With so many Email service providers it is hard to pick a one that provide good email delivering service with reliability and no down time.
I recently had a task to evaluate email service providers to integrate our software with. There are few SMTP service providers, such as "SendGrid", "Amazon SES", "Mailgun". But to my surprise small smtp service provider called "smtp2go" topped my evaluation, because of their responsiveness to customer matters and simplicity.
Here are quick guide on how to setup smtp service with smtp2go provider.
Create an account
First you need to create a account with smtp2go website. They provide "Free Plan", which gives you 1000 email per month. I suggest you use that to evaluate and test the service before you actually commit to paid plan - https://www.smtp2go.com/pricing/
You need a work email to sign up with. You will not be able to sign up with gmail/outlook/yahoo email account.
Verify Sender
After signup, before sending any emails, you need to verify sending email addresses. There are two ways to do:
1. Verify Single Email address
2. Verify sending email domain
Verify Single email address is simple, once you add an email address to verify, smtp2go send a verification link to the email address specified. Then you can click on it to verify it.
However, single email address doesn't provide much protection for spamming and reliable email delivery. It is only good for sending occasional notification email from a software application.
Recommended method is verify domain. When domain is verified, you can send email from any email address on that domain.
In order to verify domain, you will need to add 3 CNAM entries to to your domain's DNS record. These settings are provided by smtp2go domain verification wizard, so it is easy to handle this. If you don't have access to your domain's DNS, you will need to contact who ever manage that (e.g. if you purchased your domain from GoDaddy, you can configure these setting by your self by logging into GoDaddy control panel).
SMTP User / API Key
Once domain is verified, you have two ways to use the SMTP relay.
First one is calling their API method and send email using their API. You will require to create API key to do this. Generating API key is easy and can be done on smtp2go control panel very easily.
Second approach is to create a SMTP user. You can add as many SMTP users as you like from control panel (if you have paid plan). You need to give a user name and password will be generated for you (you can overtype it though).
SMTP Settings
SMTP settings are same for everyone using smtp2go and clearly showed on the control panel.
Use above SMTP settings and SMTP user credentials you have created to send emails from your application.
There are very comprehensive set of support articles can be found on smtp2go site -> https://support.smtp2go.com/hc/en-gb
There are few dashboard reports which shows you the status of your email delivery. You can track which email addresses are getting bounce and rejected.
You can chat with their support team from the control panel it self. For me it was very responsive.
Overall I'm pretty satisfied with their service so far.
