What email provider are you using for small / tiny projects?

The situation changed over the last few years. A few years ago I could literally use gmail to do that, they would allow you to send 1k emails per day no issues from a personal account. You could also use aws free tier to send emails without any issues (they had even more generous limits), these days you have to prove to them you are a legitimate business and all that stuff, otherwise you are not getting out of their sandbox.

I’ve tried to setup my own mail server not so long ago, and because I send emails only to known parties, I had no problems with my emails being flagged automatically by corporate email providers. This seems to be no longer possible, I investigated a little and it seems my provider is blocking the outgoing traffic, even for business lines.

A few years ago, I would definitely recommend aws, as they had dirt cheap prices, these days taking in consideration all these vendor locks, I’m not sure this is the case anymore.

I use local SMTP server (exim4). It is not easy; You need to have all the SPF/DKIM/DMARC crap setup, and your hosting company allows outbound SMTP.

Some email providers still block my emails though. However, all cheap email senders have the same problem in one way or the other. With your own IP and a fully controlled setup, at least I can fill out complain form.

Previous discussion thread here:

Unless that ip was not recycled and is in their blacklist for spamming already.

I think it’s time we let go of emails slowly, not only the protocol outlived its usefulness years ago, the political pressure makes it even more appealing for vendor locks.

I have used my IP for 5+ years. Too scared to switch hosting provider for exactly this reason.

I disagree on your your point of letting go of emails. What’s the alternative to reach out to my users? Social media? they have much more vendor lock-in.

I also disagree on the the “protocl outlived its usefulness” part. Yes, it has its warts. but so do everything else, eventually. I have not seen anything fundamentally better and widely adopted at the planet scale.

I use AWS and it’s been fine so far (and cheap). The approval process is pretty painless if you’re honest about what you’re doing, especially if you are doing transactional emails only. They gave me an allowance I couldn’t even use 1% of. The fact that they have the approval thing is pretty annoying but understandable, I guess.

do you need to receive emails back?
if that’s the case i’d pay for an email service that accepts custom domains and send it through it using gen_smtp directly.

if your concern is more throughput, i’d go with resend or sendgrid and just add a reply-to option to a custom email. given your metrics i’d say you could try to ride with the free-tier from sendgrid and resend for a while.

I guess since you are from Canada, they are much receptive. I asked for approval a few months ago for some of my self-hosted stuff (like zulip, discourse, etc.) and I never got a response back. I got after a few months a generic email where they said that my approval request expired and that’s it.

I guess the main reason is the fact that I used a free-tier account, if I were to use an account that had billing credentials, that would not be much of a problem.

Mailjet has a free plan with 6k emails/m (200/day)

Resend’s free tier is a bit worse than Mailjet (3k emails per month) but their paid plans seem cheaper. You get 50k emails/month for $20.

Nah, it is more for notifications purposes when things happen inside the application.
And I like your suggestion about going with SendGrid. I was evaluating both SendGrid and Brevo.

SendGrid offers 100 emails/day for free and Brevo offers 300 emails/day on their free tier. I’m just trying to decide what to use or find out if there is any other vendor that I don’t know about that could be an interesting option.