On Tue, 9 Jan 2024, Paul Heinlein wrote:
I use SendGrid for outbound mail from madboa.com because most large mail services nowadays don't trust one-off cloud VMs to send mail. (Which isn't stupid, per se, but is frustrating since I have gone out of the way to do all the right things regarding DMARC, DKIM, SPF, etc.)
Paul, Thank you. I decided to use an outbound mailing service to contact prospective clients rather than using a bash script and mailx.
Anyway, I use smtp.sendgrid.net as my relay host; it requires a (free, for me, since I don't send much mail) API key to use.
I won't be sending a lot of mail frequently so my initial impression is that their free account would work for me, too.
It mostly works. There are two irritations for me: First, sendgrid must either sell its mailing list or there is a known way to harvest sendgrid user accounts because I get phishing/spam concerning (not from, just concerning) sendgrid with some frequency.
I get a lot of sendgrid spam, too, from their other users. They're good at following up on my UCE reports.
Second, if you send mail to a non-existent account, you don't get a direct SMTP notice. I've had to log into sendgrid's web interface to inspect and/or empty that list. Until you remove the address from that online list, you can't send mail to it again. (This is an issue for me at work, for reasons I don't care to explain here.)
Okay. I think it unlikely I'll trip this non-action, but it's good to know. Much appreciated, Rich
