Which SMTP Server is Best for High-Volume Email Sending on Cloudron?
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I've come across a service called SMTPget, which claims to provide reliable high-volume email solutions. Has anyone here tried SMTPget on Cloudron, or can you recommend other good SMTP services that integrate well with Cloudron for large-scale email campaigns?
Thanks in advance for your insights!!
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Postmark has been excellent. I send almost all emails using either transactional or marketing "servers" that I create on their platform. Many times I have pointed out that "missing" emails were in fact delivered to inbox providers. What they did with the email after it was delivered is left to anyone's imagination...
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@crazybrad isn't Postmark only for transaction emails?
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@girish @jdaviescoates is correct. Postmark "servers" contain message streams (outbound and inbound). Outbound message streams are either transactional or broadcasts. Broadcasts include marketing emails, but also include general announcements that are "customer transactional" like "your Cloudron server has been updated to 8.0.3". You can have multiple message streams per server. Here is an example of the transactional message stream settings available:
Also, they have Sender Signatures which allow you to authorize sending from individual email addresses or entire domains. Here is an example from one of my Cloudron domains:
Let me know if you have any additional questions.
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What is 'high-volume' for you?
Postmark is a good platform, and they offer some nice additional services depending on your needs like DMARC monitoring. But they're a bit expensive compared to competitors in the ~100k/month sending range. The prices even up again ~250k.
Other good market leading choices in our experience are:
- Sendgrid - https://sendgrid.com/ - Highly functional, this is our de facto for an external sender. They've got a very cheap option in the 100k/month range for the budget conscious if you don't need some of the fancier options, and even in the "Pro" version it's a highly competitive price. It has some very useful extras like email validation and SSO.
- Amazon SES - https://aws.amazon.com/ses/ - A bit more tech-y to set up, and barebones in function, and hard to project costs with their black magic pricing calculator, but usually significantly cheaper at higher volumes in the end.
One other thing re: Postmark - the separate transactional/broadcast infrastructure that is sold as a big benefit is a bit strange in our opinion, when other platforms simply offer high reliability sending and unified reporting via a single system. We're not Postmark experts though, only used it once in production, so feel free to set me straight on that. In fact we split transactional/broadcast sending capabilities on our own SMTP servers and CMS deployments, so we understand a case for it, but in our case it's because we're trying to optimise performance profiles with limited infrastructure that's not up to the task for rapid transactional email sending during peak usage - which seems common in smaller hosting or self/dedicated hosting environments, but unnecessary for dedicated email senders.
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@robw We are not using 100K/month, so perhaps our experience is towards the smaller end. We were using another vendor (which shall go nameless) for quite a number of years and found their delivery rates poor due to spammers in their client pool. We then wound up spending more for a dedicated IP address to try to combat that issue. Then I found Postmark and our problems disappeared. We will move the last vestige of our email business to their platform in the next release.
As you can tell, we value deliverability (given our smaller volume) above all else, even though there may be lower rates offered by competitors.
FYI, Postmark started off small, but they were acquired by ActiveCampaign about a year ago.
It sounds like you have created much of what Postmark offers using your own SMTP servers and CMS systems. By separating the streams, you have accomplished the same as their "servers" and I can see how integrating your infrastructure with theirs would be redundant and awkward.
An interesting question (in my mind) is whether SendGrid or Amazon SES traffic is treated by inbox providers differently than Postmark. That was the root cause of our migration to Postmark and why I would hesitate to migrate away from them at this point. Anyone with experience or perspective on this?
