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There are a lot of articles about differences between Transactional e-mail and Marketing e-mails (or bulk e-mails). I understand the business difference between these two, but is there any real technical difference between these two types of e-mails? I've been reading RFCs (like RFC 821 and RFC5321) but they not seem to be defining any difference between different mail types.

So is this just marketing bulls__t or are there actually any real technical differences between transactional e-mail and bulk / marketing e-mails?

Ossi Mantylahti
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As you are suggesting, there's not really anything different about the delivered emails themselves from a purely technical point of view.

Despite this, I would still argue that it's a categorization that has relevance also in technical contexts. Particularly from the sender point of view.

For instance, if you were to look at services for sending transactional email compared to services for sending bulk email, these services may be quite different.

The fundamental requirement for transactional email: different email contents sent to different recipients at different times (triggered by actions of the recipient)

The fundamental requirement for bulk email: same email sent to lots of recipients all at once (triggered by the sender, and as a result generally more problematic from an abuse point of view)

Håkan Lindqvist
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I'm pretty sure that this question isn't on topic for this forum, but a short answer is that transactional email is triggered by individual user action (requesting an account activation/password reset, or purchasing something resulting in a receipt being mailed, for example). In contrast, bulk email is sent to a group of recipients on the whim of the sender: The recipient may or may not have willingly added their email address to the sender's list, but they're not the ones triggering bulk mail to be sent.

To slightly muddy the waters, a standardized introduction mail sent as the result of someone signing their address up to a marketing mailing list would qualify for the term transactional mail.

Mikael H
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I think its mostly marketing BS.

There can be a difference (although I'm not familiar with anyone using it). Mail programs can specify a number of headers which might be set differently depending on the email type - look at RFC1327.

 Priority (normal/urgent/non-urgent) 
 Precedence (Non standard)
 Importance (Low/Normal/High)
 Sensitivity (Personal/Private)

I guess that these could be used by a busy mail server to prioritise sending/retries of messages, and by naive MUAs to order mail.

davidgo
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