
Free Transactional Email Services – The Best Alternatives to Mandrill and Co - foolala
https://www.metachris.com/2016/03/free-transactional-email-services-the-best-alternatives-to-mandrill/
======
pfooti
It would be interesting to see in this article two features that I find are
pretty rad that mandrill supports: inbound email processing and api-side
templating.

Specifically, we have some webhooks set up so whenever someone emails
blah@example.com, mandrill posts that data to a known URL on my webapp
(processing inbound email events like replies and so on).

Mandrill also "supports" a handlebars language on their end, so I can have a
handlebars outbound template and pass in a big data structure (with repeats
and conditional rendering).

I caveat supports, because their API doesn't support nested arrays (an array
of objects which in turn contain an array property, for example) and their API
silently ignores any camelCased variables. There's a couple of other
weirdnesses to mandrill's handlebars, but on balance it's handy to allow my
designers to change the layouts to some outbound emails without having to push
those template changes to the web application itself (previously, we used
handlebars to render a big HTML blob on the server side which got pushed into
to the email).

I can live without a rich view template language, but not really without
inbound webhooks. I know Amazon SES can be made to handle this with their
Lambda service or via Amazon SNS (my webapp doesn't run on EC2, so it is a tad
more complicated), and I had been working through a lot of the other providers
to see who supports what, because woah is mandrill going to be a lot more
expensive now.

~~~
easyd
Mailgun has a great inbound api [1]. You can set up routing rules to let them
post the email as json (or just forward it) to a specified url. The json also
includes fields for the extracted quoted parts and signature. The latter is
based on some machine learning, which other providers don't have afaik.

[1] [https://documentation.mailgun.com/quickstart-
receiving.html](https://documentation.mailgun.com/quickstart-receiving.html)

~~~
thedufer
I would second Mailgun for inbound email. Granted, my use-case is very low-
volume, but it works great and the email parsing seems to be pretty good.

I've previously used Mandrill for inbound, which has a lot of problems that
I'd rather not enumerate. But that was at a much higher scale, so many of
those problems I wouldn't have seen yet even if Mailgun has them.

------
tszming
I really feel sad for the close down of Mandrill, although we are not affected
as we are also paid MailChimp user, so we can merge our accounts. However, we
are considering moving away MailChimp due to this, just don't like the way
they do business.

~~~
acomjean
We used constant contact and Mandrill at the small non profit I'm on the board
at. This move basically killed the idea of moving to Mail Chimp. It was kinda
a bait a switch. We use very low volume so be willing to pay a little, but
moving to an fairly expensive plan for transactional isn't going to happen.

~~~
OliverJones
It looks to me like Mailchimp but not Mandrill are (for now) keeping their
small-scale pay-as-you-go plans. But, they force you onto a larger plan if you
try to merge your Mailchimp and Mandrill accounts. If I'm not misreading it,
it's US$70 per month minimum -- too much for the nonprofit folks I serve.

So, I'm trying SendGrid for transactional messages and sticking with Mailchimp
for onboarding emails (a sequence of messages sent a few days apart to new
contacts with consent of course).

Sendgrid was seamless to adopt. We'll see about deliverability.

------
mysterypie
Could I use the free tiers of these services as a personal email service as an
alternative to, say, Gmail? I'm using my own mail client (like SeaMonkey or
Thunderbird) and I have my own domain name.

Would they mind that I used the free tier in this way? Are there any
downsides?

The reason is privacy. I don't want Gmail (or other free email services)
scanning, analyzing, and saving away my email. I think the "transactional
email services" in the featured article would be more private since their
motivations and they way they make money are different than Gmail.

~~~
gerry_shaw
Most (all?) don't have POP3/IMAP for incoming mail (they use webhooks for your
web app) so you could send email through these but not easily receive it.

~~~
glogla
The problem with having your own mailserver is mostly that google and hotmail
won't accept your mail. So you could have your own POP3/IMAP server, and only
send outgoing mail through the transactional service.

~~~
icebraining
Yeap, that's me. I have it configured as a smart host[1] on my self-hosted
exim server, so I can change it in just one place, without touching the email
clients. Came in handy recently :)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_host](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_host)

------
madflo
Former Evangelist team member for Mailjet here.

Mailjet added an Inbound API called ParseAPI. Even if the name is different
they are able to process inbound emails :-)

[https://www.mailjet.com/feature/parse-
api/](https://www.mailjet.com/feature/parse-api/)

Quite an handy list tho. Great work!

~~~
arnaudbreton
Thanks madflo for the mention! We've released a version of our API
documentation to ease the migration:
[http://dev.mailjet.com/mandrill/](http://dev.mailjet.com/mandrill/)

We're also beta testing a tool to automate this migration. Please reach out to
api at mailjet dot com to be involved in it.

Thanks for putting this list together, quite helpful.

------
isachintiwari
Pepipost - The Best & Free alternative to Mandrill

3 months of exclusive free unlimited transactional emails.

If you are a paid Mandrill customer you can get a 40% discount of your current
spends with Mandrill.

Read More: [http://www.pepipost.com/index.php/mandrill-
alternative/](http://www.pepipost.com/index.php/mandrill-alternative/)

~~~
darkpollo
Hi, Nice post. For the ones that want more info on Sendy, this post can be
useful:

[https://sendyhost.com/mandrill-
alternatives-245/](https://sendyhost.com/mandrill-alternatives-245/)

We have compared:

Mandrill PostMark Sparkpost Mailgun Sendgrid Amazon SES PepiPost

And we have chosen Mailgun and Sendgrid as alternative to mandrill. With
AMazon SES also for high volumes. Sparkpost has some problems for
transactional emails but you can read all the info on the post.

Maybe it can help others. Cheers!

------
Scramblejams
My question is, of the options listed, who's got the best deliverability to
Gmail users? As a small mail server operator, that's always been my biggest
challenge.

~~~
brightball
Setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC. If everything's passing you shouldn't have any
issue delivering to Gmail unless your IP is on a blacklist somewhere.

Check that here: [http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-
check](http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check)

~~~
yesbabyyes
I want to encourage everybody to set up their own e-mail infrastructure, as
it's both fun, rewarding and useful.

However, deliverability has become really difficult. It seems during the ten
years since I last ran my own e-mail, it has become an oligopoly. I have SPF,
DKIM, DMARC and reverse DNS, my IP is not on any blacklists, and still my
e-mail ends up spam listed in both Gmail and Hotmail. It seems to be getting a
worse treatment by Hotmail but it's hard to say due to the small volume.

It is getting better but slowly, it seems.

~~~
Scramblejams
Yep. Haven't done DMARC yet, but I did everything else on the list years ago
and Gmail's always been suspicious of my server.

~~~
joering2
Where do you host? what class of IP you have?

I had some issues with Gmail but adding rDNS IPv6 and enlisting into DMARC
fixed it.

I sent about 125k per week, 80% gmail, no serious issues (I would known cause
users pay for email's content).

------
ropiku
Sparkpost is missing which "has offered to take on any departing Mandrill
users and to honor Mandrill’s pricing for those users".

~~~
pfooti
Wow, and on top of everything else, sparkpost just upgraded their free tier
from 10k/mo to 100k/mo sends. That's pretty huge, as 100k/month gets you a lot
of runway before you need to really start paying for things. Plus, the CEO
promises to keep honoring the 100k threshold for anybody who signs up under
that plan, even if they have to lower it again in the future. [0]. I'll have
to check them out.

Of course my real problem at this moment is Mandrill just plain works already,
and I'm not sure if it is worth spending engineering time shifting to a
different provider instead of just paying the premium. TBH, the biggest issue
is the feeling of Impending Doom I get from the mandrill discussion. [1] seems
to indicate that the transactional email of mandrill really just doesn't fit
in the corporate culture of mailchimp. So it's not just the change in pricing
that worries me, I'm concerned about a future where there's a lack of
innovation and support in the product itself, and I'm still locked in to
paying more for less because I don't want to spend the time moving providers.
Sunk costs and all that.

0: [https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/my-promise-to-developers-
spar...](https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/my-promise-to-developers-sparkpost-
pricing) 1: [http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-
mandrill/](http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/)

------
tyingq
A couple more options not mentioned. I suspect these were left out because
they are thought of more as online/web oriented. However, both support using
your own domain, SMTP-SSL-TLS/IMAP/ETC.

Yandex:
[https://domain.yandex.com/domains_add/](https://domain.yandex.com/domains_add/)

Zoho Mail: [https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-
pricing.html](https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html)

Edit: Appears both have limits on outbound emails/day. 500 for Yandex, 200 for
the Zoho free plan.

------
sandstrom
We've used Postmark for a while, it's worked great.

Considered moving to Mandrill for a while, to reduce the cost (they had a free
tier) but never ended up doing it. Now I'm happy we never did, since they just
axed/reshaped their service :)

(on dedicated IPs, it's worth mentioning that reputation is moving from IP to
domain, with DKIM et. al., so it's not as important as it used to be)

------
hardwaresofton
Can someone refresh me on the reasons that people don't just run their own
mail servers?

Reasons that come to mind:

\- Fear of improperly configuring your mail server, contributing to
spam/relaying spam.

\- Fear of ending up in people's spam boxes?

postfix + opendkim + smtp + tls + spamassassin + fail2ban is not too difficult
a setup to achieve...

~~~
Bjorkbat
Well, that's just it, you listed 6 dependencies required to setup a mail
server. Then there's the time and effort required to keep everything running.

When it comes to side-projects, mail servers fall into that area where they're
distant enough from the thing I'm building to warrant just outsourcing that
activity, especially with the number of transactional email providers offering
free tiers.

~~~
stingraycharles
And on top of that, you have a clear separation of responsibility where
marketing can do all the A/B testing of the different emails all by
themselves, without any effort. It's a great way to reduce bottlenecks in your
organisation by separating responsibilities.

------
Geee
This is a bit misleading. For example, in serious use you need the domain
whitelabeling on Sendgrid which requires the monthly $75 plan. Otherwise you
get the 'sent via Sendgrid' message in most email clients. I'm not sure about
those other providers.

~~~
mrideout
Are you sure that's still the case? I recently switched one of my site's
transactional mail from a free Mandrill account to a free SendGrid account,
and have not seen this issue.

I'm assuming that the issue you're referring to is triggered by the presence
of a Sender header. The Sender header is present in the emails that SendGrid
sends for the site in question.

The Return-Path and From address are at the domains that I specified
(e.dnscheck.co and dnscheck.co).

Perhaps this is something that has recently changed, or is only an issue with
certain configurations.

~~~
Geee
Hmm.. Actually I don't know if they've changed this.

------
darkclarity
It's weird how 'the cloud' has put people into the mindset where email isn't
just a complementary service that runs alongside the web server and just
works. Nope. Sign up for a third party service and if you're serious pay for
it.

~~~
verelo
This is exactly why services like RDS, Redshift, S3 and others are killing it.
People don't want to deal with the finer details of running a server of any
kind, they just want the service it provides.

Running a mail server is a lot of work, and you have a lot of responsibility
when it comes to securing it to make sure it doesn't become a source of
unauthorized spam.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> and you have a lot of responsibility when it comes to securing it to make
> sure it doesn't become a source of unauthorized spam.

Hu? How is that more difficult than making sure that your $mailservice account
doesn't become a source of spam?

~~~
verelo
Besides the obvious and easily preventable case of someone setting up an open
relay, there is plenty of risk associated associated simply with the presence
of a SMTP server. The providers out there will require you to setup DKIM, SPF
records and have a decent password associated with your account...if you're
running the box yourself, this all suddenly becomes optional.

------
daigoba66
What Amazon SES might lack in terms of fancy features, it probably makes up
for in pricing and stability. We've been using it for over four years and
haven't experienced a single problem in that time.

~~~
TomBombadildoze
Not only is it dirt cheap, it's so easy to do everything right to maintain a
good reputation. If you're using Route 53, it's one click to set up DKIM. It's
also painless (and cheap) to handle bounce notifications programmatically.

~~~
jessaustin
I wonder how many of the people who chime in with "AWS is _so_ expensive"
every time AWS is discussed, use Mailgun or one of those other really
expensive mail providers? Incidentally, have you had a problem with delivery
to e.g. gmail, because there are several _old_ articles that claim SES is
blacklisted?

------
buro9
Deliverability and trust is everything.

I don't run a huge website, but am sending ~50k transactional emails per month
and am using Mailgun for this, and with the dedicated IP (which was required
to overcome deliverability issues we had) ~it's $75 per month.

That's quite a lot of cost for the email I send.

I've actually thought about splitting my email into several buckets and using
different providers and price points depending on how much I value it.

* Password resets and nopassword login emails to go through the costliest and with the highest deliverability guarantee

* Notifications to go through some mid-tier provider that is cheap and has acceptability (maybe Amazon SES?)

That said... this is a premature optimization for me, the cost of the IP
address for the highest deliverability means that I may as well pump all my
email through that until such a time that I'm sending ~500k per month when it
will start being more cost effective to split it out.

~~~
hayksaakian
I'm curious what's your project?

~~~
buro9
Failed startup: [https://microco.sm/](https://microco.sm/)

Runs: [https://www.lfgss.com/](https://www.lfgss.com/)
[http://forum.islington.cc/](http://forum.islington.cc/)
forum.raphacycling.club
[http://forum.espruino.com/](http://forum.espruino.com/) and lots of other
forums.

Basically an alternative to Discourse, phpBB, vBulletin, etc. With some
differences to make it simpler, cleaner, mobile friendly, etc.

~~~
OmarZiara
Hello buro9 I believe you're one of the co-founders. Are you open to share
more of your plan for your startup?

I've gone through your article @medium and I really got a lot of useful tips
out of it.

We are working on a similar startup and we've gone quite a distance. Whether
we believe we crossed the hard period or not, we really need to learn from
every possible experience that can help us in our journey.

~~~
buro9
My email is in my profile.

------
pbreit
Of the no/low-cost providers, is there any consensus on "favorites" and
deliverability experiences?

~~~
vital101
I just finished the work today of migrating from Mandrill to SendGrid. I can't
speak for the other providers, but so far it has been a fairly painless
process. The client libraries for Node are similar enough between the two that
I didn't have to put a ton of thought into refactoring.

------
Feld0
If you like the idea of self-hosting your transactional email server, check
out Cuttlefish[1][2] - it's a slick open-source solution for this. We spun it
up with a dedicated IP and gradually warmed it up to ~13k emails/day over
several days. It's been smooth sailing and incurs no additional monetary
costs.

[1] [https://cuttlefish.io/](https://cuttlefish.io/)

[2]
[https://github.com/mlandauer/cuttlefish](https://github.com/mlandauer/cuttlefish)

------
mixedbit
Do any of such delivery services provide some kind of a DoS prevention for
their users or is it always up to the user to implement such prevention
mechanism? For a normal usage the prices are very attractive, but it could
only take one rogue script that automatically registers new users on a site
(which results in a registration email) for the bill to become large.

~~~
brianwawok
Can you really DoS an API protected by your password?

I would be surprised if they let a bunch of spam out before shutting down your
account, they all seem to watch your behavior pretty close.

~~~
mixedbit
What I mean is a script that for example creates a large number of users using
a form that is exposed by my web page (not protected by captcha for
usability). This would result is my backend issuing large number of API calls
to send user registration confirmation emails.

~~~
acomjean
I know postmark has a credit system, and when you run low they email you. The
rates are low enough that it would take a huge volume to cost you.

I've never thought of that attack vector before.

not allow cross site form filling (using CSRF Cross site request forgery
protection) would probably help a lot in that regard. And sleep 2. Your users
can wait a couple seconds.

------
voltagex_
I'm wondering whether Sendgrid or Mailgun are overkill for my use-case. I've
got no interest in sending email but I've got a number of devices at home that
send email via SMTP when something goes wrong (router, NAS). I'd like to write
something that takes the POST from whatever webhook and sends it to PushBullet
or similar.

------
shockzzz
Sendgrid isn't in the table below

~~~
metachris
Author here, thanks for the heads up, I've just added it!

~~~
detaro
Thanks for compiling the list!

A column for incoming API yes/no would be awesome as well.

------
brightball
Should be noted that Postmark has integrated a nice DMARC aggregator into
their process.

~~~
icebraining
True, though you can use it even without being their client, for which I'm
thankful :)

------
swanson
Something that is missing/would be nice to add: with Mandrill I could pay to
get a dedicated IP address (ensuring that I don't get impacted by other
parties on the platform). Do these other services offer that?

~~~
jay-saint
I cannot speak for the other services, but I know that Sendgrid offers this as
an option. I use them for transactional emails on a couple of Magento sites.

------
blammail
Any reason someone couldn't use the free tiers across several/many of these
services simultaneously?

Seems like for transactional email, this would work great and give you quite a
high free usage level each month.

~~~
ThePhysicist
Sure you could do that, but I think the maintenance cost would by far outweigh
any price advantage you could get.

Honestly, Mandrill's pricing with 0.2$/1000 mails puts you at 200 $ for
sending 1 million e-mails, which corresponds to maybe 1-2 hours of developer
time. Designing, building and maintaining a system that sends mail through 4-6
different APIs will likely be much more expensive.

~~~
true_religion
> which corresponds to maybe 1-2 hours of developer time

There are companies in the world that pay developers less than $100/hr -
$200/hr.

In fact, there are companies in the USA where developers get paid $20/hr.

------
fasteo
After EU privacy laws, it would be great to know where are all these providers
hosting their platforms. Haven't found much info about this.

------
wyck
There are a lot missing from your paid only section, such as exacttarget
(salesforce).

------
lormayna
Which one do you think is better for a mailing list? I want to create one

------
pastullo
mailgun seems the one to go to. Used Sendgrid for a couple of apps but not
super impressed with their dashboard and analytics. What do you think?

~~~
joering2
Wait until you get to customer support. Sendgrid is a joke. The only solution
was a chargeback that they didn't fight.

Unless you want to send your friend a birthday reminder once a year, do not
invest time (and money) into Sendgrid. Once you start growing, they will cause
you a serious headache once dropped and need to move on while you operating.

And yes their stats looks fancy but are useless. I also pointed few flaws in
their stats that make them look my spam rate much higher than it really was -
no response.

------
Nux
Is there no self-hosted version of any alternative?

~~~
pjlegato
Sure, you can install Postfix or sendmail and run your own mail server. That's
a tremendous administrative hassle, though, which is why these services sprang
up in the first place.

------
amarka
I like ReachMail - they have a free tier and easy to use API

[https://services.reachmail.net/](https://services.reachmail.net/)

------
doldge
If we're throwing names around, there's also SMTP2Go
[https://www.smtp2go.com/pricing](https://www.smtp2go.com/pricing)

With a free plan that allows you to send 1,000 emails a month.

(Disclaimer: I work for SMTP2Go).

------
paul_f
If someone could indicate which services don't require domain verification,
that could be extraordinarily helpful to some of us.

~~~
eropple
I'm a novice to transactional email; what sorts of use cases would make not
verifying a domain name an (ethically) good thing? I can't think of a case
where that wouldn't scream "spam", but I'm not sure about that. =)

~~~
mgkimsal
verification of some sort should be a requirement, but in some cases domain
verification is harder to do than a single email address verification. I don't
always have control over the DNS (which is always how I've seen domain
verification done), and getting access to it, or having someone change it for
me, might take days or weeks (or get done wrong, or whatnot). I'm dealing with
a couple of clients right now where any change request like that takes 2 weeks
- that's just standard policy. But... we can verify "foo@company.com" as a
single address immediately.

This isn't to say domain verification is a bad thing, but depending on how
it's done, it's not always the first thing you can tick off on a project.

~~~
icebraining
If you can't change the DNS records, how will you set up DKIM/SPF/DMARC? And
what's the point of validating the domain before setting those up?

~~~
mgkimsal
I was saying that sometimes you can't update any of that quickly, but you can
- via amazon ses, for example - validate a single address. Doing that will
allow you to get past at least part of a project's set up and keep moving
until you can get dns issues updated. it's not a 'never do it', but 'that can
come a bit later without being a roadblock' issue, imo.

