Selecting a free SMTP service
Building and maintaining an email delivery platform in-house can be both expensive and time consuming. That’s why even big-name, techie brands, like Github, Lyft, Slack, and Shopify, often rely on third-party SMTP relays and API services like Mailgun to send outgoing emails. Mailgun is an SMTP service provider for transactional email and email marketing campaigns, offering robust features, support, and analytics—for free!
Mailgun’s cloud-based SMTP relay and flexible HTTP API is both powerful and affordable. See what you can accomplish with the world's best email delivery platform.
Understanding your SMTP options
For many just starting out and looking for a free SMTP service to handle their outgoing mail and email delivery needs, Gmail is the default option. Google has a reliable infrastructure that you can count on to stay up and running. While Gmail works well enough for low-volume email delivery, it’s not without its limits. Depending on how many emails you need to send or customers you need to reach in a day, you could quickly outpace Google’s limitations for outgoing mail. And when you do bump up against those limits, your gmail.com account may be temporarily blocked from sending additional outgoing mail – a potential nightmare when those emails matter.
Often Google just isn’t a fit when you need an email service to send at scale. That’s where Mailgun’s plug-and-play email service comes in. It’s incredibly flexible and intuitive. Whether your domain relies on a site like WordPress and you’re looking for an SMTP relay or your developers prefer working with APIs, getting your free SMTP service set up on Mailgun’s SMTP server can be done in a matter of minutes.
Features to look for in SMTP providers
Choosing a free SMTP server is important when you’re just starting out, but there are other factors to consider beyond the price tag. Think about whether the third-party SMTP service offers:
Email address validation services to improve your mailing list (because handling thousands of outgoing emails doesn’t matter much if you’re sending marketing campaigns or transactional emails to bad email addresses)
Real-time email tracking and advanced analytics for your emails, so you can track not only sent emails but customer engagement and open rates
Detailed logs to diagnose and eradicate email delivery failures
Deliverability features so you can minimize bounce rates and spam complaints
Inbound email parsing and routing
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An SMTP service that scales
Particularly for growing businesses, you want access to powerful features, real-time analytics, and the ability to scale as both your email marketing and outgoing mail multiplies. That flexibility is at the core of Mailgun so as your business and marketing campaigns evolve, your free SMTP service doesn’t have to change.
Sign up for free and see how Mailgun’s SMTP service helps you increase your email delivery rates.
Check out our plans to bundle together features for better deliverability. For businesses that send over 100,000 emails.
Other features
Explore beyond SMTP
Mailgun has a variety of features for companies in need of free SMTP services.