When did commercial ESPs appear?
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Commercial Email Service Providers (ESPs) appeared in the mid-to-late 1990s. Constant Contact launched in 1995, followed by AWeber in 1998, Mailchimp in 2001, and ExactTarget in 2000 (now part of Salesforce Marketing Cloud).
But before ESPs existed, companies sent marketing email from their own mail servers. That meant hiring engineers to manage infrastructure, manually handling bounce processing, and dealing with IP reputation directly. It worked fine at small scale, but when you needed to send to tens of thousands of people, you were on your own if something broke.
The first ESPs solved this by renting shared infrastructure. You uploaded your list, built your campaign in their interface, and they handled delivery. The trade-off: you shared IP reputation with every other customer on that platform. Shared IP sending meant your deliverability could tank if another customer on the same IP sent spam, but it also meant you didn't need a team of engineers to send email.
By the early 2000s, the ESP model had split into two tracks: marketing platforms (newsletters, campaigns, automation) and transactional ESPs (receipts, password resets, notifications). That's still the structure today.
Curious how ESPs evolved into the platforms we use now? Check out how email moved from local servers to the cloud.
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