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.
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.
I’ve documented the characteristics of the free tier or entry-level offering (incl rates) of all the providers that Swoosh supports here if that helps: Email Delivery in Bonfire — Bonfire v1.0.5-social