Ask HN: Recommendations for an SMTP Sending Service? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Recommendations for an SMTP Sending Service?

With the Google Apps changes I am looking at moving my emails somewhere else.

One solution is a SaaS service that would cover all my needs, but they all have limitations (except at very premium levels of prices).

I am considering hosting the incoming part (having my MX pointing to my home server) but I do not want to deal with the outbound part because of apparently how difficult it is to have consistent deliveries (because of spam filtering - there were several comments in HN about that).

Is there a good SMTP sending service that is affordable for home users (6 users sending a normal (low) amount of emails)? I guess that what I need is a service that will forward @mydomain emails (with the possibility to set up SFP, DMARC, ...) and handle at least two domains.

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Can wholeheartedly recommend Postmark, fabulous service and support. Virtually no problems over the last 6 years and always incredibly responsive to any questions.

Used to be with SendGrid, had a very bad experience with them where (at the time) they showed little interest in small customers and wouldn’t go back. A lot can change in 6 years, they may well be brilliant and now care more about small customers, but for reference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142728

Wow, that's great. Suggesting you rent a dedicated IP from them to improve deliverability right after saying the move to new IPs reduced deliverability.

In the last year I went through many of the SMTP sending services. SendGrid's non-dedicated IPs offered the worst deliverability I'd ever seen, and yeah the proposed solution was move to a Pro (dedicated IP) plan

I have an upcoming project in the pipeline that would injest emails based on a users custom email handle. The software should parse the email, strip one time password out of it, and send the data (otp and email Id and time" forward. At the same time, the user uses a browser extension to tell the server that an otp has been sent.

The software should "match" the two api calls which would "give" the user the requested otp.

I dunno. Should I use amazon ses+lambda+ api gateway or is there a Foss selfhosted option

Well in my experience - I would HIGHLY recommended PostMark ! - Great bunch of clever guys.

I would also HIGHLY NOT RECOMMEND Sendgrid.com - Used to use them for 5 years and suddenly closed my production account over a weekend when I wanted to move to paid service for better analytics.

No I wasn't sending spam or against their terms of service. Mostly password-resets and ticket-notifications. More importantly if you look at discussion below seems I'm not the only one !

Previous comments + discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297229

I have used both Postmark and Sendgrid.

I’ve found that Postmark gets stuck in Barracuda spam filters used by large organisations.

We do however continue to use Postmark.

I know you specifically say you don’t want to try self-hosting outbound, but I’m going to still vote for it because I think the reasoning you cited is a little second-hand FUD. I self-host mail and yes, I occasionally run into annoying delivery problems, but not often, and once you’re configured (SPF, DKIM, and so on), E-mail is set-and-forget. I think the reassurance of not relying on the whims of yet another cloud provider outweighs the convenience, but definitely reasonable people can disagree! Good luck though. The cloud hosted solutions mentioned in other threads are fine choices.

While I like personal mail servers and would suggest tech-savvy people at least to try them, OP mentions a home server, which probably involves a residential IP address, an ISP that won't set a reverse DNS for regular users, and likely other annoyances that would complicate mail delivery considerably more than usual.

If you'll decide to give it a try, BrandoElFollito, it's best to have at least one IPv4 address that isn't in a residential range and not in DNSBLs, a /64 IPv6 subnet (since blacklists tend to add at least a /64 subnet for those), ability to set in-addr.arpa records.

I am trying iRedMail to self host an email server. What do you use?

I've setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC. The PTR record is not possible for me to setup. How did you get around that? Did you get a static IP address?

What else do you think is necessary to make this better?

My stack is exim4, dovecot, and spamassassin, running on Debian stable. I do have a static IP address as the machine is a VPS. Admittedly this makes me reliant on my VPS provider so technically the whole stack isn’t in my control. I can however in theory fail over to metal on my residential IP if my VPS fails, although 1. I would want to request a static IP from my ISP and 2. I have not tested this transition recently.

At one point in the past I needed to get a different IP address and suddenly had deliverability problems because the IP I got from the VPS provider was previously naughty. Re-requesting another IP was all it took to solve that.

I would maybe start with a provider (considering that OP is hosting for others and not just themselves) and use that as fallback as they eventually start setting up their own outbound.

I’m not sure how you can say it’s set and forget if you have to deal with “occasional annoying delivery problems”

Any service runs into "occasional delivery problems". In those cases you have to explain support the issue and deal with the luck if they will be understanding or not.

I'm sending few MM emails on daily basis (no, it's not spam) and hosting my email server on simple VM. Any service will cost me ten of thousands USD monthly while I am paying something under $100.

Self-hosting outbound is almost impossible though, I've yet to find an ISP that's not blocking outgoing port 25. I'm semi-self-hosting outbound and it's an absolute nightmare to get the ISP to acknowledge that if they block your packets, they must provide an alternative (smarthost). Also, getting them to register a reverse DNS entry is very difficult, most supporters couldn't tell you the difference between DNS and rDNS if their life depended on it.

The technical stuff with SPF and DKIM is the easy part.

I’ve considered doing the same thing many times. My vote would go to Sendgrid based on my last round of research 2-3 years ago.

Reasons: 1. Automatic DKIM rotation. Sendgrid will setup 2 CNAMES so that they can automatically rotate your DKIM keys making this a “set and forget” situation.

2. Good delivery logs so you can see exactly why something wasn’t delivered if there was a problem.

3. Different permission levels for different users included. You can create a user with only SMTP permissions to use to send with while not having to worry that if it’s compromised someone can go ballistic on your account settings.

3a. Solid 2FA

4. They fiercely guard their IPs against abuse.

5. Ample free tier for personal use.

6. I believe they have an option to spam filter your outgoing messages so that even if the account (or machine) was compromised, you could prevent delivery.

Those are the main reasons from my experience. Plus all the other more standard features like read receipts, etc if you want.

Sendgrid has the worst IP addresses I ever used for sending email and the customer support has been even worse.

Yeah, there free tier was useless when I tried it. Essentially couldn't send email to anyone, including myself, since their fiercely guarded IP addresses were crap.

Worse than SES?

I agree, though. You need to pony up for a dedicated IP from Sendgrid to get good deliverability to many hosts. Small ISPs tend to be the worst, IME, where Google, Comcast, etc work pretty well with SG.

I’ve tried a dedicated IP from sendgrid as well, but our sending volumes were way too low even for transactional mails. It would have taken months of sending fake emails to warm the address up.

Sendgrid can close your account and you have no recourse, no tickets or appeals. This happened to a friend I had set this up for, account was closed for inactivity

Delivery wise I also heard they are one of the providers most likely to get flagged as spam

I'm working through the sign-up process for SendGrid (100 emails/day for free doesn't seem too bad), but their website seems so damn slow. I had to wait about 15 seconds for the signup page to load. You'd expect they'd optimize that page above all others to get conversions?

I see so much phishing from sendgrid that I just blocked the entire domain. I don’t care if they’re trying to be legit, they clearly can’t keep control over bad actors using their platform. I’ve also done the same with Google appspot domains.

SendGrid is hot garbage hacked together. I reported a critical bug (unsubscribed emails still receive future scheduled emails causing high complaint rate) five years ago and they told me they know about it, acknowledged it was a bug, and said they had no plans to do anything about it.

Ugh. I had the same experience with a company recently. Completely put me off them.

Are they a major that we're likely to stumble across in day-to-day use?

Perhaps. I was Plausible's paid analytics service I had trouble with. I'm sure their host-your-own is fine.

Replying to myself:

Wow, had no idea the Sendgrid situation had gotten so bad.

In that case, Mailgun.

I have had an awesome experience with https://mxroute.com/. The owner takes deliverability very seriously and I have never had an email go to spam. I would recommend it.

+1 for MXRoute if you're just looking for an affordable alternative to Google Apps and not some fancy API. They bill by storage and not by the number of accounts, and they offer discounts around the year if you look around. Also don't be fooled by their frontend that looks like some run of the mill shared hosting. Their backend is absolutely professional.

If it's for a single user, at that price, Microsoft's Exchange Online Plan 1 might be another option.

Otherwise Migadu or PurelyMail are a lot cheaper.

I second PurelyMail. Their price schema is based mostly on mailbox storage size, and I believe I paid under 10$ for the last two years of hosting some catch-all mailboxes for multiple domains.

I had heard of mxroute previously, but for some reason, i only thought they focused around transactional email...like sendgrid, etc...and not what others might refer to as conventional mail hosts. Their price is really compelling, and the honesty of their documentation is refreshing! Take a gander at some of their commentary around hosting calendars, contacts for example: "...Just know, that’s not where the bulk of our time and energy is going." [https://mxroute.com/docs/#/General/Do_You_Sell_Calendars] Granted i have the need for email as well as calendar and contacts, but damn that level of honesty is compelling for me to at least consider them for my short list. Kudos to the MXRoute folks for being honest!

My favorite thing about MXRoute is the super simple rate limits that you can configure when adding a user. I use it on devices for notification e-mails and being able to limit those logins to something low like 5-10 emails per day is awesome. It really minimizes the damage if something goes haywire, a device gets compromised, or a device gets stolen.

If you really want to host your own server for incoming mail, SES would probably be fine for SMTP and very cheap. With things set up correctly (SPF, DKIM), my personal experience with deliverability has been problem-free. However, I've seen others say they've still had issues because of the SES IPs. For double-checking the quality of your setup, mail-tester.com is handy.

If you want to migrate to a free consumer service (like a personal Gmail account and using aliases), a forwarding service that also provides SMTP is an option. I've been testing Pobox.com and it looks great ($20/yr for up to 20 addresses). I first tried using my registrar's forwarding service, and sending from aliased addresses via the Gmail SMTP Server, and had lots of trouble with deliverability, so I wouldn't recommend that.

I've been using Postmark for my personal email domain.

I was using Sparkpost, but I had problems. Specifically, some email help desks seemed to reject the emails - so I was unable to respond to some inquiries. Many friends reported that my emails were going to Spam, too.

With Postmark, I've had zero deliverability issues.

I recommend monitoring DMARC closely to ensure deliverability. I use this free tool from Postmark: https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com/

I use the registrar Gandi, but there are a couple limiting catches - you have to transfer your domain to them (good service though), and only 2 email accounts are included per domain with unlimited aliases, and additional cost per address is either usd$0.40/per month for 3GB storage, or $2/mo for 50GB. They offer webmail and all that but still give you imap & smtp access

So on the low end it would be $1.60 a month additional, not bad

One of my domains is actually with Gandi (I am French - the other one is with OVH). I was not aware of their offer but you made me realize that, maybe, I could use their SMTP while hosting my emails.

I am not sure which checks they do (it is possible/likely that they filter on the email addresses that are registered with them) but it is worth a try. Thanks.

Try migadu: https://www.migadu.com/pricing/ about 20 quid for the year, nearly unlimited domains, and good service. I use it for a good few domains. Happy with them.

Keep the quotas in mind on the cheapo plans.

Why not purelymail?

It's cheap, allows multiple users, multiple boxes, TOTP, Application Passwords, SMTP, Webmail, custom domains and more.

Starting $10/year.

https://purelymail.com/

I know you're probably not looking for a SaaS based on your message, however, I recently migrated from ProtonMail to mailbox.org because of reasons, and I really think it is worth using over self-hosted solutions.

A big reason for not going with self-hosted setup is because of the exact reason you mentioned. I just wasn't in the mood to manage everything myself and keeping my IPs in good standing. On top of that, the only place I could host it is on some cloud (I live in a small apartment in London, so self-hosting isn't very feasible), or worse, some smaller provider that potentially has low to no accountability. I felt like I'm just moving the trust from an email provider (who can arguably do a better job than I can) to a cloud hosting provider.

For me, mailbox.org has been great, better than PM. I got the standard package, which is €3 per month. It allows me to use both of my email domains (using a catch-all), and allows me to send emails from any sender (combined with Thunderbird's customisable send field, it's great!). It has full integration with any email client, as opposed to PM which requires either their app, or ProtonMail Bridge.

The initial set up was a bit weird, and definitely not as refined as ProtonMail's but in the end it worked. I'm able to use one of my domains as a 1 email per website, and the other for professional communications. They've also got an option to encrypt all your email using a PGP key, which you can combine with Thunderbird's PGP integration, or MailVelope.

Try uberspace! Small German hosting provider that should cover all your needs for sending and receiving email with a pay-what-you-want model (>5€ monthly encouraged). I host email adresses for several projects with them and never had any deliverability problems. Plus, they don't want any data from you.

https://uberspace.de/en/

Edit: they don't sell domains, but you can bring your own domain that you have registered elsewhere.

I've been using sendinblue, reliable and a very generous free tier. Smtp2go is good as well, with a bit of a lower free tier (9000 vs 1000 mails / month)

Check out https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2022/01/email-thoughts - it was posted here recently

Another vote for Postmark. It works and it's a paid but relatively affordable service - this is a good thing in this area, as it keeps the spammers out, and means you have real human support. I've not had a problem yet. Same can't be said for SendGrid which is used on some client projects but has sporadic deliverability issues at times.

I moved my 5 domains, 3 user setup with around 50K emails to Migadu.com after Google Workspace deprecation in the last 2 days.

Cheap ($20 a year, free trial), lots of features, decent webmail interface and has no problem sending to/from Google servers and a few other email services I've tested with so far.

I used imapsync (free/OSS) to move the emails.

Your comment should be on top. You really helped me.

I also transfered to Migadu today (before I saw your comment) and was just looking for a tool to transfer the e-mails to an old free Gmail account. It's really a scandal that Google doesn't enable this in the Workspace migration wizard.

You also have to enable access to less secure apps on Gmail to be able to use imapsync.

A relative new player is MailerSend (https://mailersend.com/). We've moved all of our transactional e-mail over to their service.

They have a sensible onboarding and UI/dashboard. The dashboard makes it clear how to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC. There is a generous free tier for a single domain. A single paid account supports multiple domains starting at $25/mo for 50k outbound. Support has been excellent.

And the biggest upside is that their shared IP range, so far, is clean and not blacklisted. That was the clincher for us.

I have no connection to MailerSend other than as a happy customer.

Fastmail has been great for both final deivery and outbound smtp for personal email.

I'm very happy with fastmail too but I'm only paying for one inbox. If OP needs half a dozen users, then that's $300 a year, which is excessive for light personal use. I suppose as they only need SMTP they could set them all up as identities on a single inbox but that's not what fastmail is meant for.

Amazon SES will cost pennies for personal use volumes. You really need to stay on top of any reported abuse complaints or they will shut you down quickly, which is a good thing in the big picture.

I recently started a business that is centered around sending mail so I looked through a lot of these. For me the primary concern was price, but I also wanted to ensure that I could DKIM sign without the signature being mangled (I didn't want to trust them to do the signing) and cost (I want to be profitable).

I ended up choosing Amazon SES as it is very cheap and simple. It is also nice that they have regional endpoints that are supposedly largely independent. his allowed me to verify my domain in multiple locations so that I can fail between them if there are problems.

Other interesting mentions:

Oracle Cloud is even cheaper. 0.0008 vs 0.001 per message and no egress charge (IIUC). However you can only verify individual addresses (not a whole domain) and you need to interact with oracle.

TurboSMTP is a more "batteries included" solution which may be better for your use case of personal email. It also has a generous free tier which may just cover your use case.

My vote (like someone else here) goes to Sendgrid. I’ve been using them since before they were sold to Twilio and they haven’t let me down yet.

They also have a reasonable free tier that I basically never exceed. I’m not sure if their basic features would fulfill all your needs though.

That said, if you need personal email I’d say just use Fastmail, and you won’t be disappointed.

Just wait for it ! They can close your account on a moments notice and there will be no way to get your data !

Sure use it if you sending spam'ish email (seems most do) but for anything critical stay far far away !!

What data is in there? It’s a SMTP server to me. As long as it sends my emails everything is good.

Normal transactional mails. Password resets. Ticket Notifications (think JIRA) etc.

>As long as it sends my emails everything is good.

Lol ja it was good until it stopped sending my mails. They closed down our free account after 5 years when we wanted to upgrade to paid tier to get better analytics. EXACT SAME mails (content,recipients, amount etc) we just wanted to give them money and get better reporting. Boom closed down our account over the weekend. No access to our data or account. No recourse !

aws ses, super cheap, fairly easy to setup. I just wish they had better or easier things like sendgrid has for analytics and troubleshooting. But i am paying pennies for my low sends.

In my experience a few email services refuse to accept emails from AWS SES, probably because a lot of automated emails are sent from AWS SES.

I came to recommend AWS SES as well. I also use Google to handle my mail, but I use a catchall email address and Google does not support changing the From address of outbound mail. I've been extremely happy with SES, as it is easy to set up and so far as I know I've not had delivery issues.

Gmail? You can add sending from other address/SMTP in the settings

  > Gmail?

Yes. I use Thunderbird to browse the mail, but Gmail is the MX record.

  > You can add sending from other address/SMTP in the settings

Occasionally I do open a web browser to view the mail from there, so that might be useful. Thanks. But I still would have no way to alter the From header in the web interface.

I have been using mailjet to do this for years. Their free tier allows for 6000 emails a month or 200 emails a day https://www.mailjet.com/pricing/#email

I’m using Migadu for user and transactional emails currently. The price is amazing, though the setup for mail on macOS is somewhat different than what their FAQ suggests so that’s a small headache to have to deal with. Their approach to pricing is usage based on the number of messages, and NOT the number of domains/email addresses, that’s awesome if you’re into idea validation at minimal cost. Supports SPF, DKIM, DMARC, forwarding, vacation messages. https://www.migadu.com/

*not receiving any compensation from Migadu in any way

Have you thought about Mail-in-a-box and a cheap VPS?

I've had one up for testing and am surprised at the reliability and ease of use.

https://mailinabox.email/

The most well-renowned specializing in outbound SMTP AFAIK would be Mailroute, Mailgun, Sendgrid, mxroute. They’re all comparable; pick whichever you think suits you best.

There’s also “mail-hosters” like Posteo, Migadu, Fastmail.

I’m assuming google gsuite (“Gmail paid” where you can use your own domain) is not an option bc of the 6 x users (and gsuite is $/per user / per month) And same goes for office365.

I only Bring those two up as no one else has mentioned them, and I was seeing other replies that were around the $25 a month mark (which is close to these 2x for 6 x users). However with both you get many more services/features than just email (especially with office 365). Actually I think office 365 has a family plan that is around the $10 /mo mark for up to six users

Google Workspace no longer has a minimum user count. I use it with just one user.

Did it ever? I've always used GApps/GWS with one user.

Zoho is usually pretty cheap and reliable. Been around for a long time and don't seem to be going anywhere fast.

Their latest blog says to expect a well priced family solution in the next couple of days

Been using the free version of zoho for about 10 years. What an amazing little piece of software.

> ...Their latest blog says to expect a well priced family solution in the next couple of days

Oooh, now that is interesting! Reference (near bottom of blog post): https://www.zoho.com/blog/workplace/honouring-the-commitment...

I use Zoho for a small company and indeed the pricing is really good and the product is reliable. The UI is really well designed and they have thought about (and implemented) nearly any feature I can ever think of. Really great service.

I plan to move my family to Zoho in the next couple of years. I only haven't yet because I've got so many other items on the to-do list.

I run all my own services but just relented and setup mailgun as an outbound SMTP relay. It works well and solves the deliverability problems associated with low-traffic IP addresses. The only tricky thing was making sure my outbound SMTP requests authenticate to mailgun using domain-specific credentials depending on which address I'm sending from (I have 5 different domains).

I use ImprovMX for inbound forwarding from my domain to whatever email service I use, but they also offer SMTP sending for their paid service. So for $9 a month, I get great forwarding for many domains and users per domain, and I get SMTP service for each domain per user.

I highly recommend them. Their support is great too.

https://improvmx.com

Thank you so much for your awesome comment :) I'm glad ImprovMX is useful for you!

https://serversmtp.com/

It is the only one I have used, it offers both SMTP and a REST API of which I have only used REST, at $COMPANY it was valued as "the cheapest working service to send thousands of email/month from a few email address (the usual noreply@xxx.yy)"

Sendgrid, but SES also is a good choice too.

I recommend mailjet. I can send email from my openbsd terminal that passes SPF and DKIM.

For sending emails Amazon SES is what I would recommend. SPF, multiple domains, SNS for bounced mails. It has it all. You have to gradually grow the reputation. Been using for many years now. Never faced any issues.

I can recommend https://docs.postalserver.io/

I use simplelogin.io for a bunch of my personal domains. They route it all to a catchall mailbox on gmail.

Mailgun are pretty good. I use them on a couple of email services I’ve built.

I use Sendgrid's free tier in this exact way, for mail from catern.com.

Been using mailgun for a long time free for 5000 emails/mo.

I use them for my infrastructure's notification mail needs. Written a small tool to send e-mails from command-line via an API key.

They're a joy to use.

The lack of automatic DKIM rotation is the only thing that keeps me from using them instead of Sendgrid.

Postmark. Be sure to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

posteo.de and tutanota.com are both affordable. I previously used the former for several years. No complaints.

Migadu has been great so far.

I'd recommend a service that lets you take bite sized portions on a pay-as-you go plan. In this case, Elastic Email is well-priced, offering email at a nickel per CPM and they have great support too

I’m guessing all the major clouds provide this?

Yes, but for addresses that are hosted by them.

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