Best 3rd party email relay service
I am fed up of transactional email that I send from my platform not arriving, even though I manage everything carefully on my own server (sends via AWS SES, spf/dkim/dmarc DNS records, etc). Clearly something is still going wrong, as so many of my emails end up not arriving or going to spam, etc.
I want to plug my codebase into a 3rd party email relay service. I've literally just found smtp.com who look good. But would welcome other suggestions for cost and ease of integration (into a simple linux/php setup)?
Trending on Indie Hackers
I'm surprised to hear there are problems with SES. It is kind of a barebones system, but assuming spf/dkim/dmarc are all correct, I wouldn't be expecting issues with it. I haven't had any.
Yeah it turns out I had made a booboo and they were going out from my own mail server directly, rather than via SES. I fixed it and now all ok.
I'm still curious though, how SES compares (quality-wise) with things like Postmark?
I imagine that SES can do most of the things that other providers can do for cheaper. But...it's at the high expense of lots of complexity. Setting up AWS stuff is usually overkill. And the docs are usually way over-complicated.
I just signed up for Postmark and I'm finding it super simple to use. I'm effectively sending out an email template (writing on the UI) with the following code:
And set up a queue so that I can delay some transactional messages.
I take back what I was saying about using Postmark. It was very cool, but it's setup pretty much solely for transactional emails. Their features copy about broadcast messages made it seem like you could use Postmark for marketing emails — which you can but it's a total pain in the ass.
Sendinblue has a lot better support for maintaining a subscriber list and just sending out an email to all of them, so gonna be moving there.
I also haven't found an explicit issues with SES, other than ip addresses getting deny listed because you share one with a spammer. In the cases where you opt for a dedicated one, there shouldn't be an issue.
There only one other rare case, that SES raw messages don't let you set an
Unsubscribe POST headerwhich is unfortunate, but a still a separate conversation.Postmark is the best, highly recommend. Bootstrapped company that is a major player now with a fantastic service.
Twilio Sendgrid is a big guy on the block and okay and so is Mailgun but go with Postmark.
I was looking at using Sendinblue over the next while, but after looking through Postmark might actually be the better option (way nicer UI). They seem to highlight that they have some of the best deliverability across the different providers.
Yes, as you noticed yourself it was a misconfiguration that made you believe SES emails where classified as spam. Actually SES has worked pretty well in the projects I have used it but it requires a careful setup. Otherwise "Mailgun" has also proven to be quite good with an easier setup, and works really well if you just use it as a transactional API and nothing more.
thank you
In the IT service provider space (one of my companies we use these) we recommend MailJet or SMTP2GO. They both have a very generous free plan, deliverability is nearly perfect for both, I personally prefer MailJet because I like its deliverability reports and ease of use.
As a side-note, I previously wrote a short blog-post on how to properly setup email authentication and what tools to use to make sure it works as expected.
I am also searching for an email service, currently using Mailjet, Protonmail and a Hostgator webmail.
Depends what you're wanting to do i.e. how many emails you're sending, etc.
I use https://www.sendinblue.com
Works really well and you can generate multiple API keys for different apps.
You might find my poll interesting: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/2020-prices-for-transactional-emails-who-gets-you-the-cheapest-1-million-what-do-you-use-d24647994b
sorry, not interested in who offers the cheapest. Quality of delivery is the primary concern.
There is a poll on what people actually use. That's why I didn't link my post but the IH poll.
thank you for these recommendations. very helpful 😊
I've seen the exact same message in other communities, I've started to wonder if maybe this is an an ad. It's become a common pattern that a marketing campaign masquerades itself as a triggering question.
This comment has been voted down. Click to show.