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SMTP provider

Who can suggest an ethical SMTP provider for low volume transactional mail? I'm willing to pay up to 2€/month for a few hundred mails per month.

30 comments

I use Brevo and have not had any issues. Your usage qualifies for their free plan.
- I use Brevo as well. Free tier: 300 emails per day.
  
  Very happy with them.
What's "ethical"?
- I bet op is one of those hippies that doesn't like their SMTP tested on animals
  
  Yeah, sorry it's not a precise term. I mean a non asshole company.
- Mostly that they respect the privacy of my users and that they don't have shady business practices that want to push you towards an over-expensive paid tier.
  
  I'm using Postmark for my Vaultwarden. Nothing major I know of.
I don't know what you mean by "ethical", but I use Sendgrid. They have a free tier that can send up to 100 emails a day.
I've read good things about migadu. Haven't used it myself.
- Pretty nice but way more expensive then simplymail
  
  EU servers might be worth something to some people, depending on where they are in the world. And while 190% is indeed "way more expensive", relatively speaking, it's still "well under" your goal of EUR 2 per month.
SMTP2GO - 1000 free emails a month, 200 emails a per day.
Been using Purelymail, full email, but SMTP as well, and love the service thus far.
- Exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks a lot!
- I’ll second PurelyMail. Easy to set up and they have explainers for all the various settings. I pay $10 a year for “unlimited” domains and mailboxes (some caveats but for minimal mail we won’t hit any limits).
You could use some containerized mail server like Mailcow. They're pretty alright to set up and should work fine for low volume. At least in my experience. Unless you don't want to deal with mail yourself, then you should maybe consider a paid service. But I don't have any experience with those.
- I specifically want to not deal with deliverability beyond the content and volume of my mails.
I use purelymail, you can register unlimited number of domains and get SMTP + IMAP in return (+ Roundcube webmail). Perfect for my usage with few automated services
- Amazing! Now this is something I haven't heard of. I think we might have a winner here! Best thing, I could use it for transactional mail on all my websites for 10€/yr. Including as many inboxes as needed. Nice!
i suspect this falls under the golden rule of 3... price,quality,[ethics].

you get to pick 2
- Agreed, and well-articulated. I think you (OP) need to ask yourself whether you’re willing to pay the appropriate market rate for the service or not. I don’t know what that is, but I expect it’s higher than you’ve expressed.
  
  Have a look at purelymail mentioned by others. It's almost exactly what I'm looking for.
Check out MXRoute. (Specifically the lifetime promo, though I've seen it on sale for cheaper.)
- Thanks but that's not what I'm looking for. I need to send mails only.
"Low volume" vs. "A few hundred mails per month"

OK, what of the above?
- A few hundred a month is just a few per day. That is pretty low volume by most standards.
  
  I would say in general if the SMTP server could be replaced by a single human writing and mailing snail-mail letters by hand it qualifies as low volume.
- This is something you used to be able to do for free, no problem. It's only a few of the big mail accepting companies being extra shitty about accepting mail making this tough. Looking at you Microsoft. So a few hundred mails per month is ridiculous both on storage, bandwidth and CPU consumption.
  
  I know. I was there, before Sanford Wallace invented the email spam and forced any sane SMTP server into password protections and whitelists.

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