An email service provider is a term used to refer to different types of establishments. Therefore, the question, ‘what is an email service provider?’ needs to be answered with reference to the different types. The answers also apply for ‘what is ESP?’ ESP is the short form of ‘email service providers’.
First, email service providers are organisations that provide servers that are used for email services. Such services include sending, receiving and storing of emails. This can be done on behalf of different end users, either individuals, companies or organizations. This type of email service providers are of two kinds, public and private. Public email service providers provide services to the general public; for example, Yahoo and Hotmail. On the other hand, the private ones only provide such services to members of that organisation or to those who are subscribed to them. They are mostly email services used for official company business.
The second type of email service providers (ESP) is the internet service providers. In essence, they are not email service providers, but they provide internet services. However, the two are almost inseparable and thus they are sometimes referred to as email service providers. This type of ESP services are usually paid for by subscription, through advertising or as part of a membership. The access to one’s email might be via POP3, IMAP or webmail protocols with regard to the ESP policies. Protocols are the means by which data is sent across the network of the email service provider.
The above type of email service providers has policies that are more restricting to unwanted email messages. They never condone the sending of bulk email, emails that are sent to a large group of recipients at random, through their servers and have filters that prevent spam messages. Spam is similar to bulk email, only they are usually offensive in nature.
The final type of email service provider is a commercial ESP. This is an organization that offers web based services to help build and manage other organizations address list and limit recipients of some emails. They primarily offer email marketing services and in extension bulk email services. Commercial email service providers also offer other services related to email marketing. They may provide tracking services for emails that have been sent from their servers, showing the status of the emails for all the members in the mailing list used. They also segment the mailing list so as to increase the effectiveness of the messages by focusing the address list into significant interest groups.
Email service providers also have other features that enable them to manage their clients’ address list. They have templates that are used when sending messages to contacts, subscriber lists, send engines and also, they posses the ability to increase delivery success rates of messages by using both html and plain text message formats. Email service providers also run several tests on the organizations emails including spam tests, template tests and statistical reviews. All these are supposed to enable the organization know the success rates of their email marketing campaigns.
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