SMTP use clarification - email

Question

need some high level direction.
I'm building a website. I'd like to be able to send emails for various situations.
when user registers, send confirmation email
if an error occurs, send me an error email
when users join a message string and a new post occurs, send all users on the string an email
send mass email for weekly updates
Can I use a free SMTP server such as Gmail?
If so, what is the diff between using Gmail vs a paid service such as SendGrid?
Will using gmail SMTP be sufficient for my purposes?
Thanks for any clarifications ...

Answer 1

I work at SendGrid.
SendGrid provides a few things out of the box that take a bit of extra work via gmail. You get analytics for things like opens and link clicks, as well as device and browser stats for those events. We provide whitelabeling that will help you configure the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records for your domain so you can send from your own domain rather than from gmail.com and be sure that receiving servers will trust the message. Also there's unsubscribe management.
gmail has some limits as well, described here. SendGrid lets you send 12,000 emails a month with no daily cap on the free account. So if you think you might eventually outgrow gmail, there's no reason not to start with SendGrid now.
Additionally, if you plan to interact programmatically with your email, there are a number of officially supported Sendgrid libraries that make integrating easy. When you integrate with the API or our custom SMTP-based API header, you can use templates, perform A/B tests, and assign unique arguments and categories to your emails and take advantage of lots of the things that let you decouple your content from your code.
Let me know if you have any additional questions.

Answer 2

The main reason why people go for services such as SendGrid is because of how hectic it can be to rightly configure your SMTP settings. I would say try going with SMTP, if native GMAIL fails, try doing it via Outlook(download the GMAIL Outlook plugin). If you can't, then go for SendGrid, which is very easy to use. Hope this helps :)

Answer 3

You can do this with an SMTP server like Gmail.
In your situation you could set up a process to send email messages when an event occurs, something like this (in Python):
import smtplib
import time
MYEMAIL = "enter your email"
def GetSecurePassword(): ...
def CheckNewUsersRegistered():
...
return emails_messages_list
def NewErrorOccurred():
...
return MYEMAILs_messages_list
def NewMessagePostedByAUser():
...
return emails_messages_list
def NewWeeklyMessageReadyForAUser():
...
return emails_messages_list
def Login():
server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com', 587)
server.starttls()
server.login(MYEMAIL, GetSecurePassword())
return server
def SendEmailsMessages(emails_messages_list,server):
for email,message in emails_messages_list:
server.sendmail(MYEMAIL, email, message)
def run():
while True:
time.sleep(600)
server=Login()
SendEmailsMessages(CheckNewUsersRegistered(),server)
SendEmailsMessages(NewErrorOccurred(),server)
...
server.quit()
if __name__ == "__main__":
run()
If you have a free Gmail account, you can send between 100/day to 500/day messages per day (depending on how you are logged in). You could also pay Google $10/month for GSuite which would give you up to 2000/day.
The problem with the homegrown approach is you have to reinvent redundancy and fail safe modes - what happens when your process chokes? How do you migrate your process to a new server or add extra users? With a paid service like Sendgrid, they will have solved these problems. I suppose it comes down to the price/value ratio of what Sendgrid offers, vs what you need and how easy is it for you to do it in-house. If getting really good at automating mail is not your business's core competency/differentiator then it's likely Sendgrid will be better value for money.
EDIT: Just remember though, the code summarized by ellipses is the code you will have to write anyway whichever way you go.