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Amazon SES is cheap and reliable. I switched over to sending from SES two or so years ago now I think. Never spent over like $2 or $3 a month. I used to run my mailboxes on Rackspace's email service, but two or three months ago switched over to my own mail server.
You'll probably get better answers to this question if you say whether you want to send, receive, or both.
Mxroute is not transactional mail provider. It just does not compare to ses and postmark.
Postmark - if you need granular analytics;
Ses - if you need raw, unadulterated mail sending.
I use them all.
Postmark is fantastic for transactional (they have bulk sending too) email that gets delivered fast, and in my experience - with very few errors. I use this for most of my production sites. It comes with all the analytics, reports, APIs, etc...
MXRoute is brilliant.
It can be used for transactional email, but I guess it's designed to be more of a traditional email offering. Hard limit at 300 emails/hour (if I'm not mistaken).
SES is the cheapest of the bunch - at scale. All the API access, but little to no out-of-the-box reporting/analytics. It's great when it works, horrible when it doesn't. I use it for notifications from various appliances like firewalls, devops/scripts, and bulk transactional emails.
As @szarka mentioned, if you can tell us your intended use case, you'll probably get better advice.
Mostly send out registration confirmation emails. But it is good to be able to receive emails too. But inbound is not high priority.
I had a vps with django web app deleted, due to loss of the ability to send out registration emails. The app does not allow end user to turn off this email registration function. So basically no new user anymore, rendering this app useless.
The easiest and most reliable in my experience is Amazon SES
Postmark is the best in terms of deliverability. SES does work, but it’s kind of meh on some cases. But SES is 10x cheaper than Postmark so that’s that
Another alternative you might want to consider, if you're on a budget (or even if not) is OpenSRS's hosted email service. It's only $0.50 per mailbox, and you don't have to actually point your MX record at their server if you want to host your own inbound. (You do have to configure each email address that will send, though.)
I used it for a medium-sized customer who was having all their email to a certain government agency go to /dev/null, despite our mail server IP having a good reputation and having appropriate SPF records configured. It solved the problem.
I've also used their spam filtering option in the past and it was decent (and cheap), though I've never used their actual POP/IMAP services.
Personally, I hate AWS so much for all the spam they've inflicted on my mail servers over the years that I refuse to use them, even though their "too big fail" status managed to keep them from getting blocked wholesale when spam was rampant on their network. Feels like paying blackmail.
Amazon doesn't require that you confirm consent for mailing lists on SES, and they ignore abuse complaints about it. It's a very good choice for spammers.
Amazon ses but you can use these also MailChimp, Sendinblue
SES got stricter regarding verification on high volume sending. It is not viable for spammers to use ses for spam. They better go with digitalocean, hetzner, ovh and all others with way more laxed policy regarding spam.
Doesn't seem to be helping my inbox any. Maybe someone should let the people running it know what you know.
Given their capacity and IP ranges they are doing stellar work. For DO example, I have blocked entire ASNs from them. Very sad situation.
I believe that if you want "something that isn't crap", the best way is to buy a yearly deal from and self host your own email, setup a control panel if you don't want to "manage" this (manage as is getting your hands on)
you can use github actions to automate backups or just use stuff like onedrive/dropbox/etc
something that is closer to being yours
I've had my OVH server shut down immediately the few times spammers hijacked a customer's email. Maybe I'm just not a big enough customer for them to miss me if I go?
Nope, you are justnot professional spammer. Pro spammers know how to avoid and cloack their activities to maximize malice.
The latest OVH spammers seem to be spinning up cloud servers, spamming, and then deleting them to spin up new ones quickly. Much like DO spammers do.
Nicest compliment I've received all day.
Though, I'd be lying if I said I'd never gotten sick of fighting the good fight and thought about going over to the dark side to make some of that sweet, sweet spam money.
hey. i have a small "use case" for email. , any ideas would be welcomed
a professional logs in to the website which sends transactional "OTP" emails to clients. this professional has to call/text the client for that OTP for tax purposes and this is pretty standard.
there is a service that lets clients forward their OTPs to the professional's software so the process is like this.
website sends OTP to client email. the client email forwards that email to our service. at the same time, a post request is sent from professionals' software that tells the service that "client A has sent an OTP, please check that". the software matches these two requests.
if these two requests are matched, the software sends a post to the software of the professional with the OTP...
i have attempted to think which software to use https://github.com/JayNewstrom/InboundEmail looks like a good idea but it would need something more
They do use reputation system and above certain level account is normally suspended, one negative thing about reputation system is bouncing emails do affect the reputation score. The reason why SES don’t require the confirmation of consent is Amazon SES is just SMTP relay not complete solution for mail list.
How about setting own mail in a box server? Setting up seems easy. But maybe there is other catchya?
Actually, I'm wondering just how bad delivery actually is doing it yourself.
My IP is (or at least was when I set it up) totally clean, but since then it seems the entire OVH AS has been added to UCEPROTECT3.
I've only had problems sending once, but I mostly only use my outgoing mail server to send to my own gmail account, family and my one client. The one time there was a problem, the client had just reconfigured their mail server and they were missing a lot of mail, not just mine.
But I definitely will want to use this for outgoing mail once I've launched my app + backend. It'll only be used for sending signup and login tokens, but I guess the nature of that is that the e-mails will look very much alike and so might get categorised as spam by some systems. There's also the risk that somebody trying to DDoS me could end up tricking me into sending these mails to known spam trap e-mail addresses.
I guess the real risk is not knowing how much mail actually gets through but gets silently dropped or hidden in a spam folder, and possibly the only way of measuring that is by the ratio of number of emails sent and number of links used.
However, I'd kind of like to know about potential delivery problems in advance, because by the time I can realise there's a lot of mail being sent but not clicked on, it's kind of too late and those users might have given up trying to log in by then.
So, is it just the case that you need to offload this to a specialist company with very clean IPs, or is clean IP apart from being on an UCEPROTECT3-listed AS sufficient for most spam filters?
Right, but depending on use case, it can be perfect. If you've got a personal domain, leaving Google Gsuite, and want to self-host email but not deal with delivery, it's a great choice.
For Advin Servers, I used Amazon SES when I was first starting out because I was already using Amazon Lightsail to host my WHMCS. I used SES for a few months, and I had a decent experience. SES is great for cheap bulk outbound mail, but doesn't provide many statistics nor is it really that flexible from what I remember. Also, the dashboard looked very old and it was decently hard to navigate.
I ended up moving to Gsuite for mail. I was already paying for Gsuite for Docs, Drive, Sheets, etc. So, using Gsuite for mail ended up looking like an OK option. As a bonus, Gsuite also included an inbox and has integration with WHMCS so I didn't need to use my own server as an inbox. I ended up sticking with Gsuite for a while, but later ended up switching due to some emails falling into spam.
I finally ended up making the switch to Postmark. Postmark has a beautiful user interface, provides in depth statistics, and I haven't had a single complaint about emails falling into spam. It's a bit more expensive than SES and Gsuite (and compared to most email solutions on the market), but I don't really mind paying more as long as I had good email delivery and good email tracking. As an inbox, I ended up using a cheap Netcup VPS with Mailcow that has Postmark setup as an email relay.
I considered switching to MXRoute, but their stance on GPDR and such was
given that I was using my mail for a business that was serving European customers. I'm sure it's fine for personal mail, but I just don't feel comfortable using them for my business.
ZeptoMail by Zoho seems like a decent option. It includes a nice dashboard, includes statistics, and it's only approximately $2.50 for 10k emails. I only found it after I switched to Postmark.
For personal mail, I just use Gsuite since I love their ecosystem so much.
Thanks! Zepto looks pretty good for my usecase, did not see that one before.
That's not entirely correct: Amazon SES has a managed reputation and if there are too many complains, sending will automatically disabled, which will be pretty soon:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/reputationdashboardmessages.html
My inbox is full of junk from SES that I never subscribed to, that I can't unsubscribe from, and that Amazon has ignored multiple recent complaints about. Same reported from several customers. I don't know how much more true that can get.
Report as spam = DSN complaint. If there are a number of them, the account will be blocked.
Content-Type: multipart/report; boundary=...; report-type=feedback-reportContent-Type: message/feedback-reportEdit: this is a good description: https://help.returnpath.com/hc/en-us/articles/220224748-What-is-the-Abuse-Reporting-Format-ARF-
Try 'Send hard bounce' with FairEmail ;-)
This is similar, but not the same
Thankfully, it doesn't seem like anyone is really using UCEPROTECT levels 2 or 3 to block outright. My OVH IP's range shows up periodically on 2 and for long stretches on 3, but deliverability issues are rare. The only significant problems I or my customers have had over the years have tended to be from odd custom rules that some random mail server administrator put in at some point, which are harder to find and to get anyone to do anything about (which is why @jar's approach of trying multiple outbound channels seems like a good way to go).