Temporary SMPT mail service?

[rgilman]

In the reading I've been doing about CiviMail, I came across this listing of mailing providers. Of the ones listed, the one that seemed most interesting to me was SparkPost. They have a free Developer Account that allows up to 15K emails per month (see here and then scroll down to the FAQ about the developer accounts). We are still a long way from that volume.

I'm still attracted to having our own mail server that can handle both inbound and outbound email but In the short-term we could continue to handle inbound on rijr.com and handle outbound from CiviMail on SparkPost.

Here's a good guide (and an extension) for using SparkPost with CiviMail. Take a look and let me know what you think.

[rgilman]

There is also another extension that seems to have more users and fewer issues in github.

[wunluv]

I'm really attracted to the pricing and feature set of SparkPost. The readily civicrm extensions are a bonus. Overall this looks like a good short term/fallback option.

Ideally, I would like for us to have our own mail server.

Running transactional emails through SparkPost could become pricey as the network grows. For Heavenletters, the project I mentioned that has much overlap with CI's webdev work, Sparkpost would be too expensive because we send in excess of 600K emails a month there.

If we sent transaction emails through the very same server BFN is hosted on, then we'd also have to make sure that that IP is accepted by the various ISPs. With our own mail server we could relay transaction emails through it.

[rgilman]

I've created a developer account on SparkPost and have gone through the sending domain setup for context.org. I've created an API key.

On my local dev setup which is running bfn including civi, I installed the SparkPost extension and configured it with the API key. All went well except that, understandably, SparkPost can't communicate back with my local dev setup. I expect that further testing will need to wait until we have bfn.context.org running on the new dev server.