I’m trying to reduce costs to run a couple of small projects. Currently I’m using postmark and dmarc digests. Both of them are costing me 3x as much as my hosting expenses.
My main questions are:
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.
I like to host my own Email; maddy is a great little all-in-one Email server written in Go. If you follow the simple instructions during setup, you’ll end with a solid config that won’t get blocked/spammed by major providers.
As far as hosts, the most common ones have a simple (but often hard to find) process to open up Email ports. I use Vultr, and you just need to open a ticket to get the ports opened.
That’s bound to run into issues eventually. E.g. a year ago or so I had problems sending emails to my brother and it turned out @t-online.de (common here in germany) maintains a manual whitelist of allowed senders. My provider internally routes emails through certain nodes, which are whitelisted, which had failed with by brother using a custom domain.
Yeah, there are certainly tradeoffs with self hosting Email. I don’t mind the occasional issue, and IMO, it’s important for the continued federation/democratization of Email that enough people choose to self-host so as to discourage bad practices, such as whitelisting senders.
Ah dang ya, could be country-based :\ I’m was on free-tier when approved though am paying now (or rather my client is). That sucks.
SMTP2GO has been serving me well for years now.
For SMTP only, mail.baby is a good option. Very reasonable pricing, and deliverability has been decent.
It’s no frills, so you need to treat it solely as a smarthost.
I’ve had a good experience with AWS SES for both small and large projects.
They charge $0.10/1000 emails, so it’s very affordable.
The only issue I can think of is the bursty nature of your email sending. SES has sending quotas (Service quotas in Amazon SES - Amazon Simple Email Service) that must be respected. These limits increase automatically once your start sending emails, but if you go “too hard, too soon”, you’ll likely be greeted with a 454 Throttling failure: Maximum sending rate exceeded sooner or later.
For small hobby projects I would highly recommend Forward Email.
They are open source so you can self host. But they do offer SMTP and have an API as well. It requires a bit of setup, so it’s a little more involved than Postmark or SendGrid.
I use MXroute. They are not a sending email service, but you can use it as such. They have lifetime promo you pay $100 or so. I have been using that for few years now and the delivery is excellent.
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