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For starters there is the mailbox - gmail, for example like many providers, do not permit mailboxes that are used by mechanical means. While they aren't particularly strict about it, they will throw the odd curve ball, such as making you go through some manual process to show you are a human if they suspect anything - I've been there, I've done that - mail stops for some unapparent reason.  Having also done email hosting in the past I know how difficult running a well run mailbox is - my advise is - take every opportunity to avoid it

Secondly there is the issue of scaling. We will do email campaigns where we send tens of thousands of emails in a short period of time. We run multiple servers working in unison on Xenforo. Any email email campaign is likely to result in a sudden influx of thousands of bounced emails (sad but true in our case). As we run XF over auto-scaled servers at AWS having one server suddenly being pre-occupied with a major task will play havoc on our systems as the expectation is that the work load will be even between servers. We have a utility server for this sort of stuff, and that is the server we would be wanting to use for this purpose and we'd like to be able to use it.

Thirdly you are introducing a dependency on a third party. If whatever mail provider I choose is having issues, then potentially our XF system can suffer delays due to issues at the mail provider,  never mind the network overhead incurred in getting emails.

Fourthly, security, your introducing a process where data gets ingested by XF by potentially untrusted third parties.


Whilst I run one of XF's biggest forums, I've been around long enough to know what I am requesting is something that I would strongly recommend for any forum owner regardless of the size of their forum if they control their own server or VPS. It makes XF more reliable and more secure and is simple for any forum owner to configure and implement.


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