Ajay Goel, Author at GMass Blog

Looking for the best email tracker Chrome extension for Gmail or Outlook?

An essential tool in any email marketer’s arsenal, email trackers help you keep track of how your email campaigns are doing. And with tons of email trackers now available as simple Chrome extensions, tracking your email campaigns is easier than ever!

But with so many of these Chrome extensions, which one do you choose?

In this article, I’ll go over the ten best Gmail and Outlook email tracker apps and cover their key features, pricing, and customer ratings to help you decide.

10 Best Email Tracking Apps (Chrome Extensions) for Gmail and Outlook:

(Click on the links to jump to a specific tool.)

1. GMass – Advanced Gmail Tracking with Campaign Dashboard
2. Mailtrack – Simple Email Tracker with limited Gmail tracking
3. Mixmax – Basic Gmail tracker with limited features
4. Gmelius – Basic Gmail tracker with limited features
5. Bananatag – Basic Gmail Tracking (Doesn’t work with corporate emails)
6. SalesHandy – Best for Small Scale Campaigns, Low Sending Limits (Gmail and Outlook)
7. Cirrus Insight – Paid Only, Works with Gmail and Outlook
8. LeadBoxer – Best for Google Analytics level reporting (Gmail and Outlook)
9. FreshSales – CRM tool with built-in email tracking features (Gmail and Outlook)
10. HubSpot Sales – A bit complex reporting dashboard (Gmail and Outlook)

Top 10 Email Tracking Chrome Extensions (Apps) for Gmail/ Outlook

Here’s a detailed look at the ten best Chrome extensions for email tracking in Gmail and Outlook:

1. GMass

If you’re a Gmail user looking for an all-round email tracker Chrome extension, then look no further than GMass.

GMass is a powerful email tracker and outreach tool used by employees from large companies like Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and Uber to skyrocket their email campaign management.

However, its outreach capabilities aren’t just used by large companies.

It’s also perfect for solopreneurs and organizations like schools and churches to send email campaigns right from the familiar Gmail interface!

GMass helps you:

Personalize your email outreach campaigns right from your Gmail inbox
Measure campaign performance with detailed reports and analytics
Schedule your emails and follow-ups easily
Automate the follow-up email process
Perform extensive mail merges in no time

Additionally, it’s super easy to get started with GMass.

Simply download the Chrome extension from the Google Chrome web store and start using it!

Ideal for: Large companies, startups, email marketers, solopreneurs, and anyone else looking to boost their email outreach.

Compatibility: GMass works with Gmail and can even connect with the Gmail mobile app for Android.

GMass Key Features

Here’s a quick look at some key features of the GMass Chrome browser extension:

A. Detailed Analytics

Since email tracking is all about knowing how well your emails are doing, GMass offers you all the email tracking metrics you’ll ever need!

When you run an email campaign, GMass generates a Campaign Report that contains metrics like:

Total Recipients
Unique Opens
Unique Clicks
Replies
Unsubscribes
Bounces
Emails not sent due to Gmail’s email sending limit
Blocks

This way, you can quickly determine how well your emails are doing and where you can improve your email performance.

B. Automatic Email Personalization

If you want your emails to really resonate with your audience, you need to personalize them.

After all, nobody likes receiving generic, templated emails, right?

Manual email personalization can take hours, but GMass lets you personalize within a few minutes!

When you’re looking to send out a bunch of emails in one go, GMass will help personalize your emails by:

Automatically detecting someone’s first name from their email address
Helping you send to personalized CC and BCC addresses
Automatically customizing blocks of text, links, and images for each recipient
Helping you add personalized attachments to your emails

Check out GMass’ complete personalization features here.

C. Simplified List Building

One of the core parts of any email campaign is an email list.

And with GMass, building one doesn’t have to take forever.

You get tons of different ways to create an email list quickly in GMass, like:

Run a search in your Gmail account and let GMass compile a list from the results.
Pick a label in the Gmail interface, and GMass will compile a list from that label.
Build an email list through email notifications.

D. Automate Follow-ups

Not everyone is going to respond to your emails all the time. Fortunately, GMass automates your email follow-ups to ensure that your emails always stay on your recipients’ radar.

You can even customize several aspects like:

The frequency of follow-ups to be sent
The total number of follow-ups each recipient receives
The message each follow-up email contains

E. Bypass Email Sending Limits

Most email clients (like Gmail and Outlook) limit the number of sent emails every day.

For example, with G Suite, the limit is 2,000 emails per day, while Gmail caps the daily limit at 500 emails.

However, these restrictions can severely limit your outreach if you’re running a massive email marketing campaign.

Don’t worry! GMass has a way around this and can connect with external SMTP providers like SendGrid and Mailjet to send a virtually unlimited number of emails every day — right from your Gmail inbox!

F. Email Scheduling

With GMass’ email scheduling feature, you choose when you want to send out a mass email campaign.

You can:

Pick from a list of pre-configured future times.
Enter a custom date or time.
Alter the time or date after scheduling an email.

GMass Pricing

Unlike most other tools, GMass has an extremely user-friendly pricing structure:

Individual:
- Standard: $25 per month or $225 annually. Includes unlimited emails, contacts, and campaigns. Plus mail merge personalization, Spam Solver, and dozens of other features.
- Premium: $35 per month or $325 annually. All Standard plan features, plus auto follow-up sequences, API access and Zapier, and triggered emails.
- Professional: $55 per month or $525 annually. All Premium features plus GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation and high-priority support.
Team:
- Professional: starts at $145 per month for a team of five – supports all features.

GMass Customer Ratings

Capterra: 4.9/5 (470+ reviews)
G2: 4.8/5 (470+ reviews)

2. Mailtrack

Mailtrack is a compact mail tracker app designed to let you know when your sent mail has been opened. It does this by adding a tracking pixel and a series of checkmarks to your email within the Gmail interface.

Mailtrack will also send you a push notification when someone has read your email and works with Gmail’s “schedule emails” feature.

Ideal for: Gmail account users who want to know who has read their emails.

Compatibility: Mailtrack works with Gmail and has an add-on for Android/iOS devices.

Mailtrack Key Features

Active email indicator to identify which emails are generating interest
Real-time desktop notification when someone opens your email
Not-opened reminders when someone hasn’t opened your email
Unread messages filter to identify unread emails quickly
Incoming tracked emails indicator alerts you when emails you receive are being tracked

Mailtrack Pricing

Mailtrack offers two pricing plans:

Free plan: offers unlimited tracking, but no other features and also includes a “sent with Mailtrack” signature to your sent mail.
Pro plan: starts at $4.99/month: The paid plan includes all the features and removes the “sent with Mailtrack” signature.

Mailtrack Customer Ratings:

Capterra: 4.5/5 (100+ reviews)
G2: 4.5/5 (50+ reviews)

3. Mixmax

Mixmax is another powerful mail tracker Chrome extension that uses a tracking pixel to identify who has opened your sent emails.

The platform comes with several other useful features that include tracking your sent mail with a tracking icon, monitoring read receipts with a push notification, calendar scheduling, automated email follow-ups, and in-email polls.

Check out my in-depth Mixmax review here.

Ideal for: Large email marketing teams, entrepreneurs, and sales reps.

Compatibility: Mixmax doesn’t work with an Outlook account. It’s strictly for your Gmail inbox and can also integrate with SalesForce, Slack, and several other platforms.

Mixmax Key Features

Detailed mail tracking and analytics that include click and download tracking
Schedule emails to send at a designated time
Custom templates to customize your emails with the addition of external images
Integrates with Salesforce and Slack to streamline your workflows
Read receipt desktop notification when emails have been received and opened

Mixmax Pricing

Mixmax offers four pricing plans:

Free plan: offers unlimited scheduling, 100 tracked emails per month, email polls, and surveys
Starter: $12/user per month – includes everything in the free plan + unlimited tracked emails
SMB: $29/user per month – includes everything in “Starter” + email sequences, shared calendars, and shared email templates
Growth: $65/user per month – includes everything in “SMB” + a Salesforce integration, round-robin calendaring, custom branding, and workflow automation

Mixmax Customer Ratings

Capterra: 4.5/5 (100+ reviews)
G2: 4.5/5 (400+ reviews)

4. Gmelius

Gmelius tracks when your emails have been opened and how many clicks the recipient made. It informs you about this via a tracking pixel and a desktop notification feature.

Ideal for: Teams who want to collaborate on work without leaving their inbox.

Compatibility: Gmelius only works with Gmail.

Gmelius Key Features

Detailed email tracking to keep a check on unread emails
Can schedule emails to help you send them at the right time
Integrated Kanban boards to convert emails into task cards
Supports workflow automation to automate repetitive tasks and save time
Built-in email templates to quickly create your emails

Gmelius Pricing

Gmelius is available in four pricing plans:

Free plan: includes unlimited shared inbox, unlimited kanban boards, collision detection, unlimited shared Gmail labels, template
Plus: $12/user per month – includes everything in the free plan + CRM integration, priority sync, unlimited email templates, unlimited meeting types, unlimited shared emails
Growth: $24/user per month – in addition to everything in “Plus,” the Growth plan comes with workflow automation, SLA rules, auto-assignments, analytics dashboard, meeting reminder
Enterprise: $49/user per month – includes everything in “Growth” + unlimited users, G Suite Admin sync, onboarding training, uptime SLA, custom user roles, dedicated CSM.

Gmelius Customer Ratings

Capterra: 4.6/5 (30+ reviews)
G2: 4.5/5 (100+ reviews)

5. Bananatag

Bananatag is an internal communication app designed to help you create company memos and newsletters and measure open and click rates.

Ideal for: Internal communication needs. It ensures that employees are opening and responding to important company communications.

Compatibility: Bananatag works with both Gmail and Outlook.

Bananatag Key Features

Built-in email templates so you can personalize your emails with external images
Email analytics to easily track your emails while highlighting the average response time
Can create custom distribution lists for various email campaigns
Powerful CRM integrations to sync your emails to most CRMs
Link tracking to let you know when the recipient opens links in your email

Bananatag Pricing

You’ll need to get in touch with Bananatag for their pricing options, but they offer three different plans:

Essential: includes email tracking and metrics, multi-user editing, email reporting, template library, and a drag-and-drop email designer
Power: includes everything in “Essential” + custom email reports, embedded pulse surveys, follow-up with non-openers, and active directory sync.
Enterprise: includes everything in “Power” + multi-domain and custom domain support, custom user permissions, branding restrictions, and segmented reporting.

Bananatag Customer Ratings

Capterra: 5/5 (5+ reviews)
G2: 4/5 (20+ reviews)

6. SalesHandy

SalesHandy is a powerful browser extension with mail tracker capabilities that can track leads and emails with real-time notifications.

Read my comprehensive SalesHandy review here.

Ideal for: Sales reps looking for a straightforward email outreach tool.

Compatibility: SalesHandy is compatible with both Gmail and Outlook.

SalesHandy Key Features

Email templates for personalized email campaigns
Link tracking via a tracking icon to see who has clicked any links in your emails
Will send you a push notification to keep track of email reads
Built-in lead tracking icon to monitor all the leads in your funnel
Can integrate with tons of third-party tools

Pros

Detailed Email Tracking
Using Mail Merge, you can personalize your email campaigns.
Automated Follow-Up Emails
Allows you to import HTML templates into Gmail and Outlook Mail

Cons

Standard plans do not include automated follow-up or advanced mail-merge features.
Standard plans have low sending limits. To send a large campaign, you’ll need the pricey Enterprise plan.
The most expensive enterprise plan allows you to send only 5,000 emails each day! As a result, if you can’t email your entire mailing list at once, your marketing efforts may be restricted.
SalesHandy does not connect with bulk mail services like SendGrid to exceed Gmail or Microsoft’s restrictions on the number of emails sent. A Gmail account has a daily sending limit of 500 emails, while a G Suite email user may send up to 2,000 messages each day. Even if you upgrade to SalesHandy’s Enterprise plan, you can only send 2,000 emails per day.

SalesHandy Pricing

SalesHandy offers four pricing plans:

Free plan: only offers unlimited tracking
Regular: $12/user per month – includes everything in the free plan + custom domains and mail merges
Plus: $27/user per month – includes all features in “Regular” + mail merges with automatic follow-ups
Enterprise: $59/user per month – includes all the features in “Plus” and high-volume campaign support

SalesHandy Customer Ratings

Capterra: 4.5/5 (50+ reviews)
G2: 4/5 (80+ reviews)

7. Cirrus Insight

Cirrus Insight helps users log emails with a click and sync their calendars to keep their lead and contact management workflows organized and structured.

Ideal for: Any company that uses Salesforce as its CRM.

Compatibility: Works with both Gmail and Outlook.

Cirrus Insight Key Features

Supports all editions of Salesforce
Can automatically sync events between Google Calendar and Salesforce
Tracking icon helps you determine if your emails have been read; location tracking shows the recipient’s geolocation
Built-in email scheduling icon to compose and send emails at specific times
Link tracking to see exactly how many clicks a link has obtained

Cirrus Insight Pricing

Cirrus Insight offers four pricing plans for your Google account (Starter, Closer, Rainmaker, and Enterprise), and three for Outlook (Starter, Closer, and Enterprise).

However, the pricing and features remain the same, irrespective of the email client you use:

Starter: $36/user per month – includes email tracking, follow-up alerts, email templates, email scheduling, Salesforce integration
Closer: $60/user per month – includes everything in “Starter” + enterprise scheduling, attachment tracking, and activities
Rainmaker: $96/user per month – includes everything in “Closer” + added campaign support
Enterprise: custom pricing – includes everything in “Rainmaker” + enterprise services like dedicated customer service managers and single sign-on access

Cirrus Insight Customer Ratings

Capterra: 4.2/5 (100+ reviews)
G2: 4/5 (1,300+ reviews)

8. LeadBoxer

LeadBoxer is a lead generation app that provides real-time information about your email recipients and your sales workflow.

Ideal for: Sales reps looking to prioritize the most promising leads.

Compatibility: LeadBoxer works with Gmail and Outlook.

LeadBoxer Key Features

Built-in email tracking to keep a check on how your emails are doing
Dedicated lead management dashboards
Can identify both companies and individuals visiting your website
Automatic lead-scoring to calculate a lead’s lead score to optimize sales workflows
Can set up an email notification for specific leads visiting your site or reading your emails

LeadBoxer Pricing

LeadBoxer doesn’t offer a free plan. Here’s a quick look at two paid plans:

Basic: $228.75 per month – includes unlimited leads and contacts, the ability to track web and email behavior, lead scoring, and real-time notifications.
Premium: $580.76 per month – includes all “Basic” features + custom integrations, cross-domain tracking, and priority support.

LeadBoxer Customer Ratings

Capterra: 4.8/5 (6+ reviews)
G2: 4/5 (2+ reviews)

9. Freshsales

Freshsales is a customer relationship management tool developed by Freshworks. With an intuitive UI and a list of powerful features, Freshsales shows its users exactly what actions a lead has taken across various platforms.

Ideal for: Companies looking for a powerful CRM tool with built-in email tracking features.

Compatibility: FreshSales can integrate with whatever email client you use, ensuring that all your emails are synced across your inbox and CRM.

Freshsales Key Features

Email templates with placeholders for bulk emails
Can import data from other CRMs to track progress and view past reports
Can create workflow automations like automatic email follow-ups to save time
Revenue analytics so that you can analyze your most profitable campaigns
Behavior-based segmentation to split leads and personalize conversations

Freshsales Pricing

Freshsales offers four different paid options:

Blossom: $12/user per month – includes lead, contact and deal management, a visual sales pipeline, two-way email sync, lead scoring, and API access
Garden: $25/user per month – includes everything in “Blossom” + 250 bulk emails per user per day, five sales sequences per user, and ten workflow automations
Estate: $49/user per month – includes everything in “Garden” + advanced lead scoring, 1,000 bulk emails per user per day, ten sales sequences per user, and 25 workflow automations
Forest: $79/user per month – includes everything in “Estate” + 5,000 bulk emails per user per day, 25 sales sequences per user, 100 workflow automations, and IP whitelisting.

Freshsales Customer Ratings

Capterra: 4.7/5 (450+ reviews)
G2: 4.5/5 (800+ reviews)

10. HubSpot Sales

HubSpot Sales is a useful platform to help you identify who opened your emails via a powerful notification system.

Ideal for: Teams looking for a versatile CRM with additional email tracking capabilities.

Compatibility: HubSpot Sales can track emails from both Gmail and Outlook.

HubSpot Sales Key Features

Predictive lead scoring to rank leads automatically based on hundreds of factors
Supports tons of workflow extensions to streamline various processes
Supports canned snippets to create a bank of reusable answers
Powerful reporting dashboard to see detailed metrics on sales performance
Unread email filter icon to quickly identify unread messages

HubSpot Sales Pricing

HubSpot Sales offers three pricing plans:

Starter: $50/month starting with two paid users – includes a deal pipeline, custom properties, quotes, a reporting dashboard, and meeting scheduling
Professional: $800/month starting with five paid users – includes everything in “Starter” + sales analytics, record customization, custom reporting, 1:1 video creation, smart send times
Enterprise: $3,200/month starting with ten paid users – includes everything in “Professional” + single sign-on access, field-level permissions, call transcripts, and predictive lead scoring.

HubSpot Sales Customer Ratings

Capterra: 4.5/5 (250+ reviews)
G2: 4.5/5 (6,200+ reviews)

Conclusion

Choosing the right email tracker Chrome extension doesn’t have to be tricky.

Just go through the tools I’ve covered here to determine what works well for you.

And while each of these extensions is great, GMass is clearly the best email tracker Chrome extension for Gmail users.

With advanced mail merge and email tracking capabilities, GMass can help take your email campaigns to the next level. So why not download its free Chrome extension today and streamline all your email sending activities?

Email marketing, cold email, and mail merge inside Gmail

Send incredible emails & automations and avoid the spam folder — all in one powerful but easy-to-learn tool

TRY GMASS FOR FREE

Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
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Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

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Looking for a detailed Amazon SES review?

Amazon SES (Amazon Simple Email Service) is part of the cloud computing platform of AWS (Amazon Web Services) and helps you send marketing emails, transactional emails, and/or notification emails to your customers’ inboxes.

In this article, I’ll cover everything you need to know about Amazon SES, including its key defining characteristics, limitations, and pricing details.

This Amazon SES Review Contains:

What’s Amazon SES?
What Are the Defining Characteristics of Amazon SES?
What Is Amazon SES Pricing?
What Are the Limitations of Amazon SES?
The Best Tool to Upgrade Amazon SES Functionality

What Is Amazon SES?

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a cloud-based email sending service that can send bulk and transactional emails to your customers. However, to send emails through Amazon SES, you first have to create an AWS account.

What Are the Defining Characteristics of Amazon SES?

Here are the five defining characteristics of Amazon SES:

1. Multiple User Types

Amazon SES has two types of users — the sandbox user and the IAM user.

Here’s a quick look at each.

A. Sandbox User

Many transactional email services have safeguards in place to prevent spammers from misusing them. New users have to get manually verified before they can start sending large volumes of emails.

Amazon SES also has this safeguard. All new users are sandbox users by default. However, you can always send a request to Amazon to remove your account from the Amazon SES sandbox through the AWS Management Console.

Although being a sandbox user won’t limit you from using any of Amazon SES’ other features, there are certain restrictions such as:

You can only send emails to and from verified email IDs and domains.
You can send a maximum of just 200 emails per 24-hour period.
You can send a maximum of one email per second.

B. IAM User

The IAM user (Identity and Access Management) gets secure access to AWS resources and can authenticate and authorize other users (for example, your employees) to use those resources.

While creating an IAM user with the AWS Console is straightforward, doing the same with AWS CLI (Command Line Interface) requires you to create an access key, which includes an access key ID (user ID) and a secret access key (password) for the user.

Some of the best features for an IAM user include:

Shared account access
Secure access to AWS resources
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) for extra security
Processing, storing, and transfer of credit card data
PCI (Payment Card Industry) and Data Security Standard (DSS) compliance

2. Email Sending Quotas

The sending quota regulates the number of emails you can send per day and the rate at which you can send them.

The maximum sending limit for sandbox users is 200 emails in 24 hours, with no more than one email per second.

If you’ve moved out of the sandbox, then Amazon SES performs an automatic quota increase depending on criteria such as:

Sending high-quality content that your recipients want to open.
Having low bounce and complaint rates.
Not sending test emails to fake email addresses.
Your daily outgoing email volume regularly approaches your daily maximum email sending limit.

However, the default email sending quota for IAM users is 10,000 emails per day after production access is granted (when you move out of the sandbox).

3. Sending Emails in Amazon SES

In Amazon SES, you can send emails to your customers through the Amazon SES Console, its SMTP interface, or the Amazon SES API.

However, unlike other email services or mailbox providers, Amazon SES checks the authentication of your outgoing mails. It even acts as a spam filter for both outgoing and incoming emails.

So here’s how you can send emails using the Amazon SES SMTP interface, Amazon SES API, and Amazon SES Console.

A. Amazon SES SMTP Interface

Amazon SES has its own SMTP interface through which you can send bulk and transactional emails. All you need is an Amazon SES SMTP username and password to use it.

What is SMTP?

SMTP, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, is an email communication protocol used to send outgoing mails. It uses an SMTP server to deliver the mails.

Most SMTP providers connect you to multiple SMTP servers through which you can send bulk emails that exceed the sending restrictions placed by regular email clients like Gmail and Outlook. For example, Gmail has a 500 email/day maximum for regular users.

However, Amazon SES’s SMTP server is split into multiple AWS Regions across the world. This way, your emails reach customers through the AWS Region you connect to while setting up the SMTP service.

So if you want to send emails to your customer base spread across the US, Canada, and Europe, you’ll have to generate separate SMTP credentials for each of these AWS Regions.

Check out my ultimate guide to SMTP for more information on how SMTP servers work.

How Do You Get Your Amazon SES SMTP Credentials?

Select SMTP Settings from the navigation pane.

Select Create My SMTP Credentials from the content pane.

Enter a new SMTP username or use the default value in Create User for SMTP and click Create.

To view your newly created SMTP Credentials, click on Show User SMTP Credentials.

Make sure to copy the SMTP Credentials or download it because you won’t be able to view it later.

Close the window, and it’s done!

B. Amazon SES API

Before going into the Amazon SES API, let’s first cover what an email API is.

What Is an Email API?

An email API offers access to email service functionalities through your website or app.

Mostly used for notification and transaction emails, it sends notifications to you and your customers instantly based on website or app triggers.

In Amazon SES, you can configure the email yourself and make API connections via:

HTTPS requests: You have to authenticate, sign in, and construct your requests manually.
AWS SDK (Software Development Kit): It automatically manages your authentication, sign in, retry logic, and error handling, etc.
AWS CLI (Command Line Interface): This is a collective tool for effective management and automation of AWS services, including emails.

However, no matter how you access the Amazon SES API, you can send emails in two ways — depending on the level of control you want in your email configuration:

Formatted: Amazon SES configures and formats the email message for you. All you have to do is enter the “From,” “To,” subject line, and message body.
Raw: Amazon SES lets you manually compose and send email messages by mentioning email headers and MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) types. This helps you send customized emails to your customers.

Regardless of whether you’re using the Amazon SES SMTP Interface or the API to send emails, you have to connect to either SMTP or API endpoints.

An endpoint is an entry point URL for an AWS web service that, when connected to a particular AWS Region, helps you send emails to your customers in that region.

C. Amazon SES Console

The Amazon SES Console is probably the easiest way to send an email.

However, you would have to enter all email information manually.

That’s why the Console is used primarily to send test emails or monitor outgoing email activity while the Amazon SES SMTP interface or API is used to send bulk/transactional emails.

Here’s a quick look at how you can send test emails via Amazon SES Console:

After signing in to AWS, open the Amazon SES Console.
Click on Email Addresses under Identity Management to view the list of verified email addresses.
Select the verified emails to which you want to send the test email.
Click on Send Test Email.
Select the Email Format — Formatted or Raw.
Fill out the required fields.
Click Send Test Email.
Log in to the email client where you’ve sent the test email to verify it.

4. Detailed Email Performance Analysis

When you send emails, Amazon SES automatically collects all data regarding email deliverability, blocked/rejected messages, bounce rates, and complaints, etc., in the SES Console.

Additionally, its Deliverability Dashboard service offers reputation monitoring for up to five domains, along with 25 predictive email placement tests.

The SES Dashboard also helps you check the number of emails that have reached the inbox and spam folders, as well as failed email deliveries.

You can even connect it to Amazon’s CloudWatch (the Amazon data management service) to get a quick overview of the total open, click, bounce, and complaint rates.

5. Amazon SES Integrations

Amazon SES can be easily integrated with other AWS services to improve email deliverability and provide more control over your email campaigns.

For example, you can integrate applications running on Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) with AWS SES and use AWS SDK (Software Development Kit) to send emails. This lets you send around 62,000 emails every month without any additional charges.

What’s more…

You can use AWS Elastic Beanstalk (Amazon’s application deployment service) and develop email-enabled programs that use Amazon SES to send newsletters to your customers.

You can even configure Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) to get email deliverability, complaints, and bounce notifications, etc.

Other than AWS, Amazon SES can be easily integrated with multiple different platforms and web applications, such as:

Gmail
Stripe
Mailchimp
Sendy
WordPress

For example, by integrating Amazon SES with the WP Mail SMTP Plugin, you can easily send WordPress emails via SES without a hassle and get all the reports in the dashboard.

What Is the Amazon SES Pricing?

Unlike other external email service providers, Amazon SES offers a pay-as-you-go service based on the email volumes sent and received.

Here’s a quick overview of Amazon SES pricing based on sending and receiving emails:

1. Sending Emails

Amazon SES has a Free Usage Tier that lets you send the first 62,000 emails for free when integrating Amazon SES with an application running on Amazon EC2.

In Amazon EC2, users can rent virtual servers to run their applications.

So if you connect any of your email applications that are already running on EC2, with Amazon SES, you get to send up to 62,000 free emails from the platform.

However, after the 62,000 email sending limit, you’ll have to pay $0.10 for every 1,000 outgoing emails.

The Free Tier doesn’t have any particular tenure and is free forever.

However, you’ll have to pay for:

Outgoing mail data ($0.12 per GB).
Incoming mail chunks ($0.09 for every 1,000 incoming mail chunks, each chunk counted as 256KB).
Data transfer fees with other AWS services.

2. Receiving Emails

In the case of receiving emails, the first 1,000 emails you receive aren’t charged. However, you have to pay $0.10 for every 1,000 emails after you’ve exhausted your initial quota.

3. Additional Pricing Features

Here are the pricing details for SES’ additional services:

A. Dedicated IP

Amazon SES allows you to lease a dedicated IP address to send emails to your customers. Each dedicated IP costs $24.95 per month, and you can lease as many dedicated IPs as you want.

B. Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP)

This optional service of Amazon SES allows you to use your own IP addresses to send emails via its app. The monthly charge is $24.95 for each IP you use.

C. Deliverability Dashboard

Amazon SES’ Deliverability Dashboard has a monthly price of $1,250. This charge covers sender reputation monitoring for five domains and 25 predictive email placement tests.

If you want to monitor more than five domains, you’ll have to pay $25 monthly for each additional domain.

What Are the Limitations of Amazon SES?

While Amazon SES may have a ton of helpful email marketing features, it’s not perfect.

Here are two limitations of Amazon SES.

1. Extremely Technical

If there’s one thing you’ve noticed from this review (and the numerous terms I’ve had to explain), it’s that Amazon SES is super-technical.

To put it simply, if you don’t have a developer’s knowledge and skill level, configuring and setting up Amazon SES can be really difficult.

Whether you are using its SMTP Interface or API, or even going deeper into configuring specific features like DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), the process is highly complicated and technical.

2. Limited SMTP Functionality

While Amazon SES offers a powerful SMTP server, it might not be as powerful as most other dedicated SMTP providers.

Why?

Unlike other SMTP providers that allow you to send an unlimited number of emails, Amazon SES still restricts the number of daily emails you can send.

Sure, it’s more than what Gmail can offer you, but for large email marketing campaigns that involve more than 10,000 emails a day, Amazon SES might not be able to help you.

Additionally, because of separate AWS regions, you’ll need different SMTP credentials for customer bases that are geographically dispersed. This limits your reach when you’re trying to send a consolidated, global email campaign.

3. Your Emails Are Under Strict Supervision

Amazon SES takes serious note of your email deliverability.

If your email quality dips, you may receive an “email sending pause,” and your SES account will be under review.

For example, if your bounce rate exceeds 5% and your complaint rate goes above 0.1%, your account could go under review.

If your bounce rate is above 10% and your complaint rate over 0.5%, your email sending capabilities will be paused automatically. It won’t resume until the issue causing these levels is resolved.

While this is done as a security and quality measure on AWS’s side, it can become rather inconvenient for a user at times.

The Best Tool to Enhance Amazon SES Functionality: GMass

Sure, Amazon SES has a great SMTP Interface that allows you to use dedicated IPs and your own IP address. But it comes with a lot of limitations as well.

So if you want to dodge its multiple restrictions and enhance your email marketing experience, just connect its SMTP server to GMass.

What Is GMass?

GMass is a powerful email marketing and marketing automation platform. Its robust mail merge features have made it a popular email tool used by employees from giants like Google, Uber, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

However, GMass isn’t only for large companies!

Anyone, from solopreneurs to churches and small businesses, can use GMass to send emails to a target audience.

GMass helps you:

Send personalized bulk emails.
Access real-time campaign engagement reports.
Schedule emails or email campaigns in advance.
Create automated follow-up workflows.
Use custom tracking domains for better deliverability.

Additionally, setting up GMass is no big deal!

All you have to do is download the Chrome extension and sign up with your Gmail account.

How Does GMass Add Functionality to Amazon SES?

A simple yet powerful email marketing app, GMass functions within Gmail’s user interface.

Since you probably already use Gmail, you won’t have to waste time familiarizing yourself with a new interface!

To connect Amazon SES with GMass, all you have to do is this:

Set up a GMass account.
Set up an AWS account and Amazon SES SMTP interface.
Modify the SMTP settings on the GMass account, and
Link your GMass account with Amazon SES SMTP Interface.

Once that’s done, you can use the Gmail editor to compose bulk emails, use the Gmail inbox to manage campaigns, and view your campaign analytics in GMass’ Campaign Reports.

What else?

While Amazon SES doesn’t have a mobile app, you can always connect the GMass add-on with your Gmail Android app.

This gives you the flexibility of running your email campaigns from your smartphone because once they’re connected, all GMass features can be used from your phone.

In a nutshell, by integrating GMass and Amazon SES, your email marketing benefits grow threefold as you get:

Gmail’s user-friendly interface
Amazon SES’s email sending capabilities
GMass’ advanced marketing features

GMass minimizes the technical complications that Amazon SES entails by keeping all your email marketing activities within one platform.

GMass Pricing

GMass has a simple and highly cost-effective pricing structure that includes:

Individual:
- Standard: $25 per month or $225 annually. Includes unlimited emails, contacts, and campaigns. Plus mail merge personalization, Spam Solver, and dozens of other features.
- Premium: $35 per month or $325 annually. All Standard plan features, plus auto follow-up sequences, API access and Zapier, and triggered emails.
- Professional: $55 per month or $525 annually. All Premium features plus GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation and high-priority support.
Team:
- Professional: starts at $145 per month for a team of five – supports all features.

Wrapping Up

Amazon SES is a powerful app for sending emails and checking your email performance and deliverability.

However, it isn’t perfect.

Apart from a very complicated set-up process, it pauses your account’s ability to send emails if the complaint rate is higher than 0.5%.

On the flip side, with GMass, you can send tons of emails from the Gmail interface itself. It’s easy to configure and doesn’t require much to optimize your email marketing.

Along with tons of other email marketing features, integrations, and comfortable pricing, GMass even offers a free plan.

So what are you waiting for?

Integrate your Amazon SES account with GMass today!

And if Amazon SES isn’t the right software for you, check out my reviews of other popular SMTP service providers:

Ready to send better emails and save a ton of time?

GMass is the only tool for marketing emails, cold emails, and mail merge — all inside Gmail. Tons of power but easy to learn and use.

TRY GMASS FOR FREE

Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
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Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

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Last week, our Zendesk subdomain, gmass.zendesk.com, was flagged by the Google Safe Browsing program. This had the unfortunate effect of sending all Zendesk ticket notification emails to our customers and admins to the dreaded Gmail Spam folder. Ugh. What a mess. In case this happens to you, this is how you can fix it.

What is a Zendesk subdomain?

When you sign up for Zendesk as your support system, you’re assigned a subdomain that’s usually in the format of [yourcompany].zendesk.com. In our case, it’s gmass.zendesk.com. The subdomain makes appearances in all email notifications to/from requesters and agents, and is also the location to your online help portal if you have one hosted by Zendesk.

In our case, we provide support only via the email channel. But, if a domain is flagged by the Google Safe Browsing program, then it is also flagged by Gmail.

Our research has shown that emails containing domains listed by the Google Safe Browsing program go straight to Spam in Gmail.

Why did it get blacklisted?

In the case of gmass.zendesk.com, Google Safe Browsing did offer us reasons for the listing via the Google Search Console. Let’s examine those.

Google points out two “harmful download” links and one “deceptive page.” The harmful downloads are legitimately harmful — they are attachments that were uploaded as part of a Zendesk ticket by a malicious “requester.” The “deceptive page” was not actually deceptive at all. It was a screenshot of the Google sign-in screen where a legitimate user showed that he was having trouble logging into his Google account. So that was just an error on Google’s part.

More importantly, how did Google’s index grab these URLs in the first place? We don’t make them public anywhere. My working theory is that either:

The malicious user that created the ticket then posted the URLs to the attachments somewhere public, where they were indexed.
Google uses URLs in Gmail as a source of indexing.

Naturally, the solution that comes to mind is to disable those URLs. Make them return a 404. Remove the offending attachments. That, however, is easier said than done, because Zendesk does not make it easy.

Did Zendesk Support help me? Of course not.

There’s an obvious irony baked inside that question. Zendesk is a support platform, and therefore one might expect them to provide stellar support themselves. But that’s not always the case. GMass is an email automation and outreach platform, and our own outreach isn’t much to speak of (our technology though is the world’s best). Occasionally a dentist has a bad tooth.

When I first reported the issue, Zendesk pointed me to their generic deliverability article. When that obviously didn’t work, they correctly guided me to the article on adding the sub-domain to Google Search Console, and it was then that I realized the problem. Zendesk didn’t provide any help beyond that, despite their claims that they monitor the Safe Browsing list for their customer’s domains. They pointed me to articles on removing attachments (which did nothing for me) and gave me incorrect information on why sub-domains still appear in emails even after setting a host mapping.

I was on my own, but that’s okay, because I’m a pretty smart guy.

The top 3 most incorrect and unhelpful things Zendesk Support agents told me:

3. “So I just heard back from the team and was able to confirm that as far as the email behavior is concerned, one of our experts confirmed that the Gmail G-To Actions were hiding a link to the ticket in the body of the email which would be out of our control. This may need to be addressed by Google in order to let these kinds of emails pass through their server without being tagged as spam.”

Gmail’s G-To actions had nothing to do with the issue at hand, and there is no link in the body of the email, which is out of Zendesk’s control. The agent is speaking as if I can just call up Google and have them “address” the issue.

2. “The emails with the email domain gmass.zendesk.com as the sender is going to your Suspended folder, and you want to prevent this — right?”

After clearly explaining that the issue was that emails are going to the Gmail Spam folder, the agent confuses this with Zendesk’s own “Suspended” folder.

1. “I got a response from our internal team. As per them, using an external email with SPF/DKIM should remove any issue regarding that otherwise, following the information in this article will help in your case: Users see red warning screens when trying to access Zendesk or ticket attachments.”

SPF was already set up, and DKIM is completely non-applicable to the situation at hand.

I’ve tweeted before about the inadequacy of most large SaaS providers’ support teams:

I’ve noticed a drastic deterioration in the support provided by major SaaS companies like @SendGrid and @Zendesk in the last few months.

It’s a shit show, much like the presidential debates tonight.

— Ajay Goel (@PartTimeSnob) September 30, 2020

Of course, there are exceptions. I’ve received excellent support from Dropbox and LiveChat in the past. The biggest determinant of whether you get good or bad support from a SaaS platform is based on the randomness of the support agent to which your issue is assigned. How well does your support agent know the SaaS platform? The 80/20 rule likely applies to support agents: 20% of the support agents are responsible for 80% of successful issue resolutions.

Can’t you just remove the subdomain from email notifications?

That would be nice.

Zendesk provides an option to mask the sub-domain and brand the entire email support channel around your own domain. For example, I can set up support.gmass.co as a CNAME alias of gmass.zendesk.com if I want full control of branding. Except there are a few flaws in this feature.

Even though you brand Zendesk support around your own domain, it only affects people that send NEW ticket requests to the branded email address. If a user sends an email to the OLD address, or an agent responds to an older ticket before the change, the notification generated to the user will still contain the old zendesk.com domain.
Even on new tickets, while only the branded domain is visible, Zendesk, for some reason that makes no sense, still includes the domain buried in the HTML of the email notification, which is enough to trigger the Gmail Spam filter. Here’s that HTML code:

 

<span style=3D"color:#FFFFFF" aria-hidden=3D"true">[M7OQED-Z369]</span><div itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/EmailMessage" style="display:none"> <div itemprop="action" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ViewAction"> 
<link itemprop="url" href="https://gmass.zendesk.com/hc/requests/38982" /> <meta itemprop="name" content="View ticket"> </div></div>

I asked a support rep why the subdomain appears in the HTML code of the email when the whole point of the branded host feature is to eliminate it. I was told that “setting up SPF and DKIM” will fix it. Now, I never tried this, but I just don’t believe it can be true. Why? Because SPF and DKIM have nothing to do with a domain that’s buried within the HTML of the message body.

So how do you solve this?

You have two choices:

Change your Zendesk subdomain altogether or
Get your domain off the blacklist.

Changing your Zendesk subdomain is a complicated process that will be messy and cause problems. So I could have changed mine from gmass.zendesk.com to say, gmss.zendesk.com (yes, I left out the “a”). For new ticket requesters who now email [email protected], all would have been good, and the emails would have stayed out of Spam folders. However, the following would also happen:

Anyone who responds to an old ticket would still end up emailing the old sub-domain, and that would then bounce. Zendesk doesn’t allow both old and new subdomains to work simultaneously.
You have to change your support address throughout your website and literature from company-name@old-zendesk-domain to company-name@new-zendesk-domain.
There’s still a chance that Google will locate the offensive content on the new sub-domain and end up listing that as well.

After asking Google over and over again to reconsider the Safe Browsing listing, and getting repeatedly rejected without reason, I finally discovered that the “sample” URLs Google provided weren’t the only URLs that Google didn’t like. I finally found the setting that let me turn anonymous access to Zendesk attachments off. It’s here, and documented by Zendesk here.

It’s frustrating, though, that neither the three Zendesk support reps I talked to nor the person that handles their Twitter account could point this out to me as the culprit. There’s a larger issue here that I’ve been vocal about recently, that well known: billion-dollar SaaS companies suck at support. Not the kind of support where the customer is asking, “How do I do this?” but the kind of support where the situation is, “Your system is failing me — how do I solve this huge problem now that I’ve come to rely fully on your software?”

So finally, after doing this, and after re-requesting a review, 24 hours later, I received this:

and this:

If you have an astute eye, you might notice the irony of Google’s email telling me that gmass.zendesk.com has been cleared while also telling me that the message is dangerous, probably for containing gmass.zendesk.com. But I’ll just chock that up to their systems not being in sync with each other.

Removing attachments from your Zendesk tickets

Zendesk provides a couple of ways to remove attachments from Zendesk tickets, but only if you know what ticket they belong to in the first place. Note the structure of the offending URLs. There’s a randomized token value, and you can see the URL encoded version of the attachment name. Zendesk allows you to search for tickets that have an attachment and tickets that have a particular attachment.

However, the list of URLs that Google shows you are only SAMPLE URLs. They aren’t a full list of offending URLs. So, if I were to remove just these three URLs and request a review, my request would be ignored. In fact, that’s what happened. I requested a review, didn’t hear back, requested a review again, didn’t hear back, did it again, didn’t hear back, and finally, I decided to cull my entire gmass.zendesk.com site for potential issues.

I searched for ALL files with an .arj extension since no user should ever send us .arj files. I also searched for all .doc files and deleted those tickets. Deleting those tickets also had the effect of disabling the corresponding attachment URLs.

Really, though, none of that was necessary.

The Actual Solution

The only thing that was necessary to resolve this, and the one thing that Zendesk support just couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me, was that I simply had to turn off anonymous attachment viewing here.

That way, when the Google crawler goes to a URL, the attachment won’t be retrieved. Instead, the crawler will be redirected to the Zendesk login page, and that’s good enough for Google to consider the problem resolved. If Google can’t crawl it, it doesn’t exist.

Zendesk resources if this happens to you

If the problem is with Google Safe Browsing, then you have to add your Zendesk subdomain to Google Search Console to determine any issues.

If the issue is like mine, where offensive attachments are the cause of blacklisting, this is how to remove attachments from tickets. Of course, you may need to use more aggressive methods, like locking down attachments altogether or deleting all tickets containing an attachment of a particular type.

Here, Zendesk discussed how they monitor issues like domain blacklistings for you and address the matter for you, but clearly, this isn’t true, at least it wasn’t in my case.

If you’ve tried everything and you can’t clear your name (or domain, as the case is here), the nuclear option is to change your Zendesk subdomain, or just leave Zendesk altogether. That might be “extra” nuclear, though. This is how you change your Zendesk subdomain. Pay attention because there are consequences.

One more thing…

Zendesk makes it incredibly difficult to NOTIFY your ticket requesters of this issue. Ideally, I want to notify the requester of any ticket that’s been updated since the blacklisting started. I can search in Zendesk:

updated<2020-09-25

But then, I can’t export those tickets to get the email addresses of those requesters. Ugh, ugh, ugh. First, only users on the Support Professional or Enterprise plans can export at all. Secondly, even if you can export, you’re limited to 100 tickets.

What I was able to do, however, was use GMass’s own build-email-list feature to search the Gmail Label where I store Zendesk notifications. From that, I generated a list of all ticket requesters during a specific date range.

Want more in-depth tales of blacklisting incidents?

This isn’t my first encounter with the Google Safe Browsing program. Also, read about my experience with Spamhaus. It’s a doozy.

See why GMass has 300k+ users and 7,500+ 5-star reviews

Email marketing. Cold email. Mail merge. Avoid the spam folder. Easy to learn and use. All inside Gmail.

TRY GMASS FOR FREE

Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

Looking for a comprehensive Inboxroad review?

Inboxroad is an SMTP relay service that offers features like email APIs, detailed analytics, and a dedicated IP to improve your email delivery.

But is it the right software for you?

In this Inboxroad review, I’ll highlight its key features, limitations, and pricing details to help you decide. I’ll also recommend the best way to add more functionality to Inboxroad.

This Inboxroad Review Contains:

(Click on a link to jump to a specific section.)

What Is Inboxroad?
What Are the Key Features of Inboxroad?
Inboxroad Pricing
What Are the Limitations of Inboxroad?
The Best Way to Enhance Inboxroad’s Functionality

Let’s jump right into it.

What Is Inboxroad?

Inboxroad is an email marketing and automation platform based in Amsterdam. With a powerful SMTP service, a dedicated IP address, and personalized support, it helps businesses of all sizes send bulk emails and transactional emails efficiently.

Emails with Inboxroad are sent via it’s SMTP relay service or its email API. And once sent, you’ll get tons of email deliverability metrics to monitor your emails in real-time.

Confused about what an SMTP service and email API is?

Let’s have a quick look at each:

What Is SMTP?

(You can skip these sections if you’d like, and head directly to the tool’s key features.)

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is an email protocol that helps you send outgoing emails.

Why do you need it?

If you’re using an email client, like Gmail, for sending any email (including promotional emails or transactional emails), there’s a limit to the number of emails you can send.

For a regular Gmail account, that limit is 500 emails/day, and with a G Suite account, you can send up to 2,000 emails over 24 hours.

However, if you’re an email marketer, you’ll probably need to send more than 2,000 emails every day, and such email sending limits can severely restrict your reach.

This is where an SMTP relay service comes handy.

An SMTP service provider, like Inboxroad, allows you to bypass the sending limit of your email service provider — enabling you to send unlimited emails with ease!

For more information regarding the SMTP protocol, read my ultimate guide to SMTP.

What Is an Email API?

An email API allows you to access an email marketing tool’s features and functionalities right from your website or mobile app.

For example, if you own an eCommerce website, an email API can be set up to send you notifications when someone signs up, makes a purchase, or unsubscribes from your newsletters.

With Inboxroad, email APIs can be used to obtain this data in real-time. This way, you can analyze campaign engagement, helping your tailor future campaigns accordingly.

What Are the Key Features of Inboxroad?

In this Inboxroad review, I’ll highlight the four key features of Inboxroad:

1. SMTP Service

When you’re running a campaign, it’s safe to assume that you’ll have thousands of emails to send to a large number of subscribers.

To stay ahead of the competition and maintain excellent customer relationships, just sticking to an email client, like Gmail, isn’t practical.

Remember those sending limits?

However, using the Inboxroad SMTP service, you can bypass any sending limits imposed by your email client. Inboxroad also tries to improve your emails’ inbox placement by helping them reach the recipient’s inbox — not the spam folder.

To support the SMTP relay platform, Inboxroad uses a custom SMTP server that also natively connects to front-ends like MailWizz, Mautic, Ongage, and Interspire.

2. Email API

Inboxroad’s email API feature can be used in two ways:

First, you can use the email API feature to send emails directly from your website or mobile app.
Second, you can program a set of Inboxroad email APIs to process email deliverability metrics, like hard/soft bounces, complaints, and expired messages.

This way, the email APIs help you keep your customers and leads informed while also giving you detailed insights into what you can improve.

3. Email Analytics

Whenever you send promotional emails — or any other campaign email — you probably want to know how they’re performing, right?

You’ll need answers to questions like:

What’s the email delivery rate in real-time?
Which is our best-performing ISP?
Where do we face the most bounces?

Inboxroad helps you answer these questions.

With its dashboard, you can find relevant data on:

Deliveries and bounces
ISPs sorted by delivery volume
List of ISP bounces

Based on these analytics, you can refine your email marketing strategy and run more effective email campaigns.

Ajay’s Email Tip

One effective way to boost your engagement rates is simply to start and end your emails appropriately. Read my detailed guide on how to start and end emails the right way.

4. Weekly Advice

Customers who opt for the Premium ($349/month for 1,000,000 emails) and Custom plans (custom pricing for 1,000,000+ emails) get personalized deliverability advice offered by a delivery expert on a weekly basis.

The delivery expert offers practical and actionable advice on how to run your campaigns better, based on previous deliverability metrics. This could be particularly useful if you’re new to email marketing.

Additionally, “custom plan” customers get the added advantage of having a personal account manager from a dedicated team to oversee campaign performance.

Inboxroad Pricing

Inboxroad offers four plans to choose from based on your monthly email volume requirements.

However, Inboxroad doesn’t offer a free trial.

Here’s a quick look at Inboxroad’s pricing model:

Basic plan at $69/month: support for 100,000 emails per month + SMTP relay and APIs + DNS setup guide + dedicated IP + dashboard + email support.
Pro plan at $139/month: support for 250,000 emails per month + all features of Basic plan + Inboxroad monitoring.
Premium plan at $299/month: support for 1,000,000 emails per month + all features of Pro plan + personal deliverability advice.
Custom plan (request a quote): support for 1,000,000+ emails per month + all features of Premium plan + personal deliverability advice.

What Are the Limitations of Inboxroad?

While Inboxroad can help you improve email deliverability, it has some limitations.

In this Inboxroad review, I’ll cover two major drawbacks of the tool:

1. Very Limited Email Marketing Features

Sure, Inboxroad is a good SMTP provider that also gives you advice on how to improve your deliverability.

Unfortunately, when you look at the big picture, you’ll be missing out on crucial email marketing features if you use it as a standalone SMTP service provider.

Inboxroad doesn’t support essential email marketing features, like:

Email personalization: to generate personalized email campaigns at scale, adjusting name, subject line, and media, etc.
List builder: to easily segment your mailing list into various categories based on location and interests, etc.
Mobile support: a mobile app for both Android and iOS devices to manage campaigns on the go
Automated follow-ups: to send automated follow-up emails after sent messages, cart abandonment, and trip updates, etc.

This is a significant reason why using this SMTP provider as your only solution for all your marketing needs isn’t a good idea.

2. Expensive Pricing

Compared to other SMTP providers like SendGrid, Inboxroad is relatively expensive.

The base plan that offers limited features and yet costs $69/month — and remember, this doesn’t include the personalized advice that Inboxroad is known for providing.

For a small business, using an SMTP relay service at such rates can be quite costly.

The Best Way to Enhance Inboxroad: GMass

Inboxroad is a decent email marketing service and SMTP service provider, but it lacks essential marketing features beyond sending emails to massive mailing lists.

Luckily, you can connect it with an email marketing platform like GMass to skyrocket your email campaigns.

What’s GMass?

GMass is your ultimate solution for email marketing and marketing automation requirements.

Its powerful outreach features and ease of use has made it a popular mail-merge tool used by employees of social media giants like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and large companies such as Google and Uber.

However, GMass isn’t meant solely for tech giants.

It’s an equally ideal marketing tool for a small business, church, or solopreneur.

And the best part?

GMass works within the Gmail interface itself.

Just download the Chrome extension and sign up with your Gmail account to start using GMass. It’s that simple!

How Does GMass Enhance Inboxroad?

It’s clear that when it comes to email marketing, Inboxroad isn’t a sufficient solution for your typical email marketer.

Here’s how GMass can help you. In a couple of simple steps, you can link Inboxroad with GMass to send unlimited outgoing emails from Gmail.

1. Powerful Email Marketing and Automation Features

In terms of email marketing features, GMass is an excellent addition to Inboxroad.

With GMass, you can:

Send personalized promotional emails with ease.
Set up automated workflows for follow-up emails.
Access advanced reporting and analytics within Gmail.
Create meaningful subscriber lists and segmentations.
Use the custom tracking domain feature.
Integrate with Google Sheets, Zapier, and Hubspot.
Get mobile support as an add-on with the Gmail mobile app.

And all these features work within the comfort of your Gmail inbox interface. This makes it all the more familiar, intuitive, and useful.

In addition to these, GMass also offers several other features to help maximize your outreach and conversions. Check them out here.

This way, you won’t need to worry about whatever you’re missing out with Inboxroad. Connect it with GMass, and have all the functionality you need!

2. Affordable Pricing

Inboxroad isn’t cheap, so paying for another tool to add some functionality to it doesn’t make sense, right?

Luckily, GMass is no ordinary tool.

With GMass, you can address all your marketing campaign for next to nothing!

GMass’ pricing model offers three plans:

Individual:
- Standard: $25 per month or $225 annually. Includes unlimited emails, contacts, and campaigns. Plus mail merge personalization, Spam Solver, and dozens of other features.
- Premium: $35 per month or $325 annually. All Standard plan features, plus auto follow-up sequences, API access and Zapier, and triggered emails.
- Professional: $55 per month or $525 annually. All Premium features plus GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation and high-priority support.
Team:
- Professional: starts at $145 per month for a team of five – supports all features.

3. Uses the Gmail Interface

GMass is one of the few Gmail-based outreach tools that can be set up with an SMTP relay service like Inboxroad.

Once you link GMass and Inboxroad accounts, you can use the SMTP server capabilities of Inboxroad within the Gmail interface to send unlimited emails.

This way, as a marketer, you can focus your time and energy on analyzing marketing campaign performances, testing strategies, and running more effective campaigns — right from Gmail. No more complicated user interfaces!

How to Connect GMass with Inboxroad

Here’s how to link Inboxroad with GMass to send unlimited outgoing emails on Gmail:

Sign up with Inboxroad.
Sign up with GMass.
Link your GMass account to Inboxroad’s SMTP relay service by changing the SMTP settings on the GMass account.

For more details on linking the SMTP service with GMass, read my guide to setting up Gmail SMTP settings.

Conclusion

While Inboxroad is a powerful SMTP relay service, it also has some limitations when it comes to email marketing.

So if you’re looking for a comprehensive email marketing tool, Inboxroad isn’t going to solve your problems… by itself.

Fortunately, there’s a perfect way to enhance the functionalities of Inboxroad — just use GMass, your ideal email marketing and marketing automation platform.

With a host of advanced email marketing features, a user-friendly interface, and proactive customer support, GMass helps you make the best of Inboxroad.

And in case you wanted to check out some Inboxroad alternatives, read my reviews on:

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

Interested in using Postmark for your email marketing and SMTP needs?

Postmark is an SMTP service provider that focuses on improving your deliverability rates. With an email API, detailed analytics, pre-made templates, and much more, Postmark can appeal to businesses of all sizes.

But can its features cater to all your needs?

This Postmark review covers everything you need to know about this email service. I’ll talk about its key features, limitations, and pricing details to help you make an informed decision.

This Postmark Review Contains:

(Click on a link below to jump to a specific section.)

What Is Postmark?
What Are the Key Features of Postmark?
What Are the Major Limitations of Postmark?
Postmark Pricing
The Best Way to Improve Postmark

Let’s dive into the review.

What Is Postmark?

Postmark is a SaaS email service provider that will help you deliver your application emails. It offers SMTP services, an email API, and other transactional email services to businesses of all sizes.

Confused about what SMTP and email API mean?

I’ll explain what they are and how these product details are relevant in the context of email marketing.

What Is SMTP?

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or SMTP is a communication protocol that enables you to send outgoing emails.

Why does this matter?

When using an email client like Gmail, for example, there’s a limit on the number of emails that you’re allowed to send in a day. It’s 500 emails/day for a regular Gmail account, and for a G Suite account, it’s 2,000 emails/day.

But as an email marketer, you might want to send more than 2,000 emails on any given day, and such sending limits restrict your outreach.

This is where a third-party SMTP relay service like Postmark helps you. It lets you bypass any sending limits placed by the email client or ISP (Internet Service Provider). You can then send unlimited promotional emails every day!

To know more about SMTP, read my ultimate guide here.

What Is an Email API?

An email API is a type of Application Programming Interface (API) used by a website or an app to access the functionalities of an email marketing platform.

eCommerce websites generally use email APIs to send you notifications about shipping details, password resets, and purchase summaries, etc. If you run a commercial site, this means you won’t have to compose an email manually every time someone orders something from your store — the email API does it for you!

What Are the Key Features of Postmark?

In this Postmark review, I’ll highlight the tool’s five key features:

1. Transactional Mail Service

Postmark helps you set up transactional mail systems for your business with ease.

What are transactional emails?

Transactional emails are personalized, unique messages sent from a business to its customer. Password resets, transaction evidence, welcome emails, and shipping details are all examples of transactional emails.

Some types of transactional emails you can send using Postmark are:

Account detail changes or password reset emails
Purchase confirmation and receipt logs
Shipping and delivery information
Comment notifications and trial expiration emails

As transactional emails are one of the most important types of application emails, the Postmark service tries to maintain competitive deliverability rates for them.

Keeping transactional emails a priority, Postmark helps improve your sender reputation and prevent such emails from being marked as spam.

2. Email Delivery Service

Unlike newsletters and marketing emails, your transactional emails should reach your customers instantly.

Why?

A transactional mail includes vital details that customers expect to receive as soon as the triggering event occurs. Delays in this process can frustrate and confuse customers, costing your business in the long run.

To help you keep up with these expectations, Postmark tries to ensure that your emails find their way into clients’ inboxes instead of spam folders and that they’re delivered as fast as possible.

For example, websites running on WordPress can use plugins like the Postmark for WordPress plugin to generate and send transactional emails directly from the website. This avoids any delay that can result from manually running a separate computer software or cloud-based application.

Additionally, Postmark only allots dedicated IPs to high volume senders. Low and mid-volume senders, on the other hand, are given shared IPs with established sender reputations.

This allows lower-volume senders to obtain optimum delivery from the get-go, instead of having to build their sender reputation from scratch.

To be eligible for a dedicated IP, you need to be a customer sending 300,000 emails/month or more.

But that’s not all.

The best part?

High delivery speeds are a core feature in all Postmark pricing plans. You don’t need to pay any additional or hidden costs to unlock high-speed delivery.

3. Detailed Email Analytics

To optimize your email performance, you need detailed stats and reports to understand what’s working or what needs to be improved in future campaigns.

Postmark offers powerful email analytics to give you detailed insights into your application emails.

Some of the key email metrics Postmark tracks include:

Bounce rates: percentage of subscribers on your mailing list who couldn’t receive your message because the recipient’s email server returned it
Open rates: percentage of subscribers on your mailing list who opened the email
Click rate: percentage of subscribers on your mailing list who clicked on at least one link within the email

Ajay’s Email Tip

An easy way to improve your open rates across the board is by starting and ending your emails properly. Read my in-depth guides on how to start and end an email for some useful tips.

Postmark also allows you to access a detailed 45-day history of all email logs. These can easily be searched through and filtered depending on the data your business needs.

4. Email API

Postmark offers several APIs to send emails and manage servers, templates, and domains.

Websites, web apps, or other applications can use Postmark’s marketing capabilities through the email API to send notifications about order confirmations and shipping details, etc.

Integrating the Postmark email API into your service is easy because Postmark contains powerful client libraries and supports all popular languages, including Node.js, PHP, Python, Java, and more.

Once the integration is complete, you can split application emails into logical groups based on which application or environment is sending them. For example, you can sort emails sent from your website and web app separately.

This is useful when you need focused reports and want to set up multi-party permissions.

Additionally, when using webhooks with your email APIs, you’re notified of emails that have been delivered, opened, bounced, or clicked (when the recipient has clicked a link within the email).

Note: Webhooks allow an application to provide real-time information to other applications.

5. Large Library of Email Templates

Building, testing, and managing email templates can be time-consuming — and that’s time you could spend on improving campaign performance instead!

To help you out, Postmark features a vast library of compatible, integrated, and responsive email templates.

You can use the available pre-made templates to put together application emails quickly, such as password resets, comment notifications, and welcome emails, etc. As you’re filing through these templates, you’ll find that they’re completely customizable — helping you easily edit and use them according to your needs.

Postmark Pricing

Postmark is billed monthly, and the pricing depends on your email volume requirements per month.

Here’s a breakdown of the Postmark pricing structure:

10,000 emails – $10 + 1.25 per 1,000 additional emails
50,000 emails – $50 + 1.00 per 1,000 additional emails
125,000 emails – $100 + 0.85 per 1,000 additional emails
300,000 emails – $200 + 0.60 per 1,000 additional emails
700,000 emails – $400 + 0.45 per 1,000 additional emails
1,500,000 emails – $700 + 0.35 per 1,000 additional emails
3,000,000 emails – $900 + 0.30 per 1,000 additional emails
5,000,000 emails – $1,200 + 0.25 per 1,000 additional emails

A free Postmark trial is available for every new account created. The trial has no expiry, and you can send up to 100 emails/month free, forever.

What Are the Limitations of Postmark?

Postmark is a powerful tool for sending and managing transactional emails like welcome emails and comment notifications. With great deliverability metrics, detailed analytics, and clever APIs, Postmark packs a punch.

However, there are a few limitations to using Postmark.

To help you make an informed decision, I’ll talk about its three key limitations.

1. Lacks Essential Email Marketing Features

Postmark was initially designed only for transactional emails.

So, it’s understandable that Postmark hasn’t provided a wide array of email marketing features in the past.

However, with the new Message Streams feature, Postmark supports an array of different application-based emails like:

Product update announcements
Updates to terms of service
Promotional emails and other kinds of broadcast emails

However, when Postmark shifted its focus from transactional to application emails, it failed to include essential email marketing features like:

Personalization of bulk emails: to create personalized bulk emails at scale
Email scheduling: to schedule email campaigns in advance in line with your email marketing strategy
Automated follow-ups: to set up automatic workflows for sending follow-up emails
A/B testing: to conduct split testing to find which campaign works best for you, and optimize accordingly

With such essential features missing, Postmark might not be able to provide the marketing edge you’d get from other dedicated email platforms like Mailchimp and SparkPost.

2. Expensive Pricing

Although it offers exceptional deliverability for your transactional emails, the Postmark pricing structure is a little too expensive.

For example, for $50/month, you can send a maximum of 50,000 emails with Postmark. And then there’s an additional cost of $1 per 1,000 emails after that.

Let’s compare that to a Postmark alternative like Pepipost that offers 150,000 emails for $25/month, and just $0.60 for every additional 1,000 emails.

Postmark isn’t nearly as cost-effective, especially when it doesn’t have the necessary features of a full-fledged email marketing tool.

3. No SMS Support

Unlike tools such as Sendinblue that allow you to simultaneously manage SMS marketing and email marketing campaigns from the same interface, Postmark doesn’t offer SMS marketing services.

Given that mobile phones are everywhere, receiving transaction updates on your phone via SMS is common — and even expected. Unfortunately, it’s not something you can do with Postmark.

The Best Way to Enhance Postmark Functionality: GMass

If you want to benefit from Postmark’s email deliverability without facing some of its email marketing drawbacks, don’t worry.

There’s an easy and ideal solution to improving Postmark — GMass!

What’s GMass?

Based in the United States, GMass is a marketing automation and email marketing platform that works within Gmail.

Its powerful outreach capabilities, superior ease of use, and proactive customer service make it a popular mail merge tool used by employees working for Google and Uber, and social media firms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

However, GMass isn’t just an ideal marketing solution for big tech firms.

It’s perfect for the email marketing needs of small businesses, solopreneurs, and even churches.

And the best part?

GMass works right inside Gmail — meaning that you don’t need to get familiarized with a new tool to start marketing. It’s all familiar, convenient, and powerful!

To get on board with GMass, just download the Chrome extension and sign up with your Gmail account.

With GMass on your side, you can:

Schedule and send personalized bulk emails.
Create workflows for auto follow-up of emails.
Generate real-time reporting and analytics within the Gmail inbox.
Organize your mailing list through effective segmentation.
Use GMass as a mobile add-on with the Gmail mobile application.
Send out cold emails and drip campaigns to unlimited customers.
Perform a Google Sheets mail merge effortlessly.

Combining the functionalities of Postmark and GMass only takes a few straightforward steps.

How Does GMass Work with Postmark?

Customers using Postmark can leverage GMass’ easy-to-use Gmail interface, powerful outreach features, and proactive customer support to carry out well-rounded and effective marketing campaigns.

Once GMass and Postmark are integrated, you can send unlimited mail-merge campaigns from within Gmail. You can even use the GMass add-on for the Gmail mobile app to manage your campaigns on the go!

To integrate Postmark and GMass, just follow these simple steps:

Create an account on Postmark by filling in the required fields.
Create an account on GMass.
Refresh the Chrome plugin to ensure that an appropriate version of GMass is in use.
Connect your GMass and Postmark accounts by modifying the SMTP settings on your GMass account.

For more info on linking GMass with your SMTP service, read my setting up Gmail SMTP settings guide.

GMass Pricing

Since Postmark is an expensive solution, you might be concerned about spending additional money on a separate tool.

Don’t worry. You can avail yourself of all of GMass’ features for next to nothing!

GMass’ pricing structure is as follows:

Individual:
- Standard: $25 per month or $225 annually. Includes unlimited emails, contacts, and campaigns. Plus mail merge personalization, Spam Solver, and dozens of other features.
- Premium: $35 per month or $325 annually. All Standard plan features, plus auto follow-up sequences, API access and Zapier, and triggered emails.
- Professional: $55 per month or $525 annually. All Premium features plus GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation and high-priority support.
Team:
- Professional: starts at $145 per month for a team of five – supports all features.

Conclusion

Postmark is an excellent tool for sending transactional emails. Its high-performing deliverability rates, detailed analytics, powerful APIs, and large template library make it a valuable tool for any business.

However, when it comes to email marketing campaigns, Postmark offers only limited email marketing capabilities — and that will limit your campaign engagement.

Fortunately, you can augment and amplify Postmark’s features by using it with the GMass email marketing and marketing automation platform.

GMass’ superior outreach features and its active customer service will empower you to make the most of Postmark.

So what are you waiting for?

Create your postmarkapp.com account, link it to GMass, and hit all the right notes with your email campaign!

However, if your decision is not to go for Postmark, you can always look at other SMTP providers like Amazon SES, Mandrill, and SendGrid.

To help you, here are my reviews on other popular third-party SMTP service providers:

See why 99% of users say they’ve had their best deliverability ever with GMass

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Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

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Looking for a detailed Pabbly review?

Pabbly is a SaaS-based web app that streamlines and optimizes your email marketing experience.

From subscription management to payment billing and marketing automation, Pabbly offers a host of features to help you.

But is Pabbly THE app to solve all your email marketing woes?

To help you determine that, I’ll cover everything you need to know about Pabbly, including its features, pricing details, and drawbacks.

This Pabbly Review Contains:

(Click on a link below to jump to a specific section.)

What Is Pabbly?
What Are the Key Features of Pabbly?
What Are Pabbly’s Pricing Plans?
What Are Pabbly’s Drawbacks?

What Is Pabbly?

Pabbly is a popular email marketing and subscription management software. Co-founded by Pankaj and Neeraj Agarwal, www.pabbly.com offers an all-in-one service for email marketing and subscription management to cater to any business need.

Pabbly offers five tools that work as its core features. They are:

Email Marketing
Email Verification
Subscription Billing
Form Builder
Pabbly Connect

In addition to these five software tools, Pabbly has a robust email API infrastructure and a built-in SMTP server to streamline your business email operations.

What Is an Email API?

An email API lets you access email service functionalities via your website or app.

That way, whenever your customers complete a subscription, payment, or sign-up form on your website, they’ll instantly be notified by email.

What Is SMTP?

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is an email communication protocol used to send outgoing emails from one email account to another. It uses an SMTP server to deliver emails to recipient email addresses.

But why do you need an external SMTP server like Pabbly to send emails?

Regular email service providers (ESPs) like Gmail and Outlook limit the number of emails you can send daily.

For example, you can’t send more than 2,000 emails a day using G Suite — which may seem large enough. But if you’re an email marketer wanting to send email campaigns to more than 2,000 customers, this limitation will stunt both your reach and growth.

However, SMTP service providers like Pabbly have no such email sending restrictions. By using Pabbly, you can bypass the traditional mail sending restrictions and send as many bulk emails as you want.

Want to know more about SMTP? Read my detailed SMTP guide here.

What Are the Key Features of Pabbly?

Let’s take a look at the key features of the five Pabbly software tools:

1. Email Marketing

Along with a built-in email builder offering multiple templates, Pabbly’s Email Marketing software includes a free built-in SMTP server for bulk emails.

Additionally, Pabbly also provides integrations with 50+ external SMTP servers, including:

With its powerful Email Tracking feature, Pabbly also lets you track your outgoing email opens, click-throughs, bounce rates, unsubscribes, and more.

Pabbly’s Marketing Automation is another unique feature that helps you create automated workflows. From pre-scheduling emails/email campaigns to automated welcome emails for every new subscriber, pabbly.com makes sure your email marketing needs are always met.

Ajay’s Email Tip:

Along with open rates, your emails’ engagement rates also matter in email marketing. Check out my detailed guide on how to start and end your emails to improve your recipient engagement.

Pabbly’s Email Marketing software also contains several API-backed and easily embeddable subscription form templates for your website to maximize lead generation.

2. Email Verification

Sending emails to incorrect or invalid email addresses is not only a waste of time, but it also increases your bounce rate.

Pabbly’s Email Verification software helps you authenticate leads’/subscribers’ email addresses easily.

To verify email addresses, Pabbly follows a “slow” verification process of sending ping requests to the recipient’s email server. Once the ping request is received, the server lets you know whether the email address is authentic or not.

What’s a ping request?

A ping request is an internet program that helps users test reachability or verify something, such as an email ID.

Pabbly uses a slow frequency of sending ping requests to avoid the chance of getting inaccurate data or a request denial from the mail server.

This reduces the chances of receiving:

False positives (inaccurate test results that verify the wrong email address)
Catch-all addresses (email addresses that catch any email sent to an incorrect/non-existent email address)

Additionally, to help keep your email list clean, Pabbly also removes email addresses that have:

Wrong/missing email syntax (like missing recipient/domain name or the “@” symbol, etc.)
Inactive/invalid domains
Duplicate emails

3. Subscription Billing

Pabbly’s Subscription Billing tool is a recurring billing and subscription management software.

It helps you manage:

Customer subscriptions
Recurring payments
Billing
Failed payments, etc.

With its robust API integration, the recurring billing software helps you create responsive subscription and billing website forms without a hassle. You can also embed customized checkout pages and add customer data auto-fills to your payment and subscription forms.

Along with a comprehensive Pabbly Subscriptions Dashboard, the billing software also offers detailed sales analytics, including:

Monthly revenue
ARPU (Average Revenue per User)
Churn rate, etc.

The billing management and accounting software even ensures smooth customer payment collection via multiple payment gateway integrations with PayPal, Razorpay, and Stripe.

To minimize payment processing complications, Pabbly includes subscription billing features that are also compatible with multiple currencies, like USD, Euro, and INR.

Conveniently, the tax management system in Pabbly Subscription Billing allows you to add and manage taxes in your billing based on your customers’ countries and states.

But that isn’t all.

With Pabbly coupon management, you can create exciting coupons, discounts, and free trials for your customer.

Taking care of the whole customer payment journey, the subscription management software helps you with:

Support for both recurring billing and one-time billing
Invoicing, tracking payments, and maintaining invoice records
Creating subscription plans
Creating a client portal for users to manage their subscription and payments
An integrated affiliate management system to manage affiliate marketers

4. Form Builder

Whether it’s for a payment, an event registration, or capturing a lead, Pabbly Form Builder (previously called FormGet) helps you create online forms for your website or email quickly and easily.

Through its simple drag-and-drop editor, you can add, remove, or customize any block you want to create your form.

You can also configure various aspects of your form in Pabbly Form Builder, like:

Selecting product images
Payment gateway
Currency

Its custom payment gateway and multi-currency features allow you to collect payments easily through online payment forms.

For added flexibility, you can even integrate Pabbly’s forms with a Google Sheet or multiple platforms like WordPress and Zapier, among others.

5. Pabbly Connect

To help you automate and streamline your marketing and sales workflow, Pabbly Connect lets you sync more than 380 apps on its platform.

From CRMs and payment web forms to social media platforms and video conferencing apps, you can connect with almost any app through the Pabbly Connect platform.

Some of the notable apps you can integrate via Pabbly Connect include:

Google Apps
Facebook
Microsoft Office 365 and OneDrive
Salesforce
QuickBooks

Additionally, you don’t have to be a developer to sync these apps. Just select your favorite app, configure them by adding filters, actions, and field mappings, and save!

If you need any assistance regarding the web app usage and integration, you can always contact the Pabbly support team.

What Are Pabbly’s Pricing Plans?

Pabbly offers 17 pricing plans, each including all features and software.

The only difference between the pricing tiers is the number of subscribers, customers, forms, credits, and tasks included at each level.

Here, I’ll cover the first four pricing tiers along with the features that each Pabbly tier contains.

A. Email Marketing

Tier 1, $29/month plan: has a limit of 2,500 subscribers
Tier 2, $37/month plan: has a limit of 5,500 subscribers
Tier 3, $57/month plan: has a limit of 20,000 subscribers
Tier 4, $79/month plan: has a limit of 30,000 subscribers

Standard Email Marketing Features Available in All Tiers

Drag-and-Drop Email Builder
External and Built-In SMTP
Marketing Automation
List Management
Email Tracking
Subscription Forms

B. Subscription Billing

Tier 1: has a limit of 50 customers
Tier 2: has a limit of 100 customers
Tier 3: has a limit of 150 customers
Tier 4: has a limit of 250 customers

Standard Subscription Billing Features Available in All Tiers

Multiple Billing Model
Client Portal Access
Payment Gateways
Dunning Management
Create Checkout Page
Global Tax Management

C. Form Builder

Tier 1: has a limit of 2 forms
Tier 2: has a limit of 4 forms
Tier 3: has a limit of 6 forms
Tier 4: has a limit of 8 forms

Standard Form Builder Features Available in All Tiers

Unlimited Submissions
Unlimited Payment Accounts
Receive Unlimited Payments
PayPal and Stripe Integration
Custom Branding
Webhooks

D. Email Verification

Tier 1: has a limit of 6,500 credits
Tier 2: has a limit of 15,000 credits
Tier 3: has a limit of 30,000 credits
Tier 4: has a limit of 45,000 credits

Standard Email Verification Features Available in All Tiers

Minimize Bouncing
Email Deduplication
Boost Deliverability
Domain Confirmation
Spam-Trap Removal
Anti-Greylisting

E. Pabbly Connect

Tier 1: has a limit of 50,000 tasks
Tier 2: has a limit of 60,000 tasks
Tier 3: has a limit of 80,000 tasks
Tier 4: has a limit of 120,000 tasks

Standard Pabbly Connect Features in All Tiers

Unlimited Workflows
Instant Triggers
Multi-Step Calls
Path Routers
Unlimited Premium Apps
Filters

What Are Pabbly’s Drawbacks?

Although Pabbly offers multiple features, it isn’t perfect.

Let’s have a quick look at two major drawbacks of Pabbly:

1. No Mobile Support

While Pabbly is a powerful web app compatible with Windows and Mac, it doesn’t have a mobile app.

Many Pabbly user reviews of the subscription feature highlight how inconvenient this can get.

For example, some of the apps that Pabbly integrates with, like FreshBooks and Zoom, already have both web and mobile apps in place.

However, if the connecting app (Pabbly) doesn’t have a mobile version, you won’t benefit from any of the integrated apps on your phone (even if those integrated services have mobile apps)!

2. Not-So-Friendly Built-In SMTP Service

Apart from third-party integrations, Pabbly has its own in-built SMTP service. And while you can use this SMTP for free once you purchase a Pabbly plan, it has certain limitations.

First, you have to request approval to use this feature — and your application could get rejected.

This makes using their built-in SMTP feature a bit confusing, as you might not know on what grounds they may have rejected your request. If your request is denied, you would have to spend money on a third-party integration and use that instead.

Moreover, even if your request is approved, you can only send 500 emails initially from their built-in SMTP server. This will increase over time if all goes well, but that’s all you have to start with — which isn’t something most email marketers can afford.

Wrapping Up

Pabbly is a great app to boost your email marketing and subscription management activities.

Irrespective of company size, the web app helps you track email engagement, verify email IDs, monitor sales analytics and payment analytics, and create customer offers with the Pabbly discount feature.

However, it isn’t perfect.

For starters, it doesn’t have a mobile app to help you manage your email campaigns on the go. And based on its user reviews, the several restrictions in Pabbly’s built-in SMTP makes it difficult to use.

But if Pabbly doesn’t seem like the right fit for you, don’t worry!

You can always opt for other SMTP providers instead. To learn more about them, check out my reviews for SMTP.com, Moosend, Inboxroad, Sendpulse, and SocketLabs.

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

Wondering if Pepipost is the right email sending service for you?

Pepipost is a cloud-based email delivery service designed to send transactional emails. Pepipost also offers an SMTP service and email API solutions.

But is Pepipost the right email management solution for your needs?

In this Pepipost review, I’ll walk you through its noteworthy features, key limitations, and pricing model.

And if, by the end, you feel that Pepipost doesn’t meet your requirements, I’ll also highlight the best way to enhance Pepipost’s features using an easy integration.

This Pepipost Review Contains:

(Click on a link to jump to a specific section.)

What Is Pepipost?
What Are the Key Features of Pepipost?
What Are the Limitations of Pepipost?
Pepipost Pricing Model
The Best Way to Add More Functionality to Pepipost

Let’s begin.

What Is Pepipost?

Offered by Netcore Solutions, Pepipost is an email delivery service designed for developers and enterprises. It helps you send transactional emails efficiently and tries to ensure that your emails are tailored for efficient inbox delivery.

Specifically, Pepipost offers email API and SMTP relay services to boost your email deliverability.

What Is SMTP?

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an email protocol used for managing outgoing emails. Setting up your own SMTP server allows you to bypass sending limits when using email clients like Gmail or Outlook.

For example, a G Suite account lets you send 2,000 emails over 24 hours, while a regular Gmail account limits you to just 500 emails/day.

And if you’re running a promotional or informational campaign, you may want to send more emails than that. In such a situation, you can use Pepipost’s SMTP service to send tons of emails easily.

For a more in-depth understanding of SMTP, read my ultimate guide to SMTP.

What Is an Email API?

An email API can help you access an email service’s functionalities right from your website or app.

For example, let’s say you purchased an item on an eCommerce website. The website might use an email API (for example, the Gmail API) to send you an update on shipping details via an email marketing tool.

Why Do Businesses Use Pepipost?

Pepipost is an email delivery engine that runs on the cloud. It helps you send transactional emails or trigger emails to your customers while trying to ensure that your emails end up in the recipients’ inboxes, and not in their spam folders.

With Pepipost, you can send emails using an SMTP relay or HTTP API. If you’ve got your own mail server, they recommend that you use the SMTP relay service. And if you’re using online portals or mobile apps, they suggest that you go for the HTTP API as your mailer service.

Who Uses Pepipost?

Because it focuses on the technical side of things, such as SMTPs and APIs, Pepipost is an email tool primarily designed for developers with a good level of experience and coding expertise. However, it can also be used by knowledgeable marketers in small or large businesses.

What Are the Key Features of Pepipost?

Pepipost offers a host of features — ranging from the Pepipost API services to Artificial Intelligence (AI) functionality.

Some key features covered in this Pepipost review are:

SMTP service
Email API
Email Subaccounts
Data Security

Here’s a detailed look at each feature:

1. SMTP Service

At its core, Pepipost is a cloud-based SMTP service provider. The SMTP relay service is designed to help you achieve efficient inbox delivery without worrying about outbound mail server limits.

To ensure reliable email deliverability, Pepipost has SMTP servers installed at multiple locations globally.

How to Use the Pepipost SMTP Service

To start using the Pepipost SMTP service, you’ll first need to complete their SMTP service integration with your account.

To set up the SMTP connection:

Modify the default settings of your mail server’s SMTP configuration.
Replace your existing SMTP server credentials with those from Pepipost.
Change the hostname to smtp.pepipost.com.
Set the SMTP port to 25, 587, or 2525.

Once that’s done, you can use Pepipost’s SMTP server for sending and tracking emails.

In case your website runs on WordPress, and you want Pepipost support for SMTP, you can use the WordPress Pepipost Plugin. The plugin uses an API integration to send emails directly from your WordPress account.

Similarly, Pepipost also has an integration with Drupal to help with email management for websites that use Drupal.

2. Email API

Pepipost recommends that you use their SMTP service to send emails, but if you’re looking for a more robust integration, they offer the Email API service.

How to Use the Pepipost Email API

The Pepipost API must first be integrated with your application.

This usually begins with an API key authentication. Use Pepipost’s integration documents and the Pepipost API code libraries for this. They support multiple development frameworks like Java, Python, C#, and more, to make it easy on the developer.

All these materials are available in their Software Development Kit (SDK) published on GitHub. The SDK also lets you submit “pull requests” for project changes.

Once the integration is complete, you can use the Pepipost Email API for:

Sending your emails
Real-time/offline tracking of your emails

3. Email Subaccounts

When you have multiple team members using the same account to send emails, it can make things difficult, as you’re not sure who’s using the account and will need to avoid simultaneous logins.

That’s why it makes sense to have distinct subaccounts for each team, and multiple passwords to facilitate access.

Luckily, this is exactly what the Email Subaccounts feature does in a Pepipost account.

The master account can create and assign separate child accounts — each complete with its own login, SMTP credentials, account settings, and bandwidth for marketing spends.

Note that the subaccounts are mutually exclusive — each has a different IP address, and any of them can be disabled in real-time.

Another advantage of the subuser management feature is that you can manage everything under one umbrella by allocating adequate credits for your subaccounts.

A big plus is that you won’t have the hassle of paying separately for each subaccount because only the master account is billed for total marketing spends.

4. Data Security

Pepipost takes data security seriously.

Their servers are located at dedicated spaces within secure data centers. Their facilities are also spread out globally to ensure that your services aren’t disrupted by any geo-specific issues.

Pepipost is also GDPR compliant.

What does that mean?

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a data privacy and security law governing the European Union that puts constraints on software like cookie scanning technology.

Additionally, Pepipost supports TLS for all your outbound emails for added security.

Security protocols like SPF and DKIM are built into the sending domain system, and Pepipost suggests that clients also use the DMARC policy.

What follows are technical definitions of the security policies mentioned above. If you aren’t interested in them, skip to the next section.

What Is TLS?

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a popular protocol used to provide end-to-end security for data exchange across applications. This ensures that your emails are sent securely with Pepipost.

What Is SPF?

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) restricts users from sending emails on your behalf by predefining which IP addresses can send emails to a particular domain or recipient. You’ll need to change your domain’s DNS setting to enable SPF.

What Is DKIM?

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) provides an extra layer of security by adding a digital signature to the emails you send. Your receiver’s server can then check the digital signature to verify its source.

What Is DMARC?

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) is a policy that ties SPF and DKIM together. First, it verifies whether or not the sender’s emails are protected by SPF and DKIM. Then, it informs the receiving server of what must be done if the two security protocols fail.

Finally, it reports back to the sender about the emails that failed the DMARC domain verification.

Pepipost Pricing Model

Pepipost initially started with a pricing structure that charged you only for unopened emails.

However, they’ve now shifted to a pricing model that bills you based on the number of emails you need to send every month.

The pricing structure for Pepipost is as follows:

150,000 emails at $25/month, and $0.60 for every 1,000 extra emails
400,000 emails at $85/month, and $0.55 for every 1,000 extra emails
600,000 emails at $145/month, and $0.50 for every 1,000 extra emails
1,000,000 emails at $245/month, and $0.45 for every 1,000 extra emails
2,000,000 emails at $445/month, and $0.40 for every 1,000 extra emails

They also offer a free trial that lets you send 30,000 emails in the first 30 days from your sending domain, and a “forever free” account with a daily limit of 100 emails.

What Are the Three Major Limitations of Pepipost?

Sure, Pepipost has some interesting features, but it does have a few limitations:

1. Not an Email Marketing Tool

Pepipost is primarily an email delivery service and not an email marketing tool.

An email marketing tool would allow you to :

Schedule bulk emails automatically
Set up follow-up email automation
Perform powerful email list segmentation

Unfortunately, Pepipost doesn’t have such features built-in to its service.

Instead, you’ll have to integrate Pepipost with open-source email marketing tools like Mailtrain or Mautic — which is an additional, unnecessary, and time-consuming step.

2. Complicated User Interface

The most troubling drawback with Pepipost is its complicated user interface.

To accomplish even basic tasks, like sending a test email, a user is forced to toggle and scroll through multiple screens.

For starters, the user interface is new to you, so you’d naturally take some time getting familiar with and adapting to it. But when the user interface is also complicated to use, the whole user experience becomes incredibly stressful.

Its domain verification system is another frustrating issue, according to user reviews.

While its purpose is to promote good senders in the email ecosystem so that all its users have a low bounce rate, the domain verification can be far too strict. For example, your sending domain can get rejected without an adequate explanation about why during the sign-up process.

Pepipost user reviews also highlight a lack of proper documentation for its features. Additionally, many essential visual guides on how to use various functionalities (such as the customizable dashboard) are unavailable within the user interface.

3. No Mobile Support

You’d normally expect email delivery service providers to offer a mobile application to its users.

Why?

Mobile support is essential because your business runs 24/7, and it is much easier to use your mobile phone to manage your emails when you’re on the move or away from the office.

However, Pepipost doesn’t offer a mobile app on Android or iOS to send emails or evaluate your deliverability metrics. You’ll always have to have your laptop or desktop handy!

4. Expensive Pricing

Pepipost can be expensive to use — especially if you use one of their pro plans.

According to industry stats, it’s significantly higher than other email delivery services, such as Amazon SES.

The base plan starts at $25/month — an expensive pricing structure, considering that Pepipost is primarily an email delivery service without additional email marketing functionality.

While the subaccounts feature lets you allocate email credits to a subuser within the master account, unused credits are not carried over to the next month.

The Best Way to Add Enhanced Functionality to Pepipost: GMass

Pepipost is a good SMTP relay service that, unfortunately, comes with severe limitations.

Fortunately, all you need to add enhanced functionality to Pepipost is to connect it with the ideal email marketing platform — GMass.

What’s GMass?

GMass is an email marketing and marketing automation platform that works within your Gmail inbox.

Its ease of use, superior outreach capabilities, active customer support team, and disruptive pricing model have made it a popular software solution that’s used by employees of Google, Uber, and social media giants like Twitter and LinkedIn.

However, GMass isn’t just for the big guys. It’s also perfectly suited to the needs of small businesses, nonprofits, churches, solopreneurs, and more.

GMass helps you:

Automatically send personalized bulk emails.
Access real-time reports to understand your deliverability metrics and traffic sources.
Schedule emails in advance.
Track customer engagement.
Create automated workflows to send follow-up emails.
Use a custom tracking domain.

Essentially, it helps you do most of the things that Pepipost can’t!

To use GMass, all you need to do is download the Chrome extension and sign up with your Gmail account. Easy, right?

GMass Pricing Plans

GMass’ pricing structure is as follows:

Individual:
- Standard: $25 per month or $225 annually. Includes unlimited emails, contacts, and campaigns. Plus mail merge personalization, Spam Solver, and dozens of other features.
- Premium: $35 per month or $325 annually. All Standard plan features, plus auto follow-up sequences, API access and Zapier, and triggered emails.
- Professional: $55 per month or $525 annually. All Premium features plus GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation and high-priority support.
Team:
- Professional: starts at $145 per month for a team of five – supports all features.

How Does GMass Enhance Pepipost?

GMass can make up for Pepipost’s drawbacks because, ultimately, GMass is more than just an email delivery service.

Not only does GMass give you a ton of email marketing features that Pepipost can’t offer you, but it also works within the Gmail user interface and can also be used as an add-on with the Gmail Android app.

A. Uses the Gmail User Interface for Email Marketing Activities

Since it works within Gmail, GMass uses the Gmail user interface itself.

That means unlike most other email marketing software, you don’t have to get familiarized with a new tool to start your email marketing campaigns. You can use something you already know and use every day!

To compose bulk emails, just use the standard Gmail email editor.

To run campaigns and use marketing automation, use the Gmail inbox.

For analytics? Access the Campaign Reports right from the Gmail sidebar.

With GMass, you no longer need to toggle and scroll through a thousand screens to send campaigns and monitor relevant emails, your open rate, etc.

B. Add-on with Gmail App

Working within Gmail means that GMass can be used as an add-on with the Gmail Android app. No more relying exclusively on your laptop or desktop to run email campaigns!

All GMass features can be managed within the convenience of your smartphone.

You simply need to install the Gmail app on your mobile after setting up a GMass account.

How Does GMass Work with Pepipost?

You can carry out an easy integration of your GMass account and Pepipost account to send unlimited mail-merge emails within Gmail.

This way, you benefit from GMass’ advanced email marketing features, Gmail’s user-friendly interface, and Pepipost’s ability to surpass Gmail’s email sending limits.

To do this, you’ll need to:

Set up a GMass account
Set up a Pepipost account
Link your GMass account to the Pepipost SMTP service by modifying your SMTP settings on the GMass account

To learn more about setting up an SMTP server in Gmail with GMass, read this article.

What Are Some Popular Comparisons for Pepipost?

Pepipost is not the only ESP (Email Service Provider) out there.

You also have various Pepipost alternatives like:

Remember, Pepipost isn’t an email marketing tool — it’s only an email delivery platform.

So if you’re looking for a comprehensive solution for your email marketing needs, using Pepipost alone might not be enough. Luckily, you can connect Pepipost or any of the alternative tools I’ve listed above with GMass!

Conclusion

Here’s the deal:

Pepipost is a good SMTP relay and email API service.

However, it’s not a comprehensive email marketing tool.

If you’re looking for an email solution with capabilities like automatic scheduling of bulk emails, powerful email personalization, and a user interface with zero complications, just link Pepipost with GMass.

The GMass email marketing automation tool offers tons of indispensable features along with mobile support.

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

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Looking for a comprehensive SMTP.com review?

SMTP.com is a tool used by marketers to send mass marketing and transactional emails.

It’s a powerful SMTP tool that helps your bulk email reach your recipients — but it isn’t perfect.

So, should you invest in the SMTP.com tool?

In this SMTP.com review, I’ll cover everything you need to know about SMTP.com. I’ll highlight what it is, what its key features are, and how much it costs.

I’ll also cover SMTP.com’s major disadvantages and tell you about the perfect companion tool to SMTP.com.

Let’s jump right in, okay?

What Is SMTP.com?

SMTP.com is an email service that uses an SMTP relay to send out a large number of emails.

Where Is SMTP.com Based?

SMTP.com is a Canadian company that is a subsidiary of J2 Global, a digital media company based in the United States.

What Does SMTP.com Offer?

While sending bulk email through its SMTP server is SMTP.com’s core function, it also gives you access to features like event-triggered emails and an SMTP API (Application Programming Interface).

What are those?

An event-triggered email lets marketers automate their email process by sending out emails based on user behavior. An email API, on the other hand, will help developers integrate their websites and apps to SMTP.com’s SMTP email server.

What Is an SMTP Server and How Does It Work?

An SMTP server is a mail server that sends outgoing mail to recipients. Each mail client has an SMTP server, but most popular email clients like Gmail and Yahoo Mail limit user access due to the high number of users, which creates a huge demand.

What does this mean?

For example, if you use Gmail, you’re limited to sending 500 emails/day. If you use a G Suite account, that limit goes up to 2,000/day — but that’s it. You can’t send any more.

While that might be fine for your personal use, unfortunately, these limits aren’t adequate for email marketers. So if the sender is looking to dispatch a significant number of emails, then an investment in an SMTP relay tool like SMTP.com could be worthwhile.

SMTP relay tools use a custom SMTP email server that can handle virtually unlimited numbers of outgoing emails at any given time.

If you want to find more information about the SMTP protocol, check out my ultimate guide to SMTP here.

What Are the Key Features of SMTP.com?

Now that I’ve covered what SMTP.com is, here’s a look at some of its key features:

1. Customized SMTP Relay Service

Every business has unique needs, right?

The email resources you need may not be what your competitors need.

But how can one email service cater to several businesses with separate needs?

When you sign up for SMTP’s service, you’re partnered with SMTP.com’s experts in email deliverability and relay technology.

You can consult these deliverability experts to improve virtually every aspect of your high-volume emails.

They can help you by:

Customizing your email delivery to reach more inboxes
Monitoring your ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and your IP address to optimize email sending
Easing the transition from your current SMTP provider
Helping your custom systems integrate with SMTP.com
Providing technical support for setting up APIs

But that’s not all!

With SMTP.com’s service, you’ll get access to customized reports, a dedicated IP address, branded email templates, and even a dedicated account manager.

2. Supports Transactional Email

Remember that confirmation email you receive from a store as soon as you complete an online purchase? Or maybe that “Welcome!” message when you subscribe to a new service? Or perhaps that “Your item has shipped” confirmation from an online seller?

Those are examples of transactional emails.

Transactional emails are automated emails sent in real-time to complete a transaction initiated by a customer. Transactional emails can be a purchase confirmation, a sign-up email, or any other email generated based on customer behavior.

Why are transactional emails important?

Transactional emails provide vendors with a way to keep their customers updated on any actions they’ve taken. This way, customers don’t have to keep going back to the website to check for updates.

SMTP.com offers tons of features that are heavily focused on boosting the email deliverability rates of your transactional emails.

You can use SMTP.com to send out emails for:

Account creation
Account activation
Password resetting
Purchase confirmation
And more!

But that’s not all.

SMTP.com is a highly-reputed SMTP relay service, and all of its servers are whitelisted servers. So there’s virtually no chance that your transactional email will end up in a spam folder!

3. SMTP API Integration

Have you ever wanted to integrate a website or an app with your mail service?

That’s exactly what the SMTP.com API helps you do!

An SMTP API will help your SMTP service communicate with a website or an app to connect the two so that they work well together. This way, you can use SMTP.com’s API to work on your transactional emails and manage campaigns — right from your website!

Additionally, this process is super easy as you can integrate your website or app with SMTP.com in minutes via JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).

SMTP.com Pricing

SMTP.com has four pricing plans: Essential, Starter, Growth, and Enterprise. You get access to all features on every plan — so plans are priced around your email volume.

Here’s a quick look at what you get with each plan:

SMTP.com Pricing 1: “Essential”

Priced at $25/month. This plan includes:

Shared IP address
50,000 emails/month
24/7 customer support via phone
Access to all features
Free API access

SMTP.com Pricing 2: “Starter”

Priced at $80/month. This plan includes:

Dedicated IP address
100,000 emails/month
24/7 customer support via phone
Access to all features
Free API access

SMTP.com Pricing 3: “Growth”

Priced at $300/month. This plan includes:

IP address (Dedicated)
500,000 emails/month
24/7 customer support via phone
Access to all features
Free API access

SMTP.com Pricing 4: “Enterprise”

Priced at $500/month. This plan includes:

Dedicated IP address
1,000,000 emails/month
24/7 customer support via phone
Access to all features
Free API access
Access to deliverability experts

What Are the Disadvantages of SMTP.com?

While SMTP.com has a lot to offer, there are a few areas where it fails to deliver.

Here are three disadvantages of using SMTP.com:

1. No Free Plan or Free Trial

If you want to use a tool, you’d expect them to offer you a chance to test it before investing in it, right?

That way, you would get to try the tool, see what it offers, and determine if it fits your needs before committing to it financially.

However, you don’t get that with SMTP.com.

Not only do they not offer a free plan for users who want to try their tool for a few months, but also they don’t offer a free trial of their email services.

So, if you’re hoping for a few free emails for a couple of months to work out how the tool fits your business, SMTP.com may not be the right tool for you. You’ll have to spend $25 on their lowest tier plan just to test the tool for a month.

2. SMTP.com’s Dashboard Isn’t Very Intuitive

Once you complete that long setup process, you’d at least expect a seamless user experience, right?

But with the SMTP.com SMTP service, that might not be the case.

SMTP.com has trouble showing sent emails in real-time on the dashboard. Additionally, it doesn’t show you detailed information when you click on any email metric (Open rate, unsubscribe rate, etc.) in the dashboard.

But the most frustrating part?

Whenever you relay an email through SMTP.com, there’s a significant lag until it appears on your dashboard.

This means that whenever an email is delivered to any recipient on your mailing list, there’ll be a significant delay in displaying the email’s status on your dashboard.

3. Lengthy Sign-Up Process

People invest in tools to make their work easier, right?

But what happens when the tools you invest in actually make things harder for you?

Unfortunately, with SMTP.com, that could happen.

It has a sign-up process that involves a multi-day approval and manual review — and here’s a recap of my experience:

First, the support team asks you to provide information about the nature of your business and your mailing list. You’ll have to be prepared to inform them if your mailing list was purchased and where you obtained recipient information from, etc.

They might also ask you to place a new page on your website to confirm your site ownership. Although their intention — to weed out scams — is worthwhile, this process is a highly inefficient way to verify ownership and provide approval for their service.

Plus, it takes a couple of days to sort everything out — so if you’re in a hurry to send out bulk email, you’ll be disappointed with the speed of their service.

The Perfect Email Companion for SMTP.com

Now that I’ve covered everything there is to know about SMTP.com, it’s clear that it’s a great — but flawed — tool.

While SMTP.com provides features like a powerful API integration and a premium email relay service, it also lacks a free plan and doesn’t boast a great UI.

But what if there were a way to take advantage of SMTP.com’s powerful features without some of the drawbacks?

There is! Say hello to GMass!

What is GMass?

GMass is a popular email marketing tool used by employees of massive tech companies like Google, Uber, and social media sites like Twitter and LinkedIn.

But GMass isn’t only for large businesses!

Small businesses, solopreneurs, and churches can use GMass to send bulk emails.

But the best part?

The GMass plugin works completely inside of Gmail. This way, you don’t have to worry about dealing with clunky dashboards or opening a separate tab to manage your email marketing campaigns.

With GMass, you’ll be able to:

Schedule and send email marketing campaigns from Gmail.
Track how recipients engage with marketing emails.
Use real-time reports and stats to understand the performance of your emails.
Set up custom domains for tracking.
Connect with SMTP.com and send unlimited emails to recipients every day.

But that’s not all!

You can easily set up the GMass plugin by adding the Chrome extension to your browser. Once that’s done, you can send bulk emails to your recipients!

How does GMass work with SMTP.com?

You can use SMTP.com as an external SMTP service provider in GMass.

This way, you can partner GMass’s excellent marketing capabilities, Gmail’s intuitive interface, and the reliable SMTP server of SMTP.com!

If you want to know more about setting up SMTP settings in Gmail, just click here.

Interested in other SMTP service providers?

Check out my:

Wrapping Up

SMTP.com offers useful features like transactional email support and powerful API integration. Additionally, its highly-reputed servers protect your high-volume emails from landing on a blacklist or being labeled as spam by a spam filter.

But it’s less-than-ideal dashboard can take the shine off some of its features.

Fortunately, with a tool like GMass, you won’t have to worry about that and can benefit from SMTP.com’s unlimited sending inside Gmail!

Not to mention, you get access to tons of other state-of-the-art GMass marketing features like email automation, automatic personalization, and detailed campaign reports.

So, what are you waiting for?

Create an account on SMTP.com, and link it to GMass to boost your email game instantly!

Ready to transform Gmail into an email marketing/cold email/mail merge tool?

Only GMass packs every email app into one tool — and brings it all into Gmail for you. Better emails. Tons of power. Easy to use.

TRY GMASS FOR FREE

Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

Looking for an in-depth Mandrill review?

Developed by Mailchimp, Mandrill is a SaaS-based transactional email service that lets you send personalized transactional emails to your customers.

But despite being feature-rich, Mandrill might not be the ideal email provider for transactional email management for everyone.

In this Mandrill review, I’ll talk about everything you need to know about this transactional email service.

I’ll cover what Mandrill is, its essential features, the major drawbacks, and its pricing details to help you determine if Mandrill is the best tool for you.

This Mandrill Review Covers:

(click on the links below to jump to a specific section)

What is Mandrill?
What Are the Key Features of Mandrill?
What Are the Drawbacks of Mandrill?
What Are Mandrill’s Pricing Plans?

What Is Mandrill?

Mandrill is the former name of the Mailchimp Transactional Email plugin. It uses API and SMTP servers to let you send transactional emails to your customers.

Are you a little confused over what those terms mean?

I’ll break them down to help you understand:

What Are Transactional Emails?

Transactional emails are emails triggered by user actions. Order confirmation emails, password reset emails, shipping notification emails, and customer support emails are common examples of transactional emails.

What Is Email API?

Email API (application programming interface) gives your website or app the power to access the functions usually provided by an email service provider.

For example, if a customer purchases a product from your website or app, you can send delivery details to their email address via Mandrill’s email API.

With the API, you also get access to detailed analytical reports about core email metrics like click-through rates and bounce rates.

What Is SMTP?

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is an email protocol that lets you send outgoing emails from an email account to other email accounts.

Why do you need an SMTP service?

Various Email Service Providers (ESPs) like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo! Mail, etc., limit the number of emails you can send daily. This way, they can manage their total daily volume of sent email traffic by imposing a maximum.

For instance, in G Suite, you can’t send more than 2,000 emails in a day — which may seem like enough for a regular user. However, if you have 3,000 or more customers, this will limit your reach and your ability to grow.

The SMTP service in Mandrill lifts this limitation by helping you bypass these restrictions and send a virtually unlimited number of emails every day!

You can even integrate Mandrill’s SMTP server with popular web frameworks like Ruby on Rails or NodeJS for added flexibility.

The SMTP integration also allows you to use SMTP headers to personalize any message you want.

You can:

Use merge tags for any custom message.
Utilize open tracking and click tracking.
Add Google Analytics tracking for your links.
Generate plain text from HTML content.
Use custom-metadata.

Interested in learning about the SMTP protocol?

Check out my ultimate SMTP guide here.

What Is the Difference between Mandrill and Mailchimp?

Mandrill focuses only on transactional emails, unlike Mailchimp, which deals with general email marketing activities.

For example, Mandrill can help you with standard automated emails like shipping confirmations, invoices, account notifications, welcome emails, customer service emails, etc.

On the other hand, Mailchimp helps you with your overall marketing campaigns and can support creative promotions through newsletters, product promotions, educational/informational emails, etc.

While Mailchimp has a web version and mobile app for iOS and Android devices, Mandrill can only be accessed from your laptop or desktop.

To use Mandrill’s features, you must sign in through Mailchimp first.

Who Are the Typical Users of Mandrill Transactional Email?

Mandrill is used mostly by B2B and B2C businesses across multiple industries like e-commerce, retail, finance, and software development.

What Are the Key Features of Mandrill?

Here are four essential features that make Mandrill a great transactional email service:

1. Analytics and A/B Testing

As a transactional email provider, Mandrill has a great dashboard that highlights the statistics of your overall email performance.

It highlights your:

Email reputation
Delivery rates
Country and state email opens, clicks, and unsubscribes
Inbound and outbound emails
Email content
Recipient details and total sends for each month and hour
Delayed or failed sends

Additionally, Mandrill gives you comparative reports over your transactional emails, helping you with A/B testing of your email campaigns.

What Is A/B Testing?

A/B testing involves sending multiple versions of the same email to different smaller groups of customers before sending the email to a larger group. For example, you can test different email subject lines and introductions, etc. (Version A would use one subject line, and Version B would use a different one. That’s how “A/B” testing got its name.)

Analyzing and comparing the performance of the two email versions shows you which one performed better and why.

You can then optimize the subject line, email content, and links within the email for better:

Open rates
Response rates
Click-through rates

Ajay’s Email Tip

The quickest way to boost engagement rates is by starting and ending your emails properly. Check out my detailed guides on how to start and end emails the right way.

For a better understanding of customer-email interaction, you get comprehensive status updates via Mandrill’s event tracking API.

Additionally, to identify your various emails, you can add custom tags by sending API calls or using custom SMTP headers.

2. Email Security and Deliverability

When you send a transactional email to your customer, you want to ensure that it reaches their inbox. To help you boost email deliverability and security, Mandrill uses custom SPF and DKIM records.

What Is SPF?

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a security validation process that verifies the IP addresses and web applications whose domains you use to send emails.

An SPF record for a specific domain includes a database of authorized applications and IP addresses that can send emails from that domain.

Recipient mail servers check these SPF records during an email transfer and only deliver emails that are authorized. If not authorized, your emails will automatically get rejected or flagged.

This ensures that only emails you authorize are sent to your recipients — preventing any spam from being sent using your domain.

What Is DKIM?

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a process of encrypting outgoing mail with a digital signature. This way, the sent email is protected throughout the mail transfer process, and the owner of the domain is also verified.

DKIM ensures that the outgoing email can only be decrypted by the recipient’s mail server. And once the recipient’s mail server verifies the domain owner, the email is directly delivered to their inbox instead of going to a spam folder.

For added customization, you can also create your own dedicated IP or use a shared IP for sending mails on Mandrill.

Using a shared IP address means that many other businesses may also be using the same IP address as you do to send bulk emails.

In that case, you can white-label your shared IP so that the recipient can directly see your domain name instead of a code of numbers. This process is known as reverse DNS (rDNS).

What Is Reverse DNS?

In a nutshell, DNS (Domain Name System) is the internet’s address book.

It helps you find web pages based on their domain names (like gmass.co or nytimes.com) by identifying and translating their IP addresses.

In the case of reverse DNS (rDNS) or white labeling an IP, it identifies domain names through their IP addresses.

For instance, if you enter a specific IP address like 3.3.3.3, it will give you the domain name of that IP address.

And it isn’t just limited to websites. A reverse DNS lookup can be performed for emails as well.

By white-labeling your shared IP address, you allow your recipient to view your domain name directly rather than see an ambiguous IP address. This boosts your authenticity and helps you gain customer reliability.

3. APIs and Integrations

Mandrill offers several integrations that can optimize your transactional emails and also streamline your business workflows.

Through its webhook (reverse API) and event tracking API, you get real-time notifications on email delivery, bounce rates, and spam complaints — helping you to take action promptly.

What Is a Webhook?

A webhook allows an app to transfer real-time information to other apps based on user triggers. It is also known as a web callback or HTTP push API.

For example, if you buy something from an eCommerce app using online payment, you immediately get notifications on your banking app about the debited amount.

This is possible because of webhooks.

With Mandrill webhooks, you get notified instantly of any customer action when your email gets delivered. You’ll know whether it was opened, marked as spam, or blocked, etc.

Mandrill also integrates with a whole range of third-party tools to streamline your transactional email marketing campaign.

Some of Mandrill’s integrations include:

Stripe: a payment management software
Woopra: a customer journey analytics platform
Drupal: a content management system or CMS
WordPress: a content management systems or CMS

4. Multiple Transactional Email Templates

Who says you have to create every transactional email from scratch?

To speed things up, Mandrill offers multiple ready-to-use email templates. Just select a template that suits you, input your email content, and send it!

To add templates to your account, you can either custom-code one and send it to your Mandrill account, or add it via the Templates page in your account.

You can even send a Mailchimp template from your Mailchimp account to your connected Mandrill account to start creating your email.

What Are the Drawbacks of Mandrill?

Mandrill may have some handy features, but a few drawbacks are holding it back.

In this review, I’ll highlight the two major drawbacks of Mandrill.

1. You Need a Mailchimp Account to Use Mandrill

Previously, you didn’t need a Mailchimp account to access Mandrill.

You only had to buy the add-on, which was a very cost-effective option for small and medium businesses and startups, etc.

However, it’s now compulsory that you become a Mailchimp user to access Mandrill.

This means now you have to pay for both the Mailchimp plan and the Mandrill plan.

Moreover, using Mandrill isn’t that straightforward.

You need to log in to Mailchimp to access Mandrill — which is simply inconvenient.

2. Limited Message Archive

In Mandrill, the emails you send are archived for record-keeping purposes.

However, delivered emails are stored for only 30 days, while bounced emails are stored for 90 days.

This limits the campaign insights you get as you can’t check the cumulative growth in the customer-email interaction beyond the set timeframe. You’ll have to check the emails within 30 or 90 days; after that, the data is lost.

What Are Mandrill’s Pricing Plans?

The Mandrill app or Mailchimp Transactional Email offers you blocks of transactional emails. Each block contains 25,000 emails.

The pricing for blocks depends on the number of emails you need to send per month.

Mandrill’s pricing plans are as follows:

1–20 blocks: $20/block – supports 1–500K emails.
21–40 blocks: $18/block – supports 500K–1 million emails.
41–80 blocks: $16/block – supports 1–2 million emails.
81–120 blocks: $14/block – supports 2–3 million emails.
121–160 blocks: $12/block – supports 3–4 million emails.
161+ blocks: $10/block – supports over 4 million emails.

Wrapping Up

With its multiple features and diverse integrations, Mandrill can be a great option for your transactional emails.

However, it is not a perfect app.

Apart from limited email records, and no mobile app, you’ll have to use Mailchimp to use Mandrill. Why pay for two tools when you only need one?

So if you think Mandrill isn’t your cup of tea, you can always check out other options like SendGrid, Mailgun, Sendinblue, or Amazon SES.

Or you can always give GMass a try.

Interested in other SMTP service providers?

Check out my:

Based in the United States, GMass is comprehensive email marketing software that offers powerful email tracking and mail merge features right inside Gmail.

With a SendGrid integration and a user-friendly interface, GMass is the perfect tool for small businesses, churches, and individuals to send bulk emails to their target audience.

Additionally, there’s a handy mobile app and no limited email archive.

What more could you ask?

Download the GMass Chrome extension and experience its power today!

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

Thinking about using SendPulse for your email marketing needs?

SendPulse is a popular multi channel marketing platform option for companies who want to boost their digital marketing outreach through emails, SMS, and more.

But will it suit your business?

In this SendPulse review, I’ll give you a detailed rundown of the SendPulse features, pricing plans, and drawbacks. I’ll also highlight a powerful email marketing tool that can enhance SendPulse’s functionality.

This SendPulse Review Contains:

(Click on a link below to jump to a specific section.)

What is SendPulse?
What are the main features of SendPulse?
What are the drawbacks of SendPulse?
SendPulse pricing plans
Best way to add more functionality to SendPulse

Let’s get started.

What is SendPulse?

SendPulse (sendpulse.com) is an SMTP service provider and a multi channel marketing platform. It acts as a comprehensive, all-in-one solution for managing your marketing outreach activities through various channels like email campaigns, chatbots, SMS, and web push notifications.

What Is an SMTP Service?

An SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) service lets your business set up bulk email marketing mechanisms.

Why not just use a standard email service like Gmail?

Gmail places limits on the number of emails you can send every day. For example, on the free plan, it’s 500 emails/day, and it’s 2,000 emails/day for G Suite accounts. These might sound like a lot for personal use, but for a business owner, it’s simply not enough.

With SMTP services, you don’t have any such limitations and can easily conduct your high-volume email campaigns.

Additionally, SMTP services offer other handy features like dedicated IP addresses for better email deliverability, campaign performance tracking, and autoresponders, which Gmail can’t offer.

Want to learn more about SMTP? Click here to check out my ultimate guide to SMTP.

What Is a Multi Channel Marketing Automation Platform?

A multi channel marketing platform means that the service isn’t just limited to one digital marketing channel like emails.

It lets you send your marketing messages through multiple channels like:

Web push notification
SMS marketing
Telegram and Facebook chatbot

And what about marketing automation?

Marketing automation features let you automate a series of tasks in your marketing process.

For example:

Sending automated emails to follow-up on a subscriber
Sending surveys to gain feedback from your customers
Sending welcome emails to new subscribers to your email newsletters

How to Send Email via SendPulse

SendPulse is a stand-alone SMTP service, which means that you don’t have to integrate with other email services like Outlook or Gmail to send emails.

Here’s how to send email via SendPulse:

Open “Email” and click on “Create a campaign” in the SendPulse dashboard.
Add information about the campaign.
Choose an email template and customize it.
Configure campaign parameters, like the statistics settings.
Preview the campaign and send it.

Who Should Consider Using SendPulse?

SendPulse offers a ton of powerful marketing features from which both large companies and solopreneurs can benefit. It’s one reason it’s equally popular among large companies like PwC and small eCommerce stores and bloggers.

Which Mobile Platforms Does SendPulse Support?

SendPulse offers a mobile app for both Android and iOS devices. This is helpful as it lets you manage your marketing campaign remotely from your mobile device.

What Integrations Are Available for SendPulse?

SendPulse offers a wide range of integrations with third-party software like these:

eCommerce: Shopify and WooCommerce
CRM: Salesforce and Vtiger CRM
Subscription form builder: Typeform and CreateForm
Communication: Slack and GoToWebinar
CMS: SendPulse plugin for WordPress
Workflow automation: Zapier

What Are the Main Features of SendPulse?

SendPulse offers a variety of features to streamline your digital marketing campaigns

Here’s a detailed look at some key SendPulse features:

1. Free SMTP Server

An SMTP server provides the technical infrastructure to send out bulk emails, like transactional emails.

What Are Transactional Emails?

Transactional emails are automated emails triggered by a specific event or user action. For example, sending an automated “thank you” email when a customer buys something from your eCommerce store.

The problem is, building and maintaining your own SMTP server is incredibly technically complex and expensive — it’s a huge task.

Fortunately, SendPulse takes care of this for you.

SendPulse offers a free SMTP server for your marketing campaigns, which lets you send up to 12,000 monthly emails for free. However, for sending unlimited emails, you’ll have to opt for their paid plans (which start at $8/month for very limited contacts).

This will let you push past the limits of an in-house server (like Gmail) or the SMTP hosted by your ISP (Internet Service Provider).

How Do You Set Up an SMTP Server with SendPulse?

First, register with SendPulse and complete a short user profile form. After your form is reviewed and approved, you’ll get your SendPulse SMTP credentials, which you can use to set up the SMTP server.

Additionally, you can configure two extra authentication parameters — DKIM and SPF.

What Is DKIM?

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is an email authentication process that encrypts outgoing mail and issues a digital signature to your emails. This helps validate the email sender’s identity, and only the receiver’s mail server can decrypt the encrypted email.

What Is SPF?

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a security protocol to validate IP addresses and web applications that deliver emails from a particular domain.

An SPF record has a huge database of IP addresses and applications that are authorized to send emails using a specific domain name.

This way, only authorized applications and IP addresses are accepted into the recipient’s inbox. Emails from unauthorized sources are rejected or flagged as spam.

SendPulse SMTP servers also feature:

Dedicated IP addresses for maintaining a better sender’s reputation and avoiding getting blacklisted for someone else.
SSL (Secure Socket Layer) connection to ensure secure email deliverability.
Statistics to track data for unopened emails, unsubscribe rates, or click-through rates.

2. Campaign Analytics and A/B Testing

SendPulse doesn’t generate a campaign statistics report by default, unlike other email marketing services.

To get the data for an email campaign, you must enable the tracking feature when creating the campaign, and you must specify what you want to track.

SendPulse let you track email metrics like:

Email open rate: See how many subscribers on your mailing list opened your emails.
Click-through rate: Shows how many readers from your email list clicked on the links present in your email.
Geographic stats: Know the number of emails opened based on the subscriber’s country.
Device stats: View what devices your subscribers are using to read your emails.
Error reports: Identify any error that occurred during the sending process so you can troubleshoot and resend.

With all these stats, performing A/B testing for your email campaigns becomes far easier!

What Is A/B testing?

It’s a method of sending an email to one set of subscribers and sending a small variation of that email to another set of subscribers.

The performance of these two campaigns is analyzed to determine which one gave better results. This helps you pinpoint which elements of your email your subscribers like the most.

How to Do an A/B Test in SendPulse

To perform A/B testing in SendPulse:

Choose a mailing list.
Choose the number of test groups.
Choose the parameters that you want to test:
1. Test the sender.
2. Test the subject line.
3. Test the email content.
Set up the testing groups.
Choose when to send.
Send and track the results.

This way, you can determine what works best for your subscribers and tailor your campaigns accordingly.

Ajay’s Email Tip

To skyrocket your conversion rates, you should know how to start and end emails in a way that engages your audience. Check out my in-depth guides to learn the right way to start and end emails.

3. SMS and Web Push Notification Addon

Since SendPulse is a multi channel marketing platform, you aren’t limited just to email marketing campaigns. They also offer SMS marketing and web push notification services.

Here’s a quick look at each service:

A. Bulk SMS Service

SendPulse allows you to send an SMS message to any mobile device through 1,000+ mobile network operators across 200+ countries. This lets your subscriber get SMS notification for your marketing messages.

Here’s what you get with SendPulse’s bulk SMS marketing services:

Complete language support
SMS personalization
SMS automation
Recipient segmentation
GSM and CDMA support

B. Web Push Notification Service

SendPulse allows you to set up a push campaign across popular browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. They also support browser notifications on your subscriber’s smartphone.

What Are Push Notifications?

Web push notifications are messages from a webpage that you receive in your browser. They can be used to notify visitors about promotional offers, new content, or important updates.

4. Drag and Drop Editor

SendPulse offers a drag-and-drop email builder to help you create beautiful, adaptive emails easily. You don’t need to have any HTML coding skills for this — just add images, videos, or text; then move around the elements, and you’re done!

For added flexibility, SendPulse also lets you:

Customize background, text color, or other parameters to match your style.
Preview YouTube videos in your emails by simply linking them.
Add social media icons in your emails and link them to your social media pages.

Additionally, if you don’t want to go through the template designing process, SendPulse lets you conveniently choose from over 130 ready-made email templates.

What Are the Drawbacks of SendPulse?

While SendPulse is a robust multi-channel marketing platform, it isn’t perfect.

Here are two downsides of using SendPulse:

1. Interface Can Be Challenging

A good user interface is essential for any marketing tool since you’ll spend a lot of time working with it.

However, many SendPulse reviews highlight that the SendPulse UI looks outdated, and some of its processes can be hard to work with and frustrating. For example, you have to specify which email metrics must be tracked manually each time you send a campaign.

2. Campaign Approvals Can Take Time

After you are done creating an email campaign, it has to go through a vetting process by the SendPulse support team to prevent spam or other illegal email practices.

This is done to abide by the online regulations and maintain the server’s reputation.

However, as this is an additional step that does require a bit of time, it can delay your marketing efforts considerably.

SendPulse Pricing Plans

SendPulse offers various plans depending on the marketing channel you prefer:

A. SendPulse Pricing Plan for Email Marketing

Free plan: supports up to 500 subscribers in your mailing list and limited email sending features.
Subscription plan: starts at $8/month for 500 subscribers – offers unlimited promotional emails and professional SendPulse features.
“Pay as you go” paid plan: starts at $32 for 10,000 emails – the price depends on the volume of email you send rather than the number of subscribers you have.
VIP plan (for businesses with more than 1 million subscribers): custom pricing – offers a personal manager and custom-made email template.

B. Pricing Plan for Transactional Emails

Free plan: supports up to 12,000 emails.
Basic: starts at $8.85/month for 25,000 emails.
Pro: starts at $74.85/month for 100,000 emails.
Enterprise: starts at $274.86/month for 500,000 emails.

C. Pricing Plan for Chatbots

Free plan: supports unlimited subscribers + up to 10,000 messages per month and 3 bots + SendPulse branding.
Paid plan: starts at $9.85/month for 1,000 subscribers – offers unlimited messages and bots + no SendPulse branding.

D. Pricing Plan for Web Push

Basic plan (Free): for up to 10,000 subscribers – offers unlimited push notifications + personalize emails + automation features + SendPulse branding.
Pro plan: starts at $19.85/month for 30,000 subscribers – includes API access + A/B testing + segmentation + priority customer support + branding removal.

E. Pricing Plan for Bulk SMS Services

In the US: $0.024 per SMS message.
In the UK: $0.04 per SMS message.

Best Way to Add More Functionality to SendPulse

Sure, SendPulse has its flaws — but don’t let that hold you back when there’s an effective solution to them.

Software like GMass can help you get around most of these drawbacks and carry out your email marketing efforts smoothly.

What Is GMass?

GMass is a powerful email outreach software that works right inside Gmail. Used by employees from major companies like LinkedIn, Google, and Twitter, GMass’ powerful features help enhance the functionality of an SMTP provider like SendPulse.

However, GMass isn’t just for tech giants.

Anyone from solopreneurs and small businesses to churches can use GMass to send bulk, automated emails to their customer base.

GMass can help you:

Send mass emails through your SMTP service simply using the Gmail platform.
Set up multiple user access for your whole team.
Analyze your email campaign performance using detailed Campaign Reports.
Schedule multiple emails and follow-ups easily.
Add personalization for your bulk emails.

The best part?

Setting up GMass is a breeze. All you need to do is install the Chrome browser extension, sign in with your Gmail ID, and you’re all set!

How Does GMass Help Improve SendPulse?

GMass is a rare Gmail-based email marketing platform that can work with an SMTP service like SendPulse.

But how does it actually help SendPulse’s email marketing software?

Send Bulk Emails without Leaving the Familiar Gmail Interface

I’ve talked about the drawbacks of SendPulse and how its interface can be difficult to work with.

Luckily, you won’t have to work with their interface if you’re using GMass.

Here’s how:

GMass works within your Gmail dashboard.

This means that you can replace a complex SMTP interface like SendPulse with the all-familiar single platform of Gmail.

Instead of wasting time trying to learn how email delivery platforms like SendPulse work, GMass allows you to access all SendPulse SMTP functionalities without compromising the ease-of-use of Gmail’s user-friendly interface.

Now you can focus your time and energy on things you’re great at, like analyzing marketing reports and managing your digital marketing team!

Click here to learn how to set up an SMTP server in Gmail with GMass.

Wrapping Up

Using a dedicated SMTP service like SendPulse can easily boost your businesses’ marketing efforts. And while it’s a powerful email marketing software, SendPulse offers you more than just email marketing campaign functionality.

However, SendPulse has a few drawbacks that could limit how user-friendly it is.

Fortunately, it’s an easy fix if you use GMass!

GMass lets you use all the SendPulse SMTP services within your familiar Gmail interface, making it the perfect companion to SendPulse.

Why not sign up for GMass today to streamline your SendPulse experience!

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

Ever since we launched the ability to hook your account up to an external SMTP provider and essentially “break” Gmail’s sending limits, one of the questions we get asked most is:

“If I have a gmail.com email address, won’t my emails go to Spam if my emails ‘from’ gmail.com are sent via SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES, or any server that’s not Google’s?”

It’s a great question and a legitimate concern! Let’s address why it’s not an issue and even offer proof that Google says it’s okay — for now anyway.

Let’s check the SPF record

To understand why this is acceptable, we must understand how SPF, DKIM, and DMARC work. Gmail.com’s SPF record is this:

v=spf1 redirect=_spf.google.com

Since this record is asking us to look at another record, the SPF record for _spf.google.com is this:

v=spf1 include:_netblocks.google.com include:_netblocks2.google.com include:_netblocks3.google.com ~all

What this means is that emails with a MAIL-FROM of gmail.com must have an IP that’s contained in one of the designators above. Remember, there’s a difference between the MAIL-FROM address and the actual From address seen by receivers of email. SPF only checks the MAIL-FROM address that’s seen by the server, not by the recipient.

Now let’s say you’re sending through SendGrid or Amazon SES. By default, when you send through either one of these services, even though your “from” address is [email protected], the MAIL-FROM is [email protected] or [email protected]. Because the MAIL-FROM isn’t gmail.com, you’re still in compliance.

So for SPF, you’re compliant.

Okay, what about DKIM?

When you send an email from your gmail.com account inside Gmail to a friend, the DKIM signature on your email looks like this:

DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed;
        d=gmail.com; s=20161025;
        h=mime-version:from:date:message-id:subject:to;
        bh=g3zLYH4xKxcPrHOD18z9YfpQcnk/GaJedfustWU5uGs=;
        b=f8vKOrTL8SFHtNe4G69kvXGs6xfx2D4whxS8vl0j6rslGIK9INVVCGEDRb4o6fFM6n
         BmpkNaAECGCvvf1imZfVjlqaFpM2abkVum+PwKkCugt8KpKEPDGmVuMst8B7gaMvBxvo
         BIygX7oIRTKRtraG/Esug0cxPTY8wDDvjXNa9Z/zLGcO7n57V7IzE2hzguYHL4xeLv7q
         WsI0NDFDGa23NVlSfX+AdnyCLbSa3tQfhDjafRFglhTL0dAX1x0Nou4QIjN2tD8IS8GQ
         YhIlHJzHT4h5bNEcxi2n/JxvjTmmeyw2eGWCy3qvjKey+QfNtxz8e2NFDxaH6RbUCxYB
         fDjw==

The email is signed by the domain gmail.com, which is the d=gmail.com part of this messy looking text. Technically, what’s happening here is that Gmail is taking the email you’ve typed, and hashing it using a private key for Gmail that only Google knows. This private key is proprietary, hidden, and kept under lock and key.

When you send an email from your gmail.com account using SendGrid or Amazon SES, each of those providers signs the email with their respective domain. SendGrid signs outbound emails with sendgrid.net, and Amazon SES signs outbound emails with amazonses.com. It’s worth mentioning that both SendGrid and Amazon SES allow you to brand the signing domain around your own domain if you wish; but out of the box, both providers will sign emails with their own domains so that emails are DKIM compliant right from the beginning.

DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=sendgrid.net;
h=mime-version:subject:from:to:content-type;
s=smtpapi; bh=MLOxbqehWaMM2DEWhURrbRF13UbLZJkxWDLneKqUJVY=;
b=t5iyssLz1OFtFDZ0MRsju381iqwZi0j7vshv3SWscVhwmGw4GZP4o2+bzj6/gugGmkYq
huZ+af3+rqM0/i872nWmp2mOQsOrzwv49ZWb5Pg67x92sGghAHKXBLh7GfteN81qcX2K+3
O+B4Wl8G54VC53AP1YPoRhHDEduizjC+8=
Subject: Sending from gmail.com through SendGrid
From: Ajay Goel <[email protected]>
To: Ajay Goel <[email protected]>

This can be confusing, but providers signing with their own domains rather than gmail.com is allowed, because with pure DKIM alone, an email can be signed with any domain you want. Of course, it has to be a domain you control, but it doesn’t have to be a domain that the email is “from.” It’s counterintuitive, but it doesn’t have to be the domain in the MAIL-FROM line or the display From address. You can see that Gmail adds a header to the received email to indicate that DKIM has passed based on the signing using the sendgrid.net domain:

Authentication-Results: mx.google.com;
dkim=pass [email protected] header.s=smtpapi header.b=t5iyssLz;
spf=pass (google.com: domain of [email protected] designates 167.89.100.13 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom="[email protected]";
dmarc=fail (p=NONE sp=QUARANTINE dis=NONE) header.from=gmail.com

So DKIM passes.

Now you might be thinking, “Well, if an email can be signed with any old domain, how does that make the email ‘authentic?'” The original point of DKIM wasn’t to prevent spam or even to determine what networks can send for what domain. The point of DKIM was to ensure that the contents of the email weren’t altered while in transit from the sender to the recipient. All it needed was access to the private signing key for some domain — any domain used in the d= part to sign the email.

Later, DMARC came along and provided enforcement of the domain in the DKIM signature by having to MATCH the domain in the Display From Address. But pure DKIM alone doesn’t require this.

If you have a sharp eye, you might notice that in the above example, it says dmarc=fail. Uh oh, that’s a problem, right? Actually, no! Read on …

Last but not least, let’s examine DMARC

The tricky part is passing DMARC. You know how I just said that with DKIM, you can sign your email with any domain you want … it doesn’t have to be any of the two “from” domains. A domain’s DMARC policy specifies whether those domains have to match up … it’s called “alignment.” A domain’s DMARC policy can specify whether the SPF domain has to match the display From domain, and whether the DKIM domain has to match the From domain. With DMARC, alignment can be “relaxed” or “strict,” and if not specified, “relaxed” is assumed. Now, “relaxed” still means that the domains have to match, but it allows a subdomain to match the root domain.

Without further ado, here is gmail.com’s DMARC record:

v=DMARC1; p=none; sp=quarantine; rua=mailto:[email protected]

The relevant portion to examine here is the part that says: p=none.

What this means is, because there’s a DMARC record present, relaxed domain alignment is expected for either SPF or DKIM to pass DMARC. Now when you send through SendGrid or Amazon SES with their default non-branded-domain setups, the domain alignment will not pass for EITHER SPF or DKIM, DMARC will fail. BUT, because the record contains p=none, Google is instructing servers NOT to punish the email because of it.

So there you have it. You can send “from” your gmail.com account through a third-party provider like SendGrid and Amazon SES. SPF and DKIM will pass. DMARC will fail, but it won’t matter because gmail.com’s DMARC record says not to take any action for DMARC failures.

Okay, so then which SMTP services will let you send “from” your gmail.com account? We did an exhaustive technical review recently, and here are the SMTP services that will allow you to send from your Gmail account: SendGrid, Mailgun, Mailjet, Sendinblue, SMTP.com, SMTP2Go, and Amazon SES. Two providers, SocketLabs and Mandrill (part of MailChimp), will NOT let you do this.

But will you hit the Inbox?

If you’re an email marketer or cold emailer, that’s all that really matters. My tests show that generally, you will. Google controls about half the world’s email Inboxes, and it’s the platform on which I’ve tested deliverability the most. In a couple of tests I’ve just run, emails sent from my gmail.com account hit the Inbox of my G Suite account.

Note that the email is sent “via sendgrid.net.” That’s to be expected. There are conditions that result in the “via” tag next to the sender’s name, but that designation is harmless.

Whether Gmail places emails in the Inbox vs. Promotions vs. Spam folder is not a matter of passing a few simple checks, and it’s certainly not only a matter of whether the email originates from Gmail itself or an external server. Google uses a complex AI-based machine learning algorithm that analyzes millions of factors to make that decision.

Occasionally the recipient might also see this designation at the top of the message, but in our experience, even this designation doesn’t alter Inbox vs. Spam placement:

So what’s the conclusion, then?

Senders are often hampered by Gmail’s daily sending limits. However, in our experience, senders who are deploying wanted email to recipients can send from their gmail.com accounts through external SMTP servers, allowing them to send more email than they would otherwise be able to send through their Gmail account.

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

We are trialing a new VIP pay-per-incident support program. If you need help urgently or are experiencing a crisis, you can request VIP support and choose either immediate resolution or 12-hour resolution.

How much is it?

The cost is $100 USD for immediate resolution and $50 USD for 12-hour resolution.

Why are we doing this?

Over the years, we’ve witnessed frustration from users who were in an urgent situation and needed help quickly, but fast help wasn’t available because our business model didn’t allow for fast problem resolution. We’ve also worked with a bunch of third-party email delivery vendors like SendGrid, Mailjet, and SendInBlue, and we’ve seen first-hand just how terrible support from many email service providers can be. We’ve personally encountered lengthy delays, wrong answers, and support personnel that know less about how email works than the average email marketer.

The fees seems expensive. Why so much?

GMass is a service for which most users pay around $10-$20/month. It’s difficult to make a profit when we also provide free support to users within that low monthly cost, especially when a support issue requires a deep investigation. For example, if we spend 30 minutes helping a user who’s paying $10/month, then we’ve already taken a loss on that customer’s account. By charging a premium price for this option, we can resolve issues quickly for those users that are in mission-critical situations by providing priority service without straining our regular support team.

What happened to “regular” GMass support?

Free support is still available and unchanged. Given the volume of users we have though, sometimes users may have to wait a day or two before receiving a response through regular support.

Why should I pay for VIP support?

When you submit a request for VIP support, the issue is handled by a lead engineer that has the power to alter system settings in a way that regular support staff cannot. The VIP support team consists of experts in all of GMass’s internal operations who can resolve issues quickly. They’re intuitive and will understand the issue you’re facing with minimal explanation from you. The lead engineer that handles your case will have the ability to:

Alter internal settings to diagnose and resolve an issue
Step through source code to simulate the issue
Release new code to fix an issue
Route emails through different servers if there’s a sending issue

Who is eligible to receive VIP support?

Any user with an active subscription can request VIP support. It doesn’t matter whether you’re on the Minimal, Standard, Premium, or Team plan — as long as you have a subscription of some type, you’re eligible.

How quickly can I expect a resolution of my issue?

It varies by the issue. You should expect to receive a response from an engineer acknowledging your request within 15 minutes of your request. The engineer will then work with you to resolve the issue.

What if the issue I’m reporting is a bug?

Like all complex software, GMass isn’t bug-free. Even popular consumer tools like Google, Facebook, and Netflix have bugs. Please don’t expect GMass (or any software) to be bug-free. If you use the VIP support system, you should expect to pay the $100 USD fee, even if you’re reporting a bug. The benefit, however, is that we’ll likely fix the bug on the spot for you.

What issues can VIP support handle?

Our team can help with almost any issue related to GMass.

Examples of issues are:

account-level issues
campaign sending issues
Gmail limit issues
Google Sheet issues
tracking domain setup with your DNS account
setup with an external SMTP relay to send beyond Gmail’s limits

One area that we cannot guarantee resolution, however, is deliverability. While we can address technical aspects of deliverability like SPF, DomainKeys, and DMARC issues, if your emails are going to the recipient’s Spam folder instead of their Inbox, there usually isn’t a quick fix. We can, however, point you to our own tools to help you get to the bottom of the issue.

I need VIP help! How do I submit a request?

Fill out the support form and select either the Immediate or 12-hour timing options from the dropdown.