We all know MailGun, SparkPost and others - but recently I stumbled into an alternative email service provider, that is suitable for a Discourse setup: Pepipost.com
Note: I am not affiliated with them in any way
They seem to be relatively new. They have an interesting pricing model, charging only for emails that are not opened. This might keep spammy customers away. And they have a rather generous free-tier plan of 25000 mails per month – and only the unopened ones should consume your credits (I think so, TBC).
- Nice dashboard and reports
- Tech support is helpful and available
- For some reason I get rather low scores with email-tester.com, but so far my delivery rate is 100%.
Some cons, or weirdness:
- They manually validate new customer websites (How to add a non-existing, new site?). Takes some some.
- Some awful security practices if using default settings - can be worked around though:
- Your account password is the default SMTP password too
- Click tracking URLs include your account username (wtf?)
- Some of the settings, or way they are presented, are a bit un-orthodox.
I decided to give them a try, since my SparkPost free plan had some deliverability issues. I will need to monitor on the long run if Pepipost is better in this sense. Also I have some trouble figuring out their click tracking URL settings - I have not yet figured out how exactly do I configure it to use my custom domain “email.website.com”.
But an interesting option, and the free-tier plan is sufficient for a pretty large Discourse community.
Anyone using them? How do they perform? Also, if you have the click tracking custom domain figured out, I would like to ask a question, so pls. page me.
