Hanbiro Vora Email

Hanbiro is a Korean software and hosting company, and its bulk mail service (대량 메일) is an add-on to Vora Email, the company's business mail product. The page describes it as a paid extra for anyone who wants to send a large volume of mail to many recipients at once: newsletters, announcements and customer mailings from a Korean business to its own address book. Hanbiro sells it in Korean won, with two ways to pay: a monthly plan sized by how many emails you may send per day, or prepaid credits charged per message. Customers of Hanbiro's groupware and mail products also get a monthly free allowance per user.

The bulk mail service sits inside a much larger catalog. The same site sells the Vora Works groupware, Vora HR, a store management system, Vora Project, the Vora Call caller display service, Vora CloudDisk, managed server hosting, colocation, web hosting, DDoS protection and private cloud. For this directory the entry covers the bulk email side only.

What a sender gets

The product is a sending tool with statistics and a contact book, not a campaign designer. Its page lists six strengths, and together they describe the whole offer.

Low price. The page sums its pricing up in one line: 0.5 won per email on the pay-as-you-go model, 20,000 won a month for the fixed plan that allows 10,000 emails a day, and 500 to 1,000 free emails per user per month for customers already on Hanbiro software.

Statistics. After a send, the service reports successes, failures, opens, clicks, unsubscribes and clicks on attachments, in the page's words "성공, 실패, 오픈, 클릭, 수신거부, 첨부파일 클릭등 다양한 통계 제공" (a range of statistics including success, failure, open, click, unsubscribe and attachment click). It also analyzes the cause of each failure, so a sender can see why a message bounced rather than only that it did.

Delivery rate. Under the heading 높은 전달율 (high delivery rate), the page lists four measures. The service leaves out wrong or previously failed addresses so that the large Korean web portals are less likely to block the mailing. It resends only to recipients who have not yet confirmed (opened) the message, rather than to the whole list again. It supports SPF and DKIM, and it applies white domain registration.

Address book. Every account includes an address book that the page says is not just a list for sending mail but one that can be extended into customer management (CRM): "단순한 메일 발송 용도의 주소록이 아니라 고객관리(CRM)까지 확장하여 사용할 수 있는 주소록 기본 제공".

Mail merge. A sender can put a company name or a person's name into the subject line or the body, so a bulk mailing reads as a one-to-one message to each recipient.

Attachments. Files can be attached to bulk mailings, and, as the statistics list shows, clicks on those attachments are counted.

Because the service is an add-on to Vora Email, it lives alongside the rest of that product. The Vora Email menu on the same page covers webmail, a calendar, the address book, a message board and internal notes, plus a spam blocking engine, a virus blocking engine, approval mail (a workflow where outgoing mail is signed off before it leaves), secure mail and what Hanbiro calls a big data service for mail. A company already running its mailboxes on Hanbiro sends its bulk mailings from the same environment and the same address book.

The page describes no drag-and-drop editor, no template gallery and no automated sequences. Vora Email suits a team that writes its message, attaches a file, merges in names and sends to a list, then reads the statistics.

Plans and prices

All prices on the page are in Korean won (원). There are three pricing models.

1. Fixed monthly plan (정액제). You pay a monthly fee for a maximum number of emails per day, and within that daily limit you can resend as many times as you like. The table on the page lists:

• 1,000 emails a day: 5,000 won a month
• 3,000 emails a day: 10,000 won a month
• 10,000 emails a day: 20,000 won a month
• 20,000 emails a day: 40,000 won a month
• 100,000 emails a day: 200,000 won a month

2. Pay-as-you-go (종량제). Credits are topped up in advance and each email costs 0.5 won. The page lists three bundles: 10,000 emails for 5,000 won, 30,000 emails for 15,000 won and 100,000 emails for 50,000 won.

3. Free pay-as-you-go allowance. Customers of other Hanbiro solutions get free sending credit every month, counted per user: 1,000 emails per groupware user and 500 per mail service user.

The page works through three examples, which are the clearest guide to choosing:

• A company with 100 groupware users that mails 50,000 customers once a month gets 100,000 free emails a month and needs to buy nothing.
• A groupware customer with 10 users that mails 7,000 customers twice a month gets 10,000 free emails and tops up credit for the remaining 4,000.
• A mail customer with 10 users that mails 10,000 customers five times a month gets 5,000 free emails. On pay-as-you-go it buys the other 45,000 for 22,500 won. On the fixed plan it takes 10,000 emails a day for 20,000 won a month. The page's conclusion is that the monthly fixed plan is better value for anyone who sends often.

That arithmetic makes the choice straightforward. Occasional senders, and groupware customers whose free allowance already covers their list, stay on credits. A business that mails its list every week will usually find a daily-capacity plan cheaper, and the daily cap matters more than the monthly total, since a 10,000 per day plan cannot deliver a 30,000 address mailing in one day.

Infrastructure and support

Hanbiro is a hosting company as well as a software vendor, and the page lists its own server operations room at the KIDC Seocho 1 center in Seoul. Its hosting menu also covers load balancing, database clustering, data duplication, storage systems, database encryption and disaster recovery systems, which gives some sense of the operation the mail runs on, although the bulk mail page itself does not tie those services to the email product.

Customer support runs through the phone line 1544-4755 and the address hanbiro@hanbiro.com. The page also offers a remote support program for Windows and Mac, one-to-one consultation (1:1 상담) and a demo request (데모 신청). It lists a Korean sales team of seven named staff with direct extensions, and an overseas sales team with an English-speaking contact and a second contact for another language. Besides the Seoul head office, the footer gives addresses in Los Angeles and in two other countries.

The page is written in Korean, and that is the working language of the service as the page presents it. There are no stated terms about data protection law on the bulk mail page.

Who it suits

Vora Email's bulk mail is a strong fit for Korean companies that already run their mail or groupware on Hanbiro. For them it is the cheapest route to a mailing: the per-user allowance often covers a monthly customer newsletter outright, as the page's own first example shows, and anything beyond it costs 0.5 won an email. It also suits small Korean businesses that want predictable costs in won, a simple sending tool with open, click and failure statistics, and the option to attach a brochure or a price list to a mailing.

It is less suited to a marketing team that wants to design campaigns visually, build automated journeys or connect an online store, since the page describes none of those. A developer looking for a sending API will not find one on this page either. For a Korean company that wants to send a clear message to its customer list at a low per-email cost, from the same system its staff already use for mail, it does exactly that.