How to choose an email platform

Most teams do not choose an email platform. They end up with three: one for the inboxes their staff read, one that sends their app's receipts and password resets, and one for the newsletter. That can be the right answer. It should be a decision, not an accident.

These five questions settle it.

1. What mail do you actually send?

There are three kinds, and they have different rules.

• Mail people write. Your team's mailboxes, you@yourcompany.com, read in webmail or a mail client over IMAP.
• Mail your app sends. Receipts, password resets and notifications, over SMTP or an API. These must arrive, every time.
• Mail you send to a list. Newsletters and campaigns, which need unsubscribe handling and careful list hygiene.

Many platforms are built around one of the three. Write down which ones you need today and which you expect to need within a year.

2. One account or three?

One account means one invoice, one dashboard and one place to check your DNS records. Three specialists can each go deeper at their one job. If all you do is send app email at very high volume, a specialist sending service may suit you better than a platform that does everything. If you also need mailboxes and campaigns, the case for keeping them together gets stronger. Mailyte is built for that second case.

3. Where does a mistake land?

A newsletter that goes badly should not take your password resets down with it. Ask whether campaigns and app email leave on separate paths. In Mailyte they do: marketing mail rides a different egress path from transactional mail.

4. What would leaving cost?

Ask this before you join, not after. Mail itself moves over IMAP, which almost every provider speaks. SMTP and a REST API are simple to repoint. A suppression list, the record of addresses you must not mail again, is something you should be able to export and import. And it helps to know whether the software underneath is something you could run yourself: the core of Mailyte's mail server is open source under the AGPL-3.0, and there is a guide to running it on your own server.

5. How will you pay?

If your team and your customers are in Nigeria, a bill in dollars puts an exchange rate on every invoice. Check which currencies a provider bills in, and whether you can pay by bank transfer as well as card. Mailyte is priced in naira, by card or bank transfer, with dollar prices too.

Where to go next

If you already use a platform, these pages set it beside Mailyte, including where it is the better choice: Mailgun, SendGrid, Mailchimp, Postmark, MailerLite and Brevo. The comparison hub lists them all, and pricing has the plans.