Postmark vs. SMTP Email Relay Solutions

If email deliverability is important, then Postmark is king. I've used all sorts of providers, with dedicated IPs and without. Postmark has always had the best deliverability and has resulted in the least amount of customer service time wasted dealing with users who simply did not receive an important email from us. It is pricier than other options, but it's well worth it if deliverability is at all important to you.

Incentivized

SMTP Email Relay Solutions is a great service if you are in a field where sending out bulk information, such as monthly statements to clients, invoices, or any back-to-back emails that would normally get flagged for "spam" is required.

• Excellent real time tracking of production server.
• Automated reporting is very nice. Great to not have to pull reports manually.
• User management is very easy.
• Cost effective.

Incentivized

• It allows us to send email through the secure email gateway.
• We are able to track and scan all email communications
• It provides a way for legacy and current applications to send out notification and mass email communications.

Incentivized

• Not many cons since it's pretty straightforward, and if email delivery service was often impacted, we'd most likely find a new provider.

Incentivized

• As with any technology on a server, we sometimes see issues with downtime related to network changes or firewall updates.
• It can be a challenge to work with some of our older applications when the TLS feature is used.
• I wish there was a more direct way to reliably use SMTP for mass email sends without the fear of being blacklisted.

Incentivized

The only thing that confused me initially was that if you don't put a specific sender email into the Wordpress plugin settings (I use Postmark exclusively with Wordpress site), it won't send emails. I thought that having selected the option to send via any @domain.com email, I wouldn't need to fill out a specific email to send from, but that isn't the case. I sorted that out quickly with support.

I have yet to encounter any hiccups with their services. I send a large volume of emails monthly and have yet to experience any delay in my work.

Fortunately, the support is not often needed, but when it is, they are available and ready to dive into your needs and often your customer's needs. It's a bad day when you have to call your email delivery service provider, it means that your own customers most likely are calling your support team, and you're calling to see what the issue is. Postmark makes this process simple, and they own their mistakes. Always nice to see that.

Incentivized

In my opinion, sendgrid is complete garbage compared to Postmark, it's not even a comparison. I had issues with emails being sent to spam using sendgrid IPs. The dashboard is inferior, the setup is fairly comparable in difficulty, and ongoing visibility is inferior.

Office 365 does use secure non-standard ports for SMTP connectivity causing a problem with older programs. SMTP Email Delivery from Exchange solves this problem by giving the network admin full control over ports and specific program connections. While we do use both Office 365 and the SMTP Email Delivery we find that a mix is needed in order to meet all expectations for our end users. The majority of our SMTP communications, for users, go through Office 365 while the majority of our applications and servers do go through the SMTP Email Delivery service.

Incentivized

• It is really "set and forget." I have not had any issues that I've needed to deal with. It just works.

Incentivized

• It's the easiest way to send mail out. No worries about complex configurations.
• It can be finicky when used in a hybrid Office 365 environment to get the proper pathways secured and working.
• I wish there were a better way to send out mass emails, on-site, without our domain or server IP being blacklisted.

Incentivized