Comparing Mail Servers

Installation Hosting
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First off I want to thank the community. Last week I moved a football forum from a site that was shutting down. Speaking as a non-techie, with no experience in any of this, the tutorials and advice on this site were brilliant. The move of approx 300-400 people to new site is goning really well. The only exception has been the Mail Server.

I used Mailjet, believing that their free plan (200 emails a day limit) would be ample. However, I realized some of my invites where no being delieved as I was going over my daily limit. After some investigation a couple of users were receiving 60 emails a day :astonished:

I have taken to educating members to change their settings, I have changed the default settings for email notification to ā€œneverā€. However, I realize probably sooner than later I need a better solution.

Looking around there seems to be:

Mailier Lite - 1000 users, 12,000 emails a month (average 400 a day)

Mail Chimp 2000 users, 10,000 emails a month (average 333 a day)

SendGrid After Trail - After 30 day trail, 100/day

Sedinblue Unlimited users, and 300 emails a day

Mailrelay 15,000 users and 75,000 emails/month (averages 2,500 a day)

Mailgun 3 months of 5000, emails then 80c per 1000 emails

Amazon SES, 62,000 free emails but 0.12c /GB

As well as several others which charge more. (Please excuse my technical ignorance if any of these cant be used with Discourse)

As I understand email notifications cant be turned off. As I want to keep my site completely free, which free/low-cost option would you guys recommend?

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Links to other Mail server prices

SendGrid After Trail - After 30 day trail, 100/day

Sedinblue Unlimited users, and 300 emails a day

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Further links

Mailrelay 15,000 users and 75,000 emails/month (averages 2,500 a day)

Mailgun 3 months of 5000, emails then 80c per 1000 emails

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Amazon SES, 62,000 free emails but 0.12c /GB

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I donā€™t believe itā€™s possible to completely disable them, but nobody should be getting 60 messages/day unless you want it to be that way (in my case, my Discourse forum replaces an old Yahoo group that was primarily used as a mailing list, so I enabled mailing list mode by default for my users). ā€œNormalā€ email notifications would send you an email if youā€™re mentioned, or if a reply is made to one of your posts, and you arenā€™t on the forum at the time. The normal notification settings will also send an email digest to users occasionally when they havenā€™t visited the forum in a while (the details are configurable).

So, if you donā€™t want to be sending a ton of emails, and your users arenā€™t expecting Discourse to operate like a mailing list, disable mailing list mode (search in the site settings for ā€œmailingā€), and make sure the other notification settings are sensible.

None of which actually answers your question, but might still be helpful nonetheless. But to your actual question, Iā€™ve been happy with Mailgun. Most of the time, my usage is low enough that I donā€™t get a bill (they donā€™t bill for less than $1/month).

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My vote is https://mailinabox.email Super easy to setup and you can scale without worries. Spin up a $5 DO droplet and check the blacklists. If itā€™s a dirty IP destroy and try again. I tried sendgrid and less mail went through than the MIAB droplet. Weā€™ve got a few K users signed up in the last month and are happy with the results. I donā€™t expect issues.

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