Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is a straightforward process that allows users to send, relay, and monitor outgoing emails. An SMTP relay service—also commonly known as an SMTP gateway service—takes this process a step further by allowing you to send more transactional and marketing emails.
Instead of managing your program, you can trust the SMTP relay service to manage and maintain the SMTP server for you.
But why is it crucial to have an SMTP relay service and how does it work?
Hosted on the cloud and accessed on a web browser, peer-to-peer email isn’t sufficient for specific types of mass email campaigns and programs. Many businesses that send out bulk emails, such as newsletters or automated messages prompted by user interaction, need more tailored outgoing email solutions. Utilizing an SMTP relay server for email distribution provides just that.
When an email service provider (ESP) tries to send an email, it connects to the configured SMTP server to communicate. Once the ESP can communicate with the configured server, it can deliver the email message through an SMTP relay server.
SMTP relay servers work similarly to snail mail—the server essentially acts as the post office.
Imagine that you have to send someone a physical letter. You write down addresses for yourself and the recipient on an envelope. After you drop it off at your local post office, the post office then determines which other post office is closest to the recipient and directs the letter there.
When you send an email, the message includes the recipient’s destination address and your return address information—for example your email address, IP address, and time stamp.
Your local server uses this information to send your message to the recipient’s server for successful delivery.
SMTP mail relay is the process of transferring an email from one server to another for delivery.
For example, if you work for company A and send an email to someone at company B, you connect to your company’s SMTP server. Then, your company’s SMTP server delivers your email to company B’s server. One server accepting an email from another server is relaying.
If you send an email to someone with an email address at the same domain as yours, there isn’t a second server involved. This isn’t relaying. It’s like sending a physical letter to someone in your town—your local post office receives and delivers it without involving another post office.
SMTP mail relay routes emails through a trusted third party to help deliver high volumes of email. It specializes in sending large batches of emails, such as newsletters, or automatic transactional emails, such as delivery confirmations and password resets.
When an SMTP relay server is public, there’s only so much a business can do before having to search for more costly options. A public SMTP relay server is free to use but has limited capabilities when sending mass marketing emails.
To counter spam, many internet providers put a cap on how many SMTP relays it can conduct per day.
Because of bulk emailing needs, businesses often exceed the public SMTP relay limit and require enterprise-level email-sending features. An SMTP relay provider can help businesses deliver large amounts of emails without them getting mislabeled as spam.
SMTP authentication, or SMTP AUTH, is an extension that grants clients access to an SMTP server through an identification mechanism. Authenticated SMTP relay is the process of verifying the sender’s credentials before processing and relaying the email.
Open mail relays don’t have the same security requirement and are more prone to misuse. SMTP authentication helps protect your server from getting spammed by malicious emails while allowing you, a trustworthy user, to receive and send emails securely.
Managing your email server for peer-to-peer email communication is relatively straightforward because most emails only go to a limited number of recipients.
But what if you want to send a marketing newsletter to tens of thousands of subscribers? What if you have a web app that sends notification emails prompted by your recipients’ activities?
Those emails aren’t as unique and are often labeled as spam. This is where an SMTP relay service can help.
If you use your primary peer-to-peer email server to send bulk emails, your delivery rate will suffer. And you may clog your bandwidth, potentially delaying the sending and receiving process of peer-to-peer emails.
Constantly monitoring your email server to keep crucial emails out of the spam folder is an expensive and time-consuming task.
As your business grows, so do your email-sending needs.
An outbound SMTP relay service ensures that common delivery mishaps won’t affect your email campaigns—and SMTP relay providers like Twilio SendGrid can help you get started.
Twilio SendGrid’s SMTP relay services are highly scalable, with no hardware or software costs associated. Our features adapt to your business needs and allow you additional capacity if needed.
SendGrid also provides various secure SMTP hosting and relay services for transactional email and enterprise jobs. Our transactional email delivery integrates with multiple developer frameworks and comes with template libraries and code samples.
Not only are these efficient and cost-effective, but our enterprise email solutions also provide a holistic messaging delivery platform.
With SendGrid’s enterprise email management, you’ll have access to real-time analytics and reporting tools, dedicated account management, and a support team to help with any inquiries.
