Which SMTP provider do you use to send transactional emails?

[Cromulent]

I'm curious to hear what the best SMTP server providers are for things like forgotten password emails etc. I've used Amazon SES before, but I don't want to create an AWS account to send some emails. Are there any other SMTP server providers who are reasonably cheap and can handle increasing traffic over time?

 

[Deathstarr]

amazon is easiest. MailGun was the other one I used but outgrew the free tier.

 

[Mr. Jinx]

https://MXRoute.com works great for me, very reliable.

 

[MySiteGuy]

For under 300 emails max per hour, mxroute.com. They do enforce that limit and will not increase it.

For over 300 emails per hour, Amazon SES or I setup an email server depending on the situation.

 

[dknife]

I used to use SendGrid but realize how ridiculously expensive it is (relatively speaking for my small site) unless you're sending a high volume of emails. I switched to AWS SES which was easy to setup and saved some $. Haven't had any issues with delivery other than the usual bad actors.

 

[duderuud]

I used my own mailserver for years but got tired of maintaining it. It's a pain in the ass.

Switched to Amazon SES. Fairly simple to setup and only costs a couple of dollars a month (and our server sends out a lot of emails).

 

[BoostN]

Amazon SES here.

 

[beerForo]

Does mxroute take issue with the Activity Summary email?

 

[eva2000]

Will only ever use Amazon SES - for one thing, it removes the real server IP in mail headers. So if you use Cloudflare proxy, you won't leak your real server IP for security reasons.

 

[MySiteGuy]

Will only ever use Amazon SES - for one thing, it removes the real server IP in mail headers. So if you use Cloudflare proxy, you won't leak your real server IP for security reasons.

This is the use case for why I switched three clients to SES over the past two weeks.

I use mxroute in some of these cases too - for example if they need easier to manage inboxes (especially browser based), have many email addresses, and are within the 300 mails per hour limit.

 

[MySiteGuy]

Does mxroute take issue with the Activity Summary email?

No issues with it.

 

[Mr. Jinx]

Will only ever use Amazon SES - for one thing, it removes the real server IP in mail headers.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but MXRoute also seems to do this? I just checked it with an email sent from my site to my personal email address.
I could not find any relation to the origin host.

Strip Outgoing IP Address Headers

I couldn’t find in a FAQ anywhere, so just wondering, can MXRoute automatically strip the Received IP address headers for privacy sake?

community.mxroute.com

 

[eva2000]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but MXRoute also seems to do this? I just checked it with an email sent from my site to my personal email address.
I could not find any relation to the origin host.

I haven't used MXRoute for sending for Xenforo as their hourly limits wouldn't be suited for forum/transactional emails usually. But just tested this on a test Xenforo forum and yup MXRoute does strip the real server IP for originating email from the server as MXRoute uses a mail server relay and that probably strips the originating IP before handing off to their mail server that actually sends the email. So your receiving email headers will have the from mail server IP belonging to the intermediate relay server IP and not your server IP.

However, that stripping of real server originating IP only applies to external outbound emails. Local emails to same domain/mail server will still reveal the originating real server IP. So if you have MXRoute domain user@domain1 sending emails to user2@domain1, the real server IP address is still shown in the mail headers for receiving email. So you want to be sure to trust your local users with the knowledge of your real server IP address when using MXRoute smtp for web apps like Xenforo or Wordpress

Also I posted a guide for MXRoute for Centmin Mod users but might help others https://community.centminmod.com/threads/using-mxroute-com-for-yourdomain-emails.22409/

 

[WoodiE]

AWS SES

 

[beerForo]

When you start with AWS SES, if you use the same email address do you bring the reputation with you or start over? The reason I ask is, let's say my email is "info@" but I figured, for these transactional emails, I will just go ahead and create a new address when setting up SES. Is that good/bad/doesn't really matter? Thanks.

 

[Mr Lucky]

if you use the same email address do you bring the reputation with you or start over?

I may be wrong, but I thought the reputation went with the domain or IP address rather than the specific email address at that domain.

 

[beerForo]

Definitely IP related just don't know about the actual email address portion of the domain.

 

[Blatchy]

Those who use SES, how difficult is it to get out of the sandbox? I set everything up, got verified, but its useless for signups because the email address is rejected.

 

[eva2000]

Those who use SES, how difficult is it to get out of the sandbox? I set everything up, got verified, but its useless for signups because the email address is rejected.

Never had any problems requesting getting out of sandbox. Amazon would want you out of the sandbox as that's how they charge you and make $$$

 

[Mr Lucky]

I have to say I didn't get on with SES. I know it comes highly recommded but just seemed to be very fiddly to set up with less than user friendly support docs. maybe I should give it another try, but I just remembered at one time I got a lot of bounces when sending to @btineternt addresses.