The company was founded in 1999 by David Ivy, Lewis Barclay, Simon Bird, Iain Anderson and Colin Dawson as Ellipsis Media, a web design agency based in Croydon, United Kingdom.

In 2008 dotmailer became a PLUS market listed PLC, opened its first Manchester office and was included in Deloitte's Technology Fast 500.

In that year it also opened its third office in Edinburgh, introduced share options for staff and was the recipient of a National Business Award.

Also in 2014, dotmailer was noted as one of the three top mailer services in G2 Crowd’s crowdsourced business software ratings.

[10] In 2014, the platform was relaunched with a number of new features, including the drag and drop Automated Program Builder which enables users to create automated communications to target specific market segments, customer behaviours or trigger emails on certain dates.