Best Hosting Deal

Broadly defined by Google as a company providing email services, an email service provider (ESP) offers email marketing or bulk email services. Neither of these terms should be confused with spam or the sending of unwanted or unsolicited bulk email of a marketing or otherwise offensive nature.

An ESP will provide a wealth of tracking information showing the status of email sent to each member of an address list. ESPs also provide the ability to segment an address list into interest groups or categories, allowing the user to send targeted information to people who value the e-correspondence.

An ESP will provide a service which may include the following features:

• Ability to create templates for sending to contacts and/or the use of templates pre-made
• A subscriber list, which is uploaded by the user for distributing messagesThis may be enhanced with custom fields in order to hold additional information for each subscriber for filtering and targeted messaging purposes
• A send engine, which allows users to distribute their message to the subscribers
• Updating of the subscriber list to suppress those requesting to be unsubscribed
• Statistcal reviews of each email sent to measure the success rate of the campaigns
• Testing of templates for compatiblity with email applications
• Spam testing to gauge the score of the email against known factors that will place the template at risk of being blocked
• The ability to send both html and plain text formats to improve delivery success rates (known as Multi-Part MIME)

The level of service provided can be according to the above basic features, or the number of subscribers uploaded, or the frequency of use – or any combination of the above criteria.

ESPs typically have terms and conditions to prevent abuse by users in order to ensure the best possible delivery rates, and some work with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to ensure compliance with legalislation and best practices.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_service_provider