: Using a SMTP Service for email This may be a horribly obvious question, but I'm learning and just need someone to confirm it for me. I putting together a private social network that needs

@Angie530

An smpt relay service will solve the issue if either hostgator allows SMTP traffic out to 3rd party relays (this is usually done a different port than smtp 25 which they probably monitor), or if the relay service supports data coming in from a different port.

3 Good choices for transactional email are:
1. MailGun - Amazing API
2. SendGrid - The favorite for spammers
3. Mandrill -

all 3 above also have an api. This lets your php or asp or whatever app send email using port 80. If you have a few hours you can update your app to use the api instead of SMTP mail functions. They add other features such as bounce / reputation / read tracking.

My favorite of the 3 is again mailgun. They have amazing support and are not part of rackspace. The best part of mailgun is that it can work with a postfix mail server. So if you ever get super huge, you can have your mail server use mailgun as its smtp relay and take advantage of all the reputation / read tracking features in mailgun. Mailgun will post this data instantly back to your webapp, so you can reaact to data in real time!

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@Si4351233

I use Zoho email for my SMTP email. They provide 3 free pop accounts. I did this because I am running my own server on ec2 and decided to use separate servers for email and not have to worry about managing email servers.

Google Apps is another good options. I'm not familiar with either Google's or Zoho's TOS on rate limits.

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