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  3. Seeking recommendations based on experience for Sendmail Relays

Seeking recommendations based on experience for Sendmail Relays

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mailrelay
29 Posts 8 Posters 3.6k Views 9 Watching
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    • marcusquinnM Offline
      marcusquinnM Offline
      marcusquinn
      wrote on last edited by marcusquinn
      #2

      First of the interesting links:

      • https://pepipost.com
      • https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/pepipost.com

      (and Trustpilot ratings are hard work to maintain!)

      Seems to tick a lot of boxes and decent pricing.

      Anyone here using an SMTP/API emailer service they love?

      Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
      Development https://brandlight.org
      Life https://marcusquinn.com

      JOduMonTJ 1 Reply Last reply
      0
      • marcusquinnM Offline
        marcusquinnM Offline
        marcusquinn
        wrote on last edited by
        #3

        Next up:

        https://serversmtp.com
        https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.serversmtp.com (I like their review replies 🙂 )

        Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
        Development https://brandlight.org
        Life https://marcusquinn.com

        1 Reply Last reply
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        • marcusquinnM Offline
          marcusquinnM Offline
          marcusquinn
          wrote on last edited by
          #4

          And notable in the budget range YMMMV:

          https://elasticemail.com
          https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/elasticemail.com
          https://www.g2.com/products/elastic-email/reviews

          Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
          Development https://brandlight.org
          Life https://marcusquinn.com

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          • JOduMonTJ Offline
            JOduMonTJ Offline
            JOduMonT
            wrote on last edited by
            #5

            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

            marcusquinnM 2 Replies Last reply
            3
            • JOduMonTJ JOduMonT

              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

              marcusquinnM Offline
              marcusquinnM Offline
              marcusquinn
              wrote on last edited by
              #6

              @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.

              Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
              Development https://brandlight.org
              Life https://marcusquinn.com

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              • marcusquinnM Offline
                marcusquinnM Offline
                marcusquinn
                wrote on last edited by
                #7

                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.com

                Can't argue with the free plan allowances compatible to GMail.

                Seems to insist on double opt-in though, which isn't always appropriate.

                Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
                Development https://brandlight.org
                Life https://marcusquinn.com

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                • girishG Offline
                  girishG Offline
                  girish
                  Staff
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #8

                  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.

                  JOduMonTJ 1 Reply Last reply
                  3
                  • girishG girish

                    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.

                    JOduMonTJ Offline
                    JOduMonTJ Offline
                    JOduMonT
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #9

                    @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.

                    girishG 1 Reply Last reply
                    1
                    • JOduMonTJ JOduMonT

                      @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.

                      girishG Offline
                      girishG Offline
                      girish
                      Staff
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #10

                      @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.

                      1 Reply Last reply
                      0
                      • marcusquinnM Offline
                        marcusquinnM Offline
                        marcusquinn
                        wrote on last edited by marcusquinn
                        #11

                        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:

                        • https://elasticemail.com/dmarc

                        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.

                        Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
                        Development https://brandlight.org
                        Life https://marcusquinn.com

                        1 Reply Last reply
                        2
                        • JOduMonTJ JOduMonT

                          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

                          marcusquinnM Offline
                          marcusquinnM Offline
                          marcusquinn
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #12

                          @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.

                          Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
                          Development https://brandlight.org
                          Life https://marcusquinn.com

                          1 Reply Last reply
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                          • necrevistonnezrN Offline
                            necrevistonnezrN Offline
                            necrevistonnezr
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #13

                            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

                            1 Reply Last reply
                            1
                            • necrevistonnezrN Offline
                              necrevistonnezrN Offline
                              necrevistonnezr
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #14

                              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?

                              marcusquinnM 1 Reply Last reply
                              0
                              • necrevistonnezrN Offline
                                necrevistonnezrN Offline
                                necrevistonnezr
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #15

                                Elasticmail gets immediately rejected by the Provider "mailbox.org"

                                1 Reply Last reply
                                0
                                • nebulonN Away
                                  nebulonN Away
                                  nebulon
                                  Staff
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #16

                                  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.

                                  necrevistonnezrN 1 Reply Last reply
                                  1
                                  • necrevistonnezrN necrevistonnezr

                                    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?

                                    marcusquinnM Offline
                                    marcusquinnM Offline
                                    marcusquinn
                                    wrote on last edited by marcusquinn
                                    #17

                                    @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.

                                    • https://www.lemlist.com/lemwarm
                                    • https://www.lemlist.com/email-deliverability

                                    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

                                    necrevistonnezrN 1 Reply Last reply
                                    0
                                    • marcusquinnM marcusquinn

                                      @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.

                                      • https://www.lemlist.com/lemwarm
                                      • https://www.lemlist.com/email-deliverability

                                      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.

                                      necrevistonnezrN Offline
                                      necrevistonnezrN Offline
                                      necrevistonnezr
                                      wrote on last edited by
                                      #18

                                      @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.

                                      marcusquinnM 1 Reply Last reply
                                      0
                                      • nebulonN nebulon

                                        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.

                                        necrevistonnezrN Offline
                                        necrevistonnezrN Offline
                                        necrevistonnezr
                                        wrote on last edited by
                                        #19

                                        @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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                                        • necrevistonnezrN necrevistonnezr

                                          @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.

                                          marcusquinnM Offline
                                          marcusquinnM Offline
                                          marcusquinn
                                          wrote on last edited by
                                          #20

                                          @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.

                                          Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
                                          Development https://brandlight.org
                                          Life https://marcusquinn.com

                                          1 Reply Last reply
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                                          • marcusquinnM Offline
                                            marcusquinnM Offline
                                            marcusquinn
                                            wrote on last edited by
                                            #21

                                            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

                                            girishG 1 Reply Last reply
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