Recommendations for an SMTP Sending Service?

Can wholeheartedly recommend Postmark, fabulous service and support. Virtually no problems over the last 6 years and always incredibly responsive to any questions.

Used to be with SendGrid, had a very bad experience with them where (at the time) they showed little interest in small customers and wouldn’t go back. A lot can change in 6 years, they may well be brilliant and now care more about small customers, but for reference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142728

Well in my experience - I would HIGHLY recommended PostMark ! - Great bunch of clever guys.

I would also HIGHLY NOT RECOMMEND Sendgrid.com - Used to use them for 5 years and suddenly closed my production account over a weekend when I wanted to move to paid service for better analytics.

No I wasn't sending spam or against their terms of service. Mostly password-resets and ticket-notifications. More importantly if you look at discussion below seems I'm not the only one !

Previous comments + discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297229

I know you specifically say you don’t want to try self-hosting outbound, but I’m going to still vote for it because I think the reasoning you cited is a little second-hand FUD. I self-host mail and yes, I occasionally run into annoying delivery problems, but not often, and once you’re configured (SPF, DKIM, and so on), E-mail is set-and-forget. I think the reassurance of not relying on the whims of yet another cloud provider outweighs the convenience, but definitely reasonable people can disagree! Good luck though. The cloud hosted solutions mentioned in other threads are fine choices.

I’ve considered doing the same thing many times. My vote would go to Sendgrid based on my last round of research 2-3 years ago.

Reasons: 1. Automatic DKIM rotation. Sendgrid will setup 2 CNAMES so that they can automatically rotate your DKIM keys making this a “set and forget” situation.

2. Good delivery logs so you can see exactly why something wasn’t delivered if there was a problem.

3. Different permission levels for different users included. You can create a user with only SMTP permissions to use to send with while not having to worry that if it’s compromised someone can go ballistic on your account settings.

3a. Solid 2FA

4. They fiercely guard their IPs against abuse.

5. Ample free tier for personal use.

6. I believe they have an option to spam filter your outgoing messages so that even if the account (or machine) was compromised, you could prevent delivery.

Those are the main reasons from my experience. Plus all the other more standard features like read receipts, etc if you want.

I have had an awesome experience with https://mxroute.com/. The owner takes deliverability very seriously and I have never had an email go to spam. I would recommend it.

If you really want to host your own server for incoming mail, SES would probably be fine for SMTP and very cheap. With things set up correctly (SPF, DKIM), my personal experience with deliverability has been problem-free. However, I've seen others say they've still had issues because of the SES IPs. For double-checking the quality of your setup, mail-tester.com is handy.

If you want to migrate to a free consumer service (like a personal Gmail account and using aliases), a forwarding service that also provides SMTP is an option. I've been testing Pobox.com and it looks great ($20/yr for up to 20 addresses). I first tried using my registrar's forwarding service, and sending from aliased addresses via the Gmail SMTP Server, and had lots of trouble with deliverability, so I wouldn't recommend that.

I've been using Postmark for my personal email domain.

I was using Sparkpost, but I had problems. Specifically, some email help desks seemed to reject the emails - so I was unable to respond to some inquiries. Many friends reported that my emails were going to Spam, too.

With Postmark, I've had zero deliverability issues.

I recommend monitoring DMARC closely to ensure deliverability. I use this free tool from Postmark: https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com/

I use the registrar Gandi, but there are a couple limiting catches - you have to transfer your domain to them (good service though), and only 2 email accounts are included per domain with unlimited aliases, and additional cost per address is either usd$0.40/per month for 3GB storage, or $2/mo for 50GB. They offer webmail and all that but still give you imap & smtp access

So on the low end it would be $1.60 a month additional, not bad

Try migadu: https://www.migadu.com/pricing/ about 20 quid for the year, nearly unlimited domains, and good service. I use it for a good few domains. Happy with them.

Why not purelymail?

It's cheap, allows multiple users, multiple boxes, TOTP, Application Passwords, SMTP, Webmail, custom domains and more.

Starting $10/year.

https://purelymail.com/

I know you're probably not looking for a SaaS based on your message, however, I recently migrated from ProtonMail to mailbox.org because of reasons, and I really think it is worth using over self-hosted solutions.

A big reason for not going with self-hosted setup is because of the exact reason you mentioned. I just wasn't in the mood to manage everything myself and keeping my IPs in good standing. On top of that, the only place I could host it is on some cloud (I live in a small apartment in London, so self-hosting isn't very feasible), or worse, some smaller provider that potentially has low to no accountability. I felt like I'm just moving the trust from an email provider (who can arguably do a better job than I can) to a cloud hosting provider.

For me, mailbox.org has been great, better than PM. I got the standard package, which is €3 per month. It allows me to use both of my email domains (using a catch-all), and allows me to send emails from any sender (combined with Thunderbird's customisable send field, it's great!). It has full integration with any email client, as opposed to PM which requires either their app, or ProtonMail Bridge.

The initial set up was a bit weird, and definitely not as refined as ProtonMail's but in the end it worked. I'm able to use one of my domains as a 1 email per website, and the other for professional communications. They've also got an option to encrypt all your email using a PGP key, which you can combine with Thunderbird's PGP integration, or MailVelope.

Try uberspace! Small German hosting provider that should cover all your needs for sending and receiving email with a pay-what-you-want model (>5€ monthly encouraged). I host email adresses for several projects with them and never had any deliverability problems. Plus, they don't want any data from you.

https://uberspace.de/en/

Edit: they don't sell domains, but you can bring your own domain that you have registered elsewhere.

I've been using sendinblue, reliable and a very generous free tier. Smtp2go is good as well, with a bit of a lower free tier (9000 vs 1000 mails / month)

Check out https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2022/01/email-thoughts - it was posted here recently

Another vote for Postmark. It works and it's a paid but relatively affordable service - this is a good thing in this area, as it keeps the spammers out, and means you have real human support. I've not had a problem yet. Same can't be said for SendGrid which is used on some client projects but has sporadic deliverability issues at times.

I moved my 5 domains, 3 user setup with around 50K emails to Migadu.com after Google Workspace deprecation in the last 2 days.

Cheap ($20 a year, free trial), lots of features, decent webmail interface and has no problem sending to/from Google servers and a few other email services I've tested with so far.

I used imapsync (free/OSS) to move the emails.

A relative new player is MailerSend (https://mailersend.com/). We've moved all of our transactional e-mail over to their service.

They have a sensible onboarding and UI/dashboard. The dashboard makes it clear how to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC. There is a generous free tier for a single domain. A single paid account supports multiple domains starting at $25/mo for 50k outbound. Support has been excellent.

And the biggest upside is that their shared IP range, so far, is clean and not blacklisted. That was the clincher for us.

I have no connection to MailerSend other than as a happy customer.

Fastmail has been great for both final deivery and outbound smtp for personal email.

Amazon SES will cost pennies for personal use volumes. You really need to stay on top of any reported abuse complaints or they will shut you down quickly, which is a good thing in the big picture.

I recently started a business that is centered around sending mail so I looked through a lot of these. For me the primary concern was price, but I also wanted to ensure that I could DKIM sign without the signature being mangled (I didn't want to trust them to do the signing) and cost (I want to be profitable).

I ended up choosing Amazon SES as it is very cheap and simple. It is also nice that they have regional endpoints that are supposedly largely independent. his allowed me to verify my domain in multiple locations so that I can fail between them if there are problems.

Other interesting mentions:

Oracle Cloud is even cheaper. 0.0008 vs 0.001 per message and no egress charge (IIUC). However you can only verify individual addresses (not a whole domain) and you need to interact with oracle.

TurboSMTP is a more "batteries included" solution which may be better for your use case of personal email. It also has a generous free tier which may just cover your use case.

My vote (like someone else here) goes to Sendgrid. I’ve been using them since before they were sold to Twilio and they haven’t let me down yet.

They also have a reasonable free tier that I basically never exceed. I’m not sure if their basic features would fulfill all your needs though.

That said, if you need personal email I’d say just use Fastmail, and you won’t be disappointed.

aws ses, super cheap, fairly easy to setup. I just wish they had better or easier things like sendgrid has for analytics and troubleshooting. But i am paying pennies for my low sends.

I have been using mailjet to do this for years. Their free tier allows for 6000 emails a month or 200 emails a day https://www.mailjet.com/pricing/#email

I’m using Migadu for user and transactional emails currently. The price is amazing, though the setup for mail on macOS is somewhat different than what their FAQ suggests so that’s a small headache to have to deal with. Their approach to pricing is usage based on the number of messages, and NOT the number of domains/email addresses, that’s awesome if you’re into idea validation at minimal cost. Supports SPF, DKIM, DMARC, forwarding, vacation messages. https://www.migadu.com/

*not receiving any compensation from Migadu in any way

Have you thought about Mail-in-a-box and a cheap VPS?

I've had one up for testing and am surprised at the reliability and ease of use.

https://mailinabox.email/

The most well-renowned specializing in outbound SMTP AFAIK would be Mailroute, Mailgun, Sendgrid, mxroute. They’re all comparable; pick whichever you think suits you best.

There’s also “mail-hosters” like Posteo, Migadu, Fastmail.

I’m assuming google gsuite (“Gmail paid” where you can use your own domain) is not an option bc of the 6 x users (and gsuite is $/per user / per month) And same goes for office365.

I only Bring those two up as no one else has mentioned them, and I was seeing other replies that were around the $25 a month mark (which is close to these 2x for 6 x users). However with both you get many more services/features than just email (especially with office 365). Actually I think office 365 has a family plan that is around the $10 /mo mark for up to six users

Zoho is usually pretty cheap and reliable. Been around for a long time and don't seem to be going anywhere fast.

Their latest blog says to expect a well priced family solution in the next couple of days

I run all my own services but just relented and setup mailgun as an outbound SMTP relay. It works well and solves the deliverability problems associated with low-traffic IP addresses. The only tricky thing was making sure my outbound SMTP requests authenticate to mailgun using domain-specific credentials depending on which address I'm sending from (I have 5 different domains).

I use ImprovMX for inbound forwarding from my domain to whatever email service I use, but they also offer SMTP sending for their paid service. So for $9 a month, I get great forwarding for many domains and users per domain, and I get SMTP service for each domain per user.

I highly recommend them. Their support is great too.

https://improvmx.com

https://serversmtp.com/

It is the only one I have used, it offers both SMTP and a REST API of which I have only used REST, at $COMPANY it was valued as "the cheapest working service to send thousands of email/month from a few email address (the usual noreply@xxx.yy)"

Sendgrid, but SES also is a good choice too.

I recommend mailjet. I can send email from my openbsd terminal that passes SPF and DKIM.

For sending emails Amazon SES is what I would recommend. SPF, multiple domains, SNS for bounced mails. It has it all. You have to gradually grow the reputation. Been using for many years now. Never faced any issues.

I can recommend https://docs.postalserver.io/

I use simplelogin.io for a bunch of my personal domains. They route it all to a catchall mailbox on gmail.

Mailgun are pretty good. I use them on a couple of email services I’ve built.

I use Sendgrid's free tier in this exact way, for mail from catern.com.

Been using mailgun for a long time free for 5000 emails/mo.

Postmark. Be sure to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

posteo.de and tutanota.com are both affordable. I previously used the former for several years. No complaints.

Migadu has been great so far.

I'd recommend a service that lets you take bite sized portions on a pay-as-you go plan. In this case, Elastic Email is well-priced, offering email at a nickel per CPM and they have great support too

I’m guessing all the major clouds provide this?