What's the cheapest way to send 30K emails/month? 💌

Just curious... how's the experience with Mailgun so far?

Ah okay. How much is it going to cost you?

Yah I couldn't disagree more with that statement. SMTP is a solution, not a problem, DNS is simple and straightforward, and there are plenty of easy and free online generators to help you manage your SPF records, DKIM, etc.

It's the way things have been done for decades and one of the reasons that someone hosts their own machinery anyway; because it's cheap, easy, and quite simply the correct way to do things.

Many folks opt for a single server with either MariaDB and/or PostgreSQL, BIND for DNS, nowadays mostly Nginx for HTTP, and although I still really like and deploy Sendmail more often than not, Postfix and Exim are both excellent, mature, and solid choices for beginners, and very simple to manage.

I've been hosting my own mail services for hundreds of domains for well over thirty years without any hitches, and in today's world all of the above can be achieved on a single machine for about ten bucks a month if you're only serving a few domains and websites.

Beginners oven find that simply picking up a little CentOS VPS and licensing cPanel for twenty bucks a month meets all of their needs most adequately with an intuitive GUI to manage most everything. That twenty dollar a month license fee also comes with personal technical support and guidance directly from cPanel Corp - more than you'll get from a hosting provider, and an intuitive GUI for administration of your mail, DNS, database, firewall and web services too if you're not comfortable on the command line

But you are indeed correct about the consideration given to reputation - yet you have to deal with that anyway for any domain, no matter what, and all you really need to do at the network level is run the IP addresses from the the block you'll be allocated through a quick RBL/blacklist checker to make sure you IP is clean and not tainted by an earlier customer.

All this having been said, given the OP's question, regardless of what infra he/she rolls out, the particular project sounds like a transactional and marketing mail system with services provided by the likes of many of the other providers mentioned here (mailjet, sendgrid, etc), but you still have to deal with DNS, DKIM, SPF, etc, anyway lol.

There's just no getting around those DNS configs for your mail whether you self-host or pay a boatload of duckets to have someone else hehehe this for you

What I would recommend, and indeed what you would probably incorporate anyway regardless of whether you save costs by running your own sever(s), with the provider I recommend the most being that of https://SparkPost.com - i.e., even if you run your own mail/web/database/DNS server you're still going to want to take advantage of the benefits of using a provider like that for your marketing campaigns and customer interactions. The metrics alone, along with viewing when and for how long and how many times someone read the emails, if when they clicked on any links contained, etc... Those are really important things and help you to determine how effective your mail campaigns are.

Now, back to reputation...

When you first register your domain you don't just setup mail services and then of you go to the races! SparkPost will help you warm up your domain and build your reputation incrementally so that you'll be sending out a bazillion emails very soon - it's they're job to help you acheive this, since, they don't make money off of you if you can't send mails that don't bounce ;)

Now, since you're being invited to operate your own sever for the sake of being really inexpensive, let's throw in a free, self-hosted https;//Mautic.org sever into the mix with SparkPost. If you're looking to develop a good campaign based on inbound marketing and you thought you would try to develop it yourself coz crap like Hubspot really does cost thousands of dollars each month (they do their best to hide that fact until you hand over the keys to your entire brand and domain to them), you just built a webserver with your own mail, DNS, database, and inbound marketing behemoth rivaling all the capabilities of Hubspot for free - you pay about twenty bucks a month for your machine that does all that and a couple dollars more to SparkPost (or Mailjet or Sendgrid or SendinBlue).

For example, with SparkPost I get 500 transactional emails per month for free, not to exceed 100 per day. This (usually, but barely) covers the needs for my technical support department and billing/invoicing operations involving transactional emails. I know when the customer received the emails, when and how many times they opened and how long they looked at those emails, when they clicked on any links, etc.

If you need than 500 emails per month, then their "Starter" plan includes 50,000 marketing and/or transsactional emails per month for twenty bucks and if you go over that it's a buck extra for each additional thousand emails. They have other plans for higher volume too. The other excellent providers mentioned have similar plans.

So, if you're starting off sending less than 500 marketing emails per month (I do recommend maximizing your potential with a free self-hosted Mautic sever), then the cost for all of your hosting is say, easily only twenty bucks a month for web, marketing, mail, DNS, everything. Don't want to host your own DNS? No problem, you can do it for free at Hurricane Electric - https://dns.he.net

Sending between 500 and 50,000 marketing and or transsactional emails per month? Then you're total outlay for everything is only forty bucks per month! And of course, all your regular business correspondence emails don't have to count on that today cuz you can send/receive those through the Postfix or Exim sever on your own VPS!

I hope that helps, and don't let naysayers tell you it's difficult, a headache, or even a hassle to run your own DNS and mail servers - nothing could be further from the truth.

I deploy stuff like this all the time and have for decades, it's simple and straightforward, and there's no reason you need to throw mountains of money away on someone who's essentially just doing what I described here lol.

There is one thing though, and I'll say it's outside the scope of this discussion here, yet touch on it briefly. If you get really busy, or need super fast last mile response times worldwide, you should consider incorporating a CDN service. Yes, there is CloudFlare, but there's also KeyCDN and others too that provide a great entry point more affordably when you outgrow or find the free CDN services won't net your needs.

Enjoy!

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@Danbars yep, that’s totally true

I use mailgun and pay literally single digit monthly.
It used to be free until recently for 40k but it's really close to free now.