Last year I also tested a local mail proxy (set up with Postfix & Dovecot) which worked perfectly, but in the end there was no need for inbound buffering. The proxy would’ve both localized inbound mail on the LAN so both mail access would’ve been virtually instantaneous. But accessing Fusemail directly ended up being only marginally slower, so the maintenance overhead of a proxy setup was not worth it.

However, after an outbound email triggered account suspension including suspending mail reception (the reason for the original post), I switched sending all outbound mail through an internal/local SMTP server to ensure it would not happen again. Postfix has served in that role well.

As for mass emails – even when it’s just few hundred emails – you should give MailChimp a try!

We sent the usual 560 invitations to the gallery opening, a list which has been used for years. All recipients in a BCC. All opt-in customers.

We got “544 too many recipients” error from Fusemail.

Fusemail repeatedly said that they do not have any limit on how many people one can send a single email.

After we insisted for about one hour that there truly is a limit, and the error comes from Fusemail, they agreed that “yes, you can send one email to max 200 recipients. So yo must split up the recipient list to multiple emails”.

So, we sent four mails, roughly 160+160+140+140 BCC recipients in each. After that I got some mails thru, and two Fusemail errors to the Fusemail-admin account indicating that their “automatic system had detected spamming”, and no more mail can be sent. Even with the attached indicated Spam-score 0.00 in that Fusemail error mail.

There is no way now to know which of the recipients received the email, and which were filtered by Fusemail. Fusemail does not even see that information about blocked deliveries in Fusemiail outbound SMTP server would be critical to any real business. Spammers are the ones who do not care about SMTP logs, 99.99999% of their customers do care. And still all of the paying customers are treated like spammers.

Fusemail has placed our account account to “HighVolume”, which means we “can send 1000 emails with same content in a time frame”. And subsequently: “Fusemail can not tell you what the time frame is”. I hate these candid cameras, they must be joking or collectively having a bad trip.

Despite of what Fusemail claims to have improved over this, they absolutely have not.

The delay with incident response was the other gripe in my original post – my account got erroneously blocked and it took 15 hours to remove the block. I understand that it was and is not the normal operating procedure, but somehow response to that incident fell through the cracks. Needless to say, it was incredibly frustrating.

Nevertheless, I would and do continue to recommend Fusemail. There are some improvements that would be nice to see (such as sortable Mail Aliases list — with many aliases defined management of the list is pretty cumbersome when the addresses on the list cannot be sorted), but overall I’m fairly satisfied with the service that I’ve now been using some 4+ months.

I imagine this all seems pretty draconian, but unfortunately it is necessary. We have people signing up using stolen credit cards to send nigerian spam, viagra spam, every kind of spam that you could imagine. This gets us blocked from sending mail to other major email services, and affects all of our customers.

Thanks
Pat