original link. There is a provision to skip process of tracking if demanded from the client.
Q7: What are the two methods by which email can be sent through Pepipost? When should I use each of these methods?
Pepipost can be integrated in 2 ways, one via SMTP (application) and secondly via HTTP (API). Once email reaches Pepipost, it sends the email to the user/recipient one on one.
a. SMTP is a standard protocol, is relatively simple to implement and send one email per API call.
b. HTTP Clients can use the HTTP API in cases where the same email needs to be sent to multiple recipients. Since a single API call can suffice for multiple email addresses, which means a significant saving in bandwidth costs. Thus one can send up to 1000-10,000 emails per API call
Q8: Is Pepipost Secure?
Pepipost has multiple security layers, let’s understand them below:
a. Pepipost does not store the text of the emails it sends. Emails are transient in nature and it only stores Meta information (basic information of data) about the email.
b. Data-in-transit is securely transited from customer application to Pepipost over secured port via TLS/SSL.
c. Pepipost HTTP API runs over secure HTTP, securing your email while in transit.
d. Pepipost configuration and reporting interface at https://www.pepipost.com/ also runs over secure HTTP
e. Pepipost panel which stores logs of emails is secured via 2FA (2 factor authentication) on demand, logs are stored in the system only for 90 days.
f. The API calls and the panel access can be secured using IP whitelisting
g. We have selected ISO 27001 accredited Data Centres to deliver our services. We want our customers to be confident in the security of their data and so have chosen to build our infrastructure using Data Centres that support our commitment to protect information assets.
Q9: What are SPF and DKIM? How do they ensure email authenticity?
SPF & DKIM is used for authentication of emails. It is defined as below:
SPF – Sender Policy framework. It is a permission to sending server IP for sending emails on behalf of sender. Can be done by defining IP in txt records under DNS settings of your domains control panel.
DKIM – Domain Key Identified Mail. It is signing email via domain key so that content of email is not tampered with, when in transit.
Q10: Does Pepipost provide dedicated IPs? Do I need to pay extra for them?
Dedicated IPs are available, but on request. We don’t have to charge customer for the same.
Q11: What happens if I reach my credit limit? Will Pepipost bounce my email? Will it reject my API call? Does it send me notifications about my credit limit?
Once the client’s credit limit is reached, it will not be able to send emails anymore. Pepipost will reject the API calls.
Of course, Pepipost will send the client prior notification about the status of your credit limits. These alerts can be configured in Settings -> Mail Alerts.
Q12: What is the uptime of the Pepipost infrastructure?
Pepipost infrastructure is distributed across several independent Data Centres with Load balancers. It offers 99.9% uptime. In addition to this, Pepipost has 24x7 operational teams that monitors the health of its critical assets.
Q13: What happens if mails not accepted by recipient's server immediately?
Pepipost delivery engine keeps trying to deliver the email to the recipient server for the next 5 days only in cases of soft bounce. After 5 days if it is still not able to deliver, the mail bounce back (hard bounce)
Q14: What is the maximum throughput, Pepipost can provide?
Using Pepipost, technically there is no limit on the number of mails you can send in an hour. The infrastructure for Pepipost keeps scaling as your volumes grows
Q15: Do we get to know Hard and Soft bounce and are the reports available in the frontend?
Yes.
Q16: Do we retry bounces?
Hard bounces are not retried as they are blacklisted at the first attempt. Soft bounces are re-tried for next 5 days.
Q17: What happens if an email bounces?
Pepipost utilizes a set of techniques to determine whether a bounce should be classified as a soft or hard bounce.
Generally, permanent errors such as invalid domains or mailboxes will get classified as hard bounces, while quota errors and other temporary problems are treated as soft bounces.
Hard bounce rejections last longer, so our server never retries in this case, while in soft bounce our server retries to deliver the email. If you're seeing a lot of soft bounces to an address, it may be a sign that the address is unusable.
More the no. of bounces, the greater it will affect your Account Reputation. So, it is recommended to download the list of bounce ids from the interface and suppress the same in your internal database.
Q18: What is a DROPPED email?
Recipient email addresses are added to DROP category, if any of the following matches:
a. The recipient address marks the mail as SPAM.
b. The recipient address is unsubscribed from a mail.
c. The recipient address is hard bounced
While an email address is active on the Unsubscribe list, emails to the address will be given a state of DROPPED and Pepipost will not attempt to deliver the emails. This helps to prevent sending emails to an email address that is no longer interested in receiving the emails.
Subsequent spam complaints might affect the Reputation of your account.
Note: Accounts are not charged for Dropped email requests and Dropped do not affect your account reputation (only the Bounce, Spam complaint or Unsubscribe is used to help calculate the account reputation).
Q19: What SMTP ports can I use?
Currently we support connection over port 25 or 587, if you're not encrypting the communication between your system and Pepipost.
Q20: Does Pepipost support SSL/TLS?
Yes, Pepipost support SSL/TLS
Q21: Can I use my desktop email clients like Outlook, Thunderbird etc. to send mails through Pepipost?
Yes, you can set up desktop email clients to route emails through Pepipost by specifying Pepipost smtp details as the outgoing server.
Q22: How Can I get the reports from Pepipost to my system?
Reports from Pepipost can be generated in 2 ways:
a. Download the reports from Pepipost panel
b. Call Pepipost APIs (http) and fetch the report
c. If you want real-time reports try Webhooks. Client can give us a call back url and we will pass the customer activity in real time to that url.
Q23: Can I use a sub-domain as my sending domain ?
Yes, you can use a sub-domain for sending emails. You need to verify and authenticate the same under Settings --> Domains.
Authentication is done by adding the TXT record.
Q24: What is DKIM and how to configure the same ?
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) lets an organization take responsibility for a message that is in transit. Read more about DKIM here.
You can refer this link to set DKIM for your account.