Ask HN: Does anyone have a SMTP service for not sending bulk email? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does anyone have a SMTP service for not sending bulk email?

2 pointswoofcat4 comments

I have a few projects where I want to send email from an Application. These are mainly demo servers for showing things off to clients. When the customer buys the software they hook it up to their Exchange/Office365/Mail infrastructure.

Right now I'm using postmark, with my own domain but I feel my use case isn't geared to their market. Their minimum plan is 10,000 emails a month. I'd need less than 1,000 emails a month.

Does anyone know of a SMTP provided that would a good fit.

Requirements

- Send from my own domain

- SMTP server available over TLS, not sending email via a API call.

- Transactional Emails are all I'm sending.

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You can give "ZeptoMail" from Zoho, a try. Its a platform dedicated to sending application/transactional emails. The platform doesn't allow bulk or marketing email sending. There are no monthly subscriptions for ZeptoMail. You can simply buy email credits when you need them and these credits will be valid for 6 months. It would tick all your requirements.

You can check it out - www.zoho.com/zeptomail

I personally use my gmail account for personal scripts where I send cronjob results back to myself via SMTP.

You can create an "application password" in your google account settings that separate from your main password. However, the granularity of permissions isn't great in that you can scope it to gmail, but not make it a "send only, not read email" password.

I'd caution against outgoing emails going to many other places other than back to your own email though. You don't want your personal email or domain taking an authoritative hit on spam filter.s

The problem I've had with this before is that the service is sending an email to say 5 different users when an update happens in a container.

With outlook.com and Gmail I've had it get rate limited real fast. I.e. connecting to SMTP and firing out 15 emails seems to flag it pretty quick. The WebUI will continue to work but they'll lock down SMTP.

I like Amazon SES.

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