To date I have been using SendGrid as an SMTP relay service for sending emails from the Webmite.  But now SendGrid has put a time limit of their free SMTP relay account, presumably to force users onto their expensive paid service.

The only other free SMTP relay service that I know of is SMTP2GO but it has its own issues.  Does anyone know of any other free SMTP relay services that can work with TCP or IP or HTTP (not HTTPS)?

Webmite applications do not need to send many emails but all the SMTP relay services that I have found are geared towards volume commercial users who are happy to pay for the service.

Geoff

Sending email from code is becoming difficult. My JAQ software can send emails ( invoices/quotes to customers and purchase orders to suppliers ) and in the early days I had a dedicated email server just to handle these. The code ( php mailer code, the same thing this forum uses ) would use a username and password to connect to my email server, then send the email. But as time went on, more and more of these emails would end up in the recipients junk/spam folder. The main reason is the sender's domain didn't match the mail servers domain. eg, fred@thebusiness.com was sending mail from mail@jaqsmailserver.com. The recipients email clients didn't like this, so into the junk folder it goes.

I'm seeing the same with a couple clients that use the STMP2Go service. Jaq sends the email, the SMTP2GO service sends it on, but the email client at the recipients end, or their own email server, rejects it.

The solution is to use an existing username and password that the sending party uses for one of their own employees, eg, fred@thebusiness.com. Or, create a new account on the business domain for just this purpose, eg jaq@thebusiness.com.

This worked fine until a few Office 365 users started having issues, as Office 365 now wants to use a 2 factor authentication. The are ways to get this working with php mailer, but its painful, needing keys or fixed IP's etc. The same would apply to the Webmite code.

But, if you have your own domain and email server, its a lot easier to get working. If you set up a Webmite to use an existing email account ( or create one like webmite@geoffg.net in your example ), you can send a email, and even change the "reply to " header to your own email address, that still seams to be acceptable by the fussy email clients.

Its late, I'm tired, hope this made sense.

Glenn

Just asked ChatGPT

  Quote  

Service Free Tier Limitations Features Notes
Sendinblue 300 emails/day Marketing automation, transactional emails Free tier includes a daily sending limit.
Mailgun 5,000 emails/month for the first 3 months API access, analytics, email validation After 3 months, pricing applies.
Elastic Email 100 emails/day API access, analytics, email templates Free tier is limited to basic features.
Gmail SMTP 500 emails/day (for personal accounts) Integration with Google services Requires a Gmail account; may have restrictions.
Zoho Mail 5 users, 25 emails/user/day Email hosting, collaboration tools Good for small teams; limited features.
SMTP2GO 1,000 emails/month Analytics, email tracking Free tier has limited features.

I have no clue about this stuff but the comments with this video seem pretty positive.

Thanks, the problem with Gmail is that they want SSL which the Webmite cannot do.  Otherwise, Gmail would have been perfect.  I will check the others but what I would really like to find is a service using simple SMTP on port 25.

Thanks for the suggestions Glenn.  I mostly want to do this for users of the Webmite firmware who will not have their own mail server.

I live in hope,
Geoff
Edited 2025-09-16 01:51 by Geoffg

You could just build the SMTP server into the WebMite. This approach is used by systems that want to simplify the process, although the best example I can think of is malware.

If there is room available, here is some MIT licensed code:

Here