SMTP2GO Free Plan - Spam Score?

I spotted this in another thread here at selfhosted:

https://www.smtp2go.com/pricing/

1000 outgoing emails per month is free.

It makes me worry that spammers will use that service and give a bad reputation to their IPs so that a lot of emails will end up in spam folders. But from what I can see so far, it seems like they actually have a good mail delivery score?

It also says they were founded in 2006 in New Zealand and have servers around the world:

https://www.smtp2go.com/about/

They certainly seem professional.

Anyone else here using their free plan and can say whether they are good? I'm just interested in sending like 5 outgoing emails a month for personal use.

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Edit: Thanks for suggesting an alternative. I will be picking MailJet as suggested below. Both are great. But here are two posts that describe why I pick MailJet (in short: Higher limits for free users, and they are a very huge European corporation that already handles communication for most of the western world, you probably already use their services without knowing it):

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1hr7bi5/comment/m4wgnhe/?context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1hr7bi5/comment/m4wibz0/

Edit: For a moment I got worried when the free plan at https://www.mailjet.com/pricing/ mentions a "MailJet logo in the footer" but you can relax, I just saw that it only happens if you use their web app to send email newsletters. Something I won't even be doing at all.

Their privacy policy is great. They will not share with 3rd parties:

https://www.mailjet.com/legal/privacy-policy/

I am creating my account now, using my custom email domain (it didn't like gmail and said that extra sending limits would apply if that was used).

After I have an account, you just have to use their SMTP Relay feature to send via a regular email client.

https://www.mailjet.com/products/email-api/smtp-relay/

Edit: I am currently setting it up. The free plan allows up to 100 domains and lets you send from ANY email alias ("From" address) at each domain you have set up (without having to define the aliases on MailJet's website). Awesome. And their setup guide is super easy to follow for authenticating ownership of the domain (via DNS records) and then adding DKIM and stuff to your domains...

Edit: Setup was so easy, but my love with them is short-lived. They are great, and the whole signup process was a pleasure. Their entire website and the setup process was freaking awesome and super easy and professional. BUT, every email gets a List-Unsubscribe header.

This makes recipients treat your email as a newsletter, which can lead to seeing things like "unsubscribe from newsletter" banners in the email viewer of the recipient. If they try to unsubscribe, nothing happens (so that's fine), but the other drawback is that your emails may be auto-sorted as "Promotional Emails" in Gmail for example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/n4lcpy/mailjet_listunsubscribe_header/

I personally tried sending to a GMail receiver and they don't see any "unsubscribe" banners or links anywhere, and it was not sorted as "promotional". But they even have a blog about it which says that it WILL appear if the recipient hasn't opened your emails in 30+ days:

https://www.mailjet.com/blog/deliverability/understanding-gmail-unsubscribe/

So it doesn't feel right for personal emails. And I worry that it could cause me problems with some of my receivers.

Another weird thing is that all of your email recipients (via SMTP too) automatically get added to a Contacts list on the Mailjet website, which can only hold 1500 addresses and will refuse to add other destinations unless you manually prune it later.

And yet another freaky aspect is that all sent emails are listed on their website with their recipient emails and the email titles.

It's clear that MailJet is really meant for newsletter postings and automated emails (such as order confirmations etc). Whereas SMTP2Go is a general-purpose SMTP server.

I will be switching to SMTP2Go now.

Edit: SMTP2Go's privacy policy is okay too: They store some information for 35 days to detect spam: ALL email headers (not contents) for all emails, and the actual body contents of 0.1% of your emails (1 email per 1000 sent). They use automated analysis to determine if it's spam. They only manually look at the saved contents if they get complaints about you. And the data is deleted after 35 days. It's fine in my opinion. See here: https://www.smtp2go.com/privacy/

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Edit: I am using SMTP2GO now. The website doesn't feel as nice and modern as MailJet, but it's definitely a better service for normal people. The outgoing emails don't contain weird "email newsletter/mailing list" related headers, and their service is definitely properly set up for DKIM and SPF too. It was very easy to set up, even if the site felt a little bit old school. I am happy with them!

Here's the setup process for SMTP2GO:

• Follow their welcome guide to add a "Verified Sender" and choose the "Domain" variant to authenticate an entire domain.

• Note: If you use Cloudflare, be sure to disable the "Proxied" checkbox for all the CNAME entries they tell you to add. Otherwise Cloudflare will try to do its own magic rewriting and proxying of the target hostname's IP addresses. I am not sure if Cloudflare does it if the destination address is hosted by another provider, but why take the risk? SMTP2Go tells us to disable proxying.

• Click "Verify" to check your DNS records. If they pass, they'll generate an SSL certificate for your link tracking domain (nothing to worry about, since they handle it). You can click "Verify" again to check if the SSL certificate has been enabled.

• Note: You should not add SMTP2Go to your domain's normal SPF record. They use another trick instead. SPF is always verified against the Return-Path domain, so they set themselves up as a subdomain of your domain, and use that subdomain as the Return-Path sender. Then they use a CNAME to provide the SPF policy via their own custom subdomain instead. Therefore, don't worry about editing your main domain's SPF record, since it won't be used for anything. They describe their technique here: https://www.smtp2go.com/blog/spf-record/

• Another aspect of email deliverability is whether your domain has a DMARC record, which tells the recipient which senders are allowed to send emails that appear to come from your domain. It's a very complicated topic. The most interesting aspect here is that SMTP2GO uses a sub-domain for sending (it uses a Return-Path at a sub-domain at your domain, such as Return-Path: [email protected]), whereas your emails will obviously be using a From: [email protected] header. And one aspect of DMARC is to verify that the Return-Path and From headers are the same domain, to prevent spoofing. Luckily, there's a "relaxed" mode that allows them to mismatch as long as they both belong to the same overall domain.

• So if you want to set up DMARC, I recommend using https://easydmarc.com/tools/dmarc-record-generator and studying the topic in detail, and then configuring it to allow emails to come from subdomains, and to reject all emails that fail these checks. The record itself should be placed on your main domain (as a TXT record at _dmarc.yourdomain.com). It's also possible to place the record on subdomains, but that could easily lead to exploits where spammers can still impersonate your main domain, so it's recommended to put the rule on your main domain. If you don't want to use DMARC, it's a good idea to create a default record with the contents v=DMARC1; p=none to explicitly "disable" the feature.

• Very important: If you're using Cloudflare's Email Routing on your domain, you must be aware of the fact that Cloudflare rewrites the "Return-Path" header of all your forwarded emails to be your own domain, which means that you must include Cloudflare's SPF record on your main domain as instructed by Cloudflare (see https://community.cloudflare.com/t/email-routing-and-spf/341490). You must also ensure that your DMARC record permits Cloudflare's email forwarding to pass through. It might actually be impossible to enable DMARC when using Cloudflare Email Routing, since Cloudflare doesn't DKIM-sign the forwarded emails, which means that they can never pass DMARC, as seen here https://community.cloudflare.com/t/forward-mails-from-dmarc-enabled-domain-without-dkim-signature/620222.

• Note: It's recommended that you set DMARC to monitoring mode before enabling "reject" mode, to see if any emails would have been rejected.

• Now follow SMTP2GO's instructions to create an "SMTP User" to use for sending. It will recommend your primary domain name as the username, but that's honestly just weird. Set the username to anything you want (I just used random letters and numbers). Lastly, go into the "Advanced" tab and enable "Bounce Notifications: On, Send to the original sender", so that you'll receive warnings if you try to send emails to non-existent recipients. That makes it behave like normal SMTP servers which will notify you about failures, rather than acting like a mass mailing server where you wouldn't want bounce notifications. All other marketing-related features (open-tracking, click-tracking, unsubscribe-footer, etc) should be disabled.

• Configure your email client's Outgoing SMTP Server as shown on the SMTP2GO "SMTP Users" page. I recommend using SSL/TLS (not STARTTLS) encryption when connecting.

• Use a website such as https://www.mail-tester.com/ to verify that your domain's SPF/DKIM credentials are all working properly, and to see that DMARC has been configured (or disabled, which is what I recommend for most people).