Which email delivery system do you use?
I am trying to find out the best dynamic email delivery system with a simple setup. Any recommendations ?
I am trying to find out the best dynamic email delivery system with a simple setup. Any recommendations ?
Depends a lot on your use case, but here's how I'd think about it:
For pure transactional email (password resets, onboarding, receipts) at low-to-medium volume, AWS SES is hard to beat on price — sub-$1 per 10k emails once you're out of the free tier. The API is solid if a bit verbose. Postmark is more expensive but has excellent deliverability and a great developer experience, and their support is genuinely responsive.
Resend has become popular lately because of the clean API, but worth knowing it's built on top of SES — so the underlying infrastructure is the same. Great for getting started fast.
The question I'd encourage anyone to think about early: what happens when your provider has an outage? For most early-stage projects it's not worth worrying about, but if you're sending anything critical (auth emails especially), it's worth understanding the failure mode before you hit it in production.
I’m running Postal https://github.com/postalserver/postal on a cheap VPS for a few years now. It’s really great and gives me better delivery rates then I had with sendgrid in the past.
This looks very promising. Thanks for sharing. Right now, I use SendGrid and host my own email server for all the side projects I have. After building a small portfolio, having all the domains with custom emails gets really expensive using providers like Google or similar with their "per user" model.
I can't tell if this Postal would be a good options as a "general" email server for having email accounts. But seems great, for more marketing style emails
It's only really suitable for transactional emails. You can also process incoming mails. But you should only see this as a SendGrid alternative.
Gotcha. Have you used it at a large scale? If so, what sort of issues did you run into with scaling it out of the box (aside from just upgrading the server)
I do only send a few hundred messages a day with it. So can’t say anything about how it would run on large volume.
A few hundred a day is still solid out of the box at least. Thanks for the info bud!
Try it out on a vps right now.
Wow. I will check it out. Thanks.
Currently, we are using Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) for HeyForm newsletter delivery, easy to set up and the price is very competitive.
Does SES also handle mailing lists or is it just an API for sending?
SES is just an API for sending, you would need something like Sendy or Postal to handle the mailing lists.
Thanks. Do yoy need a domain in aws to you ses?
Yes, you would need to add either a domain or a mailbox and have it verified.
Thanks dearroy!
For transactional email a lot of people on Hacker News and Reddit recommended Postmark when I was researching the same thing. I implemented it in my app and it was super easy to integrate.
Mailgun.
This seems to be the common choice.
I like SendGrid, for my website newsletter I use MailPoet
Does sendgrid make you use a 2fa app ? Havent heard of mailpoet..will check it out.
You can try mixmax
Do you mean https://www.mixmax.com/ ?
Yes. That's what we use for our email marketing. However, if your email list is huge, then something like a mailgun is advisable.
For marketing emails - you can try activecampaign & sendinblue as well. They have better deliverability.
For deliverability testing - glockapps.com
For domain warming- use lemlist
Wow thank you for the solutions:)
Will look into this ! Thanks.
Using Mailchimp for sending out to an email list and woodpecker.co for cold-email.
Will check it out. Thank you.
Testkit uses MailChimp for marketing and SendGrid for transactional. Looking to move away from MailChimp though since I'm not happy with their UX
I use mailchimp for my newsletter/marketing emails too, but their UX seems like it has gotten super bad recently. It is way to clunky, especially for simple newsletters or simple marketing triggers
the problem with sendgrid is that its a bit too much for the setup. Though their dynamic templates are really nice. Didnt look at mailchimp because you cant send transactional emails ( not sure) . Mailgun looks promising.
Mailgun for email blasts, postmark was great for transactional emails. I use my own SMTP server for receiving emails now (not for sending)
Postmark seems pretty good too .. their free plan is quite nice.
Mailgun.. Been using them for 5-6 yrs since it was Rackspace :)
I think the common reply here is mailgun :)
They have just made it easy... It's hosted in AWS, but managed by a team that knows how to make things simple.
Second best would be AWS them self in Amazon SES
Our company's been using SparkPost for transactional emails for a few years now. Mandrill before that.
Sparkpost has comeup in my research. I am going to check it out. Thanks.
I am using Mailgun & sendgrid
Which one do you think is better?
both are good.. I have to use both for the nature of my product.. but I would prefer Mailgun most over sendgrid
I've used both MailChimp and SendGrid. I use SendGrid for my main project, MailChimp for a side project.
For basic usage: building templates, creating campaigns and sending them out to subscribers, I tend to prefer MailChimp. Mostly because the UX is better than SendGrid. I had a few experiences building templates in SendGrid that had me scratching my head.
I do, however, like SendGrid's API better. My SaaS needs to send transactional emails along with marketing automations and getting things setup with the SendGrid API was a breeze. Easier than the prior experience I had with MailChimp. My main project sends a lot more transactional emails than marketing emails, so I opted for SendGrid.
I haven't run into any issues with deliverability so far for either of them.
I should note that the folks at SendGrid are much more strict: when you start sending emails in greater volume you need to upgrade your account, as well as go through a manual auditing process before your upgrade gets approved. They ask you a series of questions about your business and what it is you're doing, and you have an email dialog with an account manager.
Wow. Thanks for the reply. This was very useful.
Sendgrid recommends i use 2FA for security and I agree that you should always secure mission critical components with 2FA , but what i dont like about sendgrid is the fact that it forces me to use a specific 2FA app, it seems it doesnt support google authenticator.
I will try mailgun .. as it seems pretty common.. thank you !! I have never used an email service.