Users discuss their experiences with various email providers for Discourse, including Mailgun, SendGrid, Elastic Email, MailJet, and Amazon SES. jayqueue2 initially struggled with SendGrid’s complex CNAME verification but found Mailgun much easier to set up for a small community. Stephen praises Mailgun for its simplicity and DNS monitoring, noting its dashboard guides setup well, though analytics are limited compared to premium services like SendGrid. He cautions that Elastic Email may not suit small communities due to reputation risks below 10,000 messages. jayqueue2 confirms Mailgun met their needs for ease and speed, without requiring advanced analytics. nexo endorses Mailgun for its reliability and free tier (10,000 emails/month). ufukayyildiz and renato recommend Amazon SES, citing its cost-effectiveness (e.g., $0.90 for 12k emails beyond the free tier), though renato notes its setup is less user-friendly. techwithanirudh had their SendGrid account suspended for spam-like activity (common with Discourse), seeking a free, reliable alternative. Richie cautions that “free” and “really good” rarely align, while techwithanirudh persists in seeking a free, user-friendly option. Overall, Mailgun is highlighted as the most painless for beginners, while Amazon SES offers value at scale despite a steeper setup curve.
The install guide offers a handful of email providers for Discourse. I was wondering if people could chime in with their feedback for the ones mentioned in the guide (Mailgun, Elastic, SendGrid, Mailjet).
I used SendGrid on an install and it took awhile to get it to work correctly. I had to verify with five separate CNAMEs to verify the site and get emails not to end up in spam folders.
What has been the most painless service for you? And is the verification process the same for every provider?
@pfaffman may have thoughts
I just did a new setup with Mailgun and it was substantially easier than SendGrid was.
I’ve found mailgun to be very simple and effective. Their dashboard tells you exactly what you need to configure and checks DNS regularly to make sure records stay intact. The rest of their platform is rather simplistic, if you’re looking for more in the way of analytics you may be better paying the premium and sticking with Sendgrid.
Last time I checked MailJet and SendGrid were equally priced, but MailJet didn’t really offer much over cheaper options such as MailGun and ElasticEmail.
I’ve only worked with Elastic Email a couple of times. They do talk about mail reputation on their platform being affected by email volumes below 10,000 messages, so they might be a bad starting point for small communities.
As to ‘best’, it very much depends on your appetite for this kind of stuff. Setting up CNAMEs is par for the course with everyone. All of the companies you’ve mentioned are experts in mail deliverability and that’s part of why they’re recommended rather than running a local SMTP server. If you give us more information on your community size and estimated volumes it would certainly help.
My community is very small. A better topic title should be “Easiest Email Providers”. Mailgun had fewer records to work with and got up and running faster, which is what I was looking for. Serious analytics is out of my range so Mailgun was just what I needed.
I’m mainly looking for feedback from other uses as to if they encountered any roadblocks or had their feedback about a particular service.
Mailgun is extremely good, I’ve set it up months ago and I’ve never even went back on to check anything because there are never any errors or limit problems.
Give it a try, 10,000 emails a month for free.
I use Amazon SES. Give it a try 
I was using sendgrid, but then after I configured my discourse forum they suspended my sendgrid account thiking I was a spammer (due to discourse sending many emails). I tried to contact support but they didn’t reply, it had been two days and my forum really needs to send an email, and I need a better provider anyways. Which one is free and is really good?
The words “free” and “really good” rarely go hand in hand.
Reliable transactional email is often a case of, you get what you pay for 
True, Is there any good for discourse provider you would recommend which is free.
I’m a happy Amazon SES user. There’s a free tier and it’s really cheap, but setting it up on their end is far from user-friendly.
Last month, for example, I was billed U$ 0,90 for 12.040 emails (3k are free and then U$ 0,10 per 1k emails).
Cool! Anything more user friendly?