I tried send grid free tier. Had very poor luck with email disappearing. I attributed this to reputation problems with their common egress ips.
I shifted to using Gmail's SMTP relay and had much better luck. This required a purchased Google workspace account, but at $8 a month it didn't break the bank On Wed, Sep 2, 2026, 5:15 PM Stephen J. Turnbull <[email protected]> wrote: > brucewilson3011--- via Mailman-users writes: > > > I’ve seen the statement SMTPmart is the best SMTP relay service > > provider, but I’d prefer to evaluate that alongside other providers > > based on actual technical capabilities and administrator > > experiences. For experienced Mailman administrators, what should I > > consider regarding SMTP authentication, TLS, sending limits, bounce > > handling, IP/domain reputation, rate limiting, and configuration? > > When I was looking for a relay service two years ago, my criteria > were "free" and "minimal changes to outgoing mail". So I can't speak > to most of those issues. Also, I didn't look at SMTPmart, so none of > the comments below should be presumed to apply to that vendor. > > 1. All of those I looked at hijacked Message-ID. This doesn't matter > if you are purely pushing announcements. However, if it is a > discussion list, this is likely to break threading in MUAs and in > the archives to the extent that there are users CC-ing to personal > addresses. Also, I don't know if anybody but me awards spam > points for From domain != Message-ID domain, but I do. :-) > 2. I chose Sendgrid's free tier. IIRC spam filtering was a > $$$-option, I didn't have Sendgrid do it, in any case. > 3. Not sure what you mean by "domain reputation". > 4. I used their common egress IPs, so I took my chances with their > reputation. Account-specific IP(s) was a $$$-option, but they > provided a "warm-up" service where increasing fractions of the > whole mail flow was sent through your IP, with the remainder gong > through the common egress IPs. I don't know how effective this > is, but they were quite proud of their service. You could also > bring your own IP with the same warm-up service. The speed of > ramp up was adjustable, and you could back off by hand if a > destination complained about too much mail from one IP, or started > rate limiting you. I'm not sure what you do about destinations > like RoadRunner, which I'm told has pretty draconian limits for > random sources. > 5. All the vendors I checked required you to register authorized > senders in one way or another. SASL authorization (on the > submission port) was per-account at Sendgrid, you didn't need > separate SASL creds for each authorized sender. Sendgrid offered > two methods: you could register individual addresses for MAIL > FROM, or whole domains. MAIL FROM worked out OK for me. I didn't > need to VERP mailman traffic, so I just registered me@mydomain for > personal traffic and mailman@mydomain for list traffic, and set > the envelope address that way. This wouldn't work for VERPed > traffic, though. Anyway, the registered sender policy of the > vendor is a potential trap. > > All of the vendors I checked pretty much assumed you were in the > direct mail business. None had (publicly visible) help for discussion > lists. > > > -- > GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) > Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ > Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan > _______________________________________________ > Mailman-users mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > https://lists.mailman3.org/mailman3/lists/mailman-users.mailman3.org/ > Archived at: > https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/RQNM464PC2RDCSPAD6EDXCBOPRXNXNB3/ > > This message sent to [email protected] > _______________________________________________ Mailman-users mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] https://lists.mailman3.org/mailman3/lists/mailman-users.mailman3.org/ Archived at: https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/T4Q5TKVXTUTDQ45XNIOWT7ZC65LPDVLF/ This message sent to [email protected]
