bromcom SMTP for Bromcom

[Homer]

Morning all

 

Those on Bromcom, what are you doing for outbound email? The SMTP free limit is probably plentiful for a smaller primary school but we could blow through that with a few whole school emails.

 

Are you paying the Bromcom rates or have you gone for another service like Amazon SES or Sendgrid etc? 

 

Just finding out what people are doing so I know the best route to look in to.

 

Cheers 

[jthompson]

Using the "Your Own SMTP Server" option in conjunction with a Gmail SMTP relay service. On the Google Workspace side, we have some custom Apps Script to monitor the sending rates, so that we can avoid hitting Google's usage quotas for that (the main one being to stay under 10k messages in any 24 hours).

[Homer]

Ahhh we're M365 or I would do this, I don't think we have scripting like that available in M365 for this type of use case.

 

[synaesthesia]

Bromcom SMTP. Used Gmail and even with various watchdogs in place, we got hit by limits far too often and it wasn't possible to properly track email, so it wasn't possible to get idea of failures etc.

Plus with the bromcom offering it gives a few more features like being able to easily tell who's addresses were incorrect or no longer working. The cost wasn't exactly massive so more than worth it IMO.

[jthompson]

2 minutes ago, synaesthesia said:

Bromcom SMTP. Used Gmail and even with various watchdogs in place, we got hit by limits far too often and it wasn't possible to properly track email, so it wasn't possible to get idea of failures etc.

Plus with the bromcom offering it gives a few more features like being able to easily tell who's addresses were incorrect or no longer working. The cost wasn't exactly massive so more than worth it IMO.

I'll admit that it's a fair bit of work to put in place homemade monitoring/alerting to avoid falling foul of usage quotas. We also have some custom scripting to manage non-delivery reports so as to get a sense of which contact details need reviewing in the MIS. I wouldn't want to not have those measures in place. Quite a bit of work simply to avoid spending money, so yes, the first-party paid option is certainly worth considering.

[tom_newton]

I would still recomment someone like mailgun or sendgrid for this - the mail providers are cheap-bordering-on-free and have reasonably generous quotas, proper logging, etc

[Devaleth]

Using the Bromcom credit system - I think we bought into the 30k additional package, of which we probably use about 20k in an average month. We went for a bit more to avoid running out in a busy month, especially when we understood how many are generated behind the scenes beyond just messages home.

 

The cost felt insignificant in the long run when compared with the potential time (and costs) of managing it or other connectors ourselves.

[willtech]

Do they not support something like GOV.UK Notify ?

[Marci]

We're (still) using it fine with O365 SMTP configured old-fashioned stylee manually with Basic auth, rather than the newer "proper" intergration. **shrug**