How An SMTP Rely Service Helps

Unless you are an IT professional or have a special interest in learning more about how to use email more efficiently you have probably never heard of an SMTP relay service. Don’t worry if you haven’t, they are relatively simple to understand and once you know the basics seeing why they are so useful will be a breeze.

Understanding the Basics
SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and it is the most common way that all internet email systems communicate with each other. Basically the SMTP relay acts a lot like a snail mail post offic mail sorting facility. It reads the incoming email to determine where it should go to and then sends it to the respective SMTP server.

The use of SMTP means that the email address us type in to the receiver, and yours as the sender, are unlikely associated with a particular email client on an SMTP server. This is why email gets to you each and every time through the same server systems.

What are SMTP Relay Services?
Without using an SMTP relay service every individual email sent and received has to come from a specific dedicated email client which is on your SMTP server. This then relays or passes forward the message to the receivers SMTP server, even if it is not the same as yours.

Without the use of an SMTP relay service your email server could only send to email addresses also on that server, which would make emailing virtually impossible as a technology. It would be as if you could only mail letters to people that use your same post office and same postal code.

Open and User Authentication SMTP Relay Service Options
An open SMTP relay service allows the server to send emails anywhere and to and from any email address. In other words, it is completely open to all users. If spammers are on these systems they can quickly send millions of emails to all other open SMTP servers through the relay.

User authentication SMTP relay service is stricter in the types of emails they can process. This is because the user is authenticated through their SMTP server which is then relayed to the receiving SMTP server as proof that the email is not spam and, in fact, is from an authorized sender.

Using an SMTP relay service, particularly a user authentication system, will ensure that your emails get where you need them to be without being mislabeled as spam.