Seeking recommendations based on experience for Sendmail Relays
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Lately, I migrate one of my clients which had an old CentOS to send an invoice and mailing list which was around 500 000 mails per month. I compared Mailgun, Mailjet and SendGrid which are all offering service in EU. We end going with SendGrid because they are Microsoft Partner. But overall I noticed
- Amazon SES is great but pricy if you don't host your VM at Amazon.
- SendGrid and Mailgun are rock solid.
- MailJet has random support and, one time they blocked my account simply because I didn't reply on time, they are the cheapest.
Let's do some math
- 50 mailboxes * 20 days * 100 mails per day = 100 000 mail per month
- 6 shared mailboxes * 30 days * 150 mails per day = rounded at 25 000 mail per month
- 4times a week * 4weeks *100 000 subscribers = 1.6M mail per month but you mention 1M
- 6 e-commerce websites * 30 days * 150 mails per day = rounded at 25 000 mail per month
for 1.5M of email per month Mailgun and Mailjet would be around 650$US/month and SendGrid would be over 800$US
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Lately, I migrate one of my clients which had an old CentOS to send an invoice and mailing list which was around 500 000 mails per month. I compared Mailgun, Mailjet and SendGrid which are all offering service in EU. We end going with SendGrid because they are Microsoft Partner. But overall I noticed
- Amazon SES is great but pricy if you don't host your VM at Amazon.
- SendGrid and Mailgun are rock solid.
- MailJet has random support and, one time they blocked my account simply because I didn't reply on time, they are the cheapest.
Let's do some math
- 50 mailboxes * 20 days * 100 mails per day = 100 000 mail per month
- 6 shared mailboxes * 30 days * 150 mails per day = rounded at 25 000 mail per month
- 4times a week * 4weeks *100 000 subscribers = 1.6M mail per month but you mention 1M
- 6 e-commerce websites * 30 days * 150 mails per day = rounded at 25 000 mail per month
for 1.5M of email per month Mailgun and Mailjet would be around 650$US/month and SendGrid would be over 800$US
@JOduMonT Nice, exactly the insight and experience needed. I do everything possible to avoid Amazon for ethical reasons.
Mailgun looked good from the big boys & girls last time I looked, could be a candidate, although the above shows they have decent and hungry competition, so it's certainly a premium option.
Sendgrid - no EU options that I can see, and I thought insisted on double opt-in (also doubling subscription email sending) and our subscribers have been around for 15 years, way before double opt-in was a thing.
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I guess sometimes you hear a name enough you expect them to be pricey and funding slick marketing but Sendinblue might be legit:
https://www.sendinblue.com/
https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.sendinblue.comCan't argue with the free plan allowances compatible to GMail.
Seems to insist on double opt-in though, which isn't always appropriate.
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We use postmark for some of our internal services. The pricing for that comes roughly to what @JOduMonT mentioned. Postmark is very reliable and we have only good things to say about them.
But bulk of our emails are sent out directly from the server and we haven't had delivery issue. This is probably because we were very early adopters of DigitalOcean and got a clean IP. These days it's really hard to get clean IPs. One idea might be to shop around for some VPSs with a clean IP. Before going to production, you should also reach out to them and let them know about the email volume since if you send even more than 1k mails a day, they get all paranoid and shut down the VPS these days.
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We use postmark for some of our internal services. The pricing for that comes roughly to what @JOduMonT mentioned. Postmark is very reliable and we have only good things to say about them.
But bulk of our emails are sent out directly from the server and we haven't had delivery issue. This is probably because we were very early adopters of DigitalOcean and got a clean IP. These days it's really hard to get clean IPs. One idea might be to shop around for some VPSs with a clean IP. Before going to production, you should also reach out to them and let them know about the email volume since if you send even more than 1k mails a day, they get all paranoid and shut down the VPS these days.
@girish said in Seeking recommendations based on experience for Sendmail Relays:
around for some VPSs with a clean IP
clean IP is not enough, if the Ip has being bad in the past and/or is in a bad neighbourhood it might result into SPAM.
That said, more and more provider block by default STMP which is to prevent my first point.
Provider such as Vultr, Linode and upCloud (probably DigitalOcean too) have this practice.@girish does Cloudron regulate how much email it is possible to send per secs / minutes / hours because Mailcow do and it is a great way to mitigate the issue.
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@girish said in Seeking recommendations based on experience for Sendmail Relays:
around for some VPSs with a clean IP
clean IP is not enough, if the Ip has being bad in the past and/or is in a bad neighbourhood it might result into SPAM.
That said, more and more provider block by default STMP which is to prevent my first point.
Provider such as Vultr, Linode and upCloud (probably DigitalOcean too) have this practice.@girish does Cloudron regulate how much email it is possible to send per secs / minutes / hours because Mailcow do and it is a great way to mitigate the issue.
@JOduMonT said in Seeking recommendations based on experience for Sendmail Relays:
@girish does Cloudron regulate how much email it is possible to send per secs / minutes / hours because Mailcow do and it is a great way to mitigate the issue.
No, Cloudron doesn't regulate how much mail it sends out.
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Feedback on reviews of all the above so-far - all very well documented and self-guiding to setup and with competitive pricing I don't think you can go too far wrong with any of them.
- Elasticmail
- Absolute lowest costs possible & extremely comprehensive documentation, guides, interface & API (seems to be automated approval).
- PepiPost
- Next lowest cost and active live-chat and good documentation with direct Mailtrain & Mautic support and guides. Only one offering encrypt-at-rest for email lists too - which is very handy for mailing-list security and GDPR protection from that vector. (manual approval process).
- Sendinblue
- Application and service supplied with lots of marketing extras for a hybrid approach to use Mailtrain/Mautic/SendInBlue tools (seems to be automated approval).
- turboSMTP
- Manual approval process and can't see anything yet. Might be a bit more tolerant for imperfect email lists from anecdotal reviews but they will all be strictly against excessive spam reports.
Bonus, Elasticmail guides taught me more about how to manage multiple sendmail providers on a domain and has this very useful DMARC voodoo generator and guide:
Overall, I think all 4 would be great integrations for Cloudron to have and lower cost than everything except self-sending compared to current options.
Will report back more as I find out more.
Worth noting, Mailtrain only has SMTP setup, no API for anything other than Amazon SES - but if you need to send high volumes in a short time (ie: to hit optimal localised delivery times), then you really want API sending as SMTP won't handle the volumes.
- Elasticmail
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Lately, I migrate one of my clients which had an old CentOS to send an invoice and mailing list which was around 500 000 mails per month. I compared Mailgun, Mailjet and SendGrid which are all offering service in EU. We end going with SendGrid because they are Microsoft Partner. But overall I noticed
- Amazon SES is great but pricy if you don't host your VM at Amazon.
- SendGrid and Mailgun are rock solid.
- MailJet has random support and, one time they blocked my account simply because I didn't reply on time, they are the cheapest.
Let's do some math
- 50 mailboxes * 20 days * 100 mails per day = 100 000 mail per month
- 6 shared mailboxes * 30 days * 150 mails per day = rounded at 25 000 mail per month
- 4times a week * 4weeks *100 000 subscribers = 1.6M mail per month but you mention 1M
- 6 e-commerce websites * 30 days * 150 mails per day = rounded at 25 000 mail per month
for 1.5M of email per month Mailgun and Mailjet would be around 650$US/month and SendGrid would be over 800$US
@JOduMonT Thanks for the numbers!
Elasticmail for 1.5M emails would be $135/month Standard and +$30 for Pro, so $165/month for comparison. Basically, $515 to $665/month cost-savings on the table, or $6,180 to $7,980 a year.
The research kinda pays for itself a few times over once you get above say 10,000 emails a month.
You do need to bring your own client though, like Mailtrain - but then it will support a hosted HTML page generated anywhere if the GUI templates aren't pleasing to the design team.
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FYI: Apparently, Amazon SES is blocked by the major German email services and a couple in France in Brazil: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=323992
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What are the best options to have a reliable email relay for a privat domain - I don't have huge amounts of mail (5-10 a day) and don't need tracking, analysis, etc.
I currently have my domain at Namecheap - should I just buy their mail option? -
Elasticmail gets immediately rejected by the Provider "mailbox.org"
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What are the best options to have a reliable email relay for a privat domain - I don't have huge amounts of mail (5-10 a day) and don't need tracking, analysis, etc.
I currently have my domain at Namecheap - should I just buy their mail option?@necrevistonnezr For low volumes like that I'd just use the Cloudron SMTP.
Namecheap's email is good too, tried that and it worked well but I ended up retiring it in favour of Cloudron's SMTP.
Lemwarm is good for building a trust reputation on a new sendmail service with any provider.
Amazon services I avoid, Google I'm starting to think similar. Just easier to stick to EU services for GDPR and their generally more pro-privacy claims at least.
Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
Development https://brandlight.org
Life https://marcusquinn.com -
@necrevistonnezr For low volumes like that I'd just use the Cloudron SMTP.
Namecheap's email is good too, tried that and it worked well but I ended up retiring it in favour of Cloudron's SMTP.
Lemwarm is good for building a trust reputation on a new sendmail service with any provider.
Amazon services I avoid, Google I'm starting to think similar. Just easier to stick to EU services for GDPR and their generally more pro-privacy claims at least.
@marcusquinn said in Seeking recommendations based on experience for Sendmail Relays:
@necrevistonnezr For low volumes like that I'd just use the Cloudron SMTP.
My Cloudron is at home with a dynamic IP from my ISB - that won't work for building reputation, I guess.
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Not sure what that AWS forum entry exactly indicates, however I am using SES for my personal Cloudron just fine and most of my contacts are within Germany.
@nebulon said in Seeking recommendations based on experience for Sendmail Relays:
Not sure what that AWS forum entry exactly indicates, however I am using SES for my personal Cloudron just fine and most of my contacts are within Germany.
I had several mails rejected today for GMX and Web.de accounts - and others have too, see the AWS forum entry.
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@marcusquinn said in Seeking recommendations based on experience for Sendmail Relays:
@necrevistonnezr For low volumes like that I'd just use the Cloudron SMTP.
My Cloudron is at home with a dynamic IP from my ISB - that won't work for building reputation, I guess.
@necrevistonnezr If it were me I'd go with Mailgun free tier, which is the only supported sendmail service from Ghost websites if you use that (I recommend it and use for my personal blog, blog.cloudron.io does too).
If you want to pay and have sort-of-privacy, I think Namecheap lowest tier for email is decent value and service.
If you thought you might need more mailboxes and want to build an IP sendmail reputation, you could create your own Cloudron tiny sendmail server on Hetzner / Netcup for < €3/m and the free Cloudron subscription.
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Just to update on this thread: elasticemail.com is proving a winner, happy with everything about it, pricing, features, hand-holding through all the deliverability setup stuff. Happy to recommend this one.
The others I'm aware of, and they all have something unique but they all take time to setup and test. So, for now at least I can confirm any effort anyone needs to put into this area, Elastic Email is decent enough and good value.
Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
Development https://brandlight.org
Life https://marcusquinn.com -
Just to update on this thread: elasticemail.com is proving a winner, happy with everything about it, pricing, features, hand-holding through all the deliverability setup stuff. Happy to recommend this one.
The others I'm aware of, and they all have something unique but they all take time to setup and test. So, for now at least I can confirm any effort anyone needs to put into this area, Elastic Email is decent enough and good value.
@marcusquinn that's some really good pricing - https://elasticemail.com/email-api-pricing . Let me quickly sign up and test.
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@marcusquinn that's some really good pricing - https://elasticemail.com/email-api-pricing . Let me quickly sign up and test.
@girish yeah, and I must have been through testing over a dozen of these services in one way or another now. I think a lot of the things people think are their own service are actually Elastic Email resellers.
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Adding a note on experience in this area:
ALL of these relay services seem to be presumed to be untrusted by Microsoft mail received (@outlook.com @live.com etc), the same for Cloudron. You either get a large number of bounces, or they are categorised as promotional.
From what I can tell, the only services that Microsoft mail servers trust more are their own services are other similar services, like GMail, Yahoo, Protonmail, Posteo, etc
The way around this is most-likely double opt-in email subscriptions, so the receiver has to find, mark as not spam and read, and click the link to opt-in to mailing lists. If it's normal email, it might be for the receiver to send you an email first and you reply to it.
If you are using any mass-mailing for cold-email, it looks like the only way to avoid issues with Microsoft service deliverability is to use a Microsoft mail services or Google Workplace, those do seem to get through fine from the beginning, presumed trusted until proven otherwise.
Just thought I'd update with the experience as it takes ages to figure all these things out.
Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
Development https://brandlight.org
Life https://marcusquinn.com
