Alternatives to Postfix logo

Alternatives to Postfix

Dovecot, Axigen, Twilio, Twilio SendGrid, and Amazon SES are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Postfix.
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What is Postfix and what are its top alternatives?

Postfix is a popular open-source mail transfer agent (MTA) that is known for its speed, security, and reliability. It is widely used for routing and delivering email on Unix-like operating systems. However, Postfix can be complex to configure for beginners and lacks some advanced features compared to other MTAs.

  1. Exim: Exim is another widely used MTA known for its flexibility and extensive configuration options. It supports various authentication methods and spam filtering capabilities, making it a popular choice for both small and large email servers. However, Exim can be challenging to configure for beginners.
  2. Sendmail: Sendmail is one of the oldest and most well-established MTAs, known for its robustness and high performance. It provides extensive customization options and supports complex routing configurations. However, Sendmail can be challenging to set up and lacks some modern features found in newer MTAs.
  3. Qmail: Qmail is a secure and efficient MTA known for its focus on security and simplicity. It follows the "one-program-one-task" approach, making it easy to audit and maintain. However, Qmail has a steep learning curve and lacks some advanced features compared to other MTAs.
  4. SMTP: SMTP is a lightweight and simple MTA that is easy to configure and use. It is designed for small to medium-sized servers and provides basic email routing and delivery capabilities. However, SMTP lacks some advanced features and scalability options found in other MTAs.
  5. Mailgun: Mailgun is a cloud-based email infrastructure service that offers powerful email delivery capabilities and tracking features. It provides scalability, reliability, and advanced analytics for email sending. However, Mailgun is a paid service and may not be suitable for all users.
  6. Haraka: Haraka is a high-performance MTA written in Node.js, known for its speed and extensibility. It supports plugins for customization and has built-in spam filtering capabilities. However, Haraka may not be as widely supported or tested as other MTAs.
  7. OpenSMTPD: OpenSMTPD is a free and open-source MTA that aims to be simple, secure, and easy to configure. It supports modern email standards and provides built-in security features. However, OpenSMTPD may lack some advanced features and scalability options compared to other MTAs.
  8. Mailjet: Mailjet is a cloud-based email service provider that offers email delivery, marketing automation, and transactional email capabilities. It is known for its deliverability and scalability for high-volume email sending. However, Mailjet is a paid service and may not be suitable for all users.
  9. MTA-STS: MTA-STS is a security protocol that allows email senders to specify policies for secure email transmission. It helps prevent man-in-the-middle attacks and other security vulnerabilities in email delivery. However, MTA-STS requires support from both the sending and receiving mail servers to work effectively.
  10. Mailsac: Mailsac is a disposable email service provider that allows users to create temporary email addresses for testing and development purposes. It provides inbox storage, email forwarding, and API integration for managing temporary email accounts. However, Mailsac is not suitable for production email delivery and may have limitations in terms of scalability and reliability.

Top Alternatives to Postfix

  • Dovecot
    Dovecot

    It is an open source IMAP and POP3 email server for Linux/UNIX-like systems, written with security primarily in mind. It is an excellent choice for both small and large installations. It's fast, simple to set up, requires no special administration and it uses very little memory. ...

  • Axigen
    Axigen

    It is a fully self developed solution, truly innovative in several respects, particularly scalable and configurable. This messaging solution offers the entire range of mail services — SMTP, POP3, IMAP, WebMail (Desktop and Mobile versions) — includes List server, Logging, Reporting, and FTP Backup modules and provides various, flexible administration options (including a central Web administration interface — WebAdmin). ...

  • Twilio
    Twilio

    Twilio offers developers a powerful API for phone services to make and receive phone calls, and send and receive text messages. Their product allows programmers to more easily integrate various communication methods into their software and programs. ...

  • Twilio SendGrid
    Twilio SendGrid

    Twilio SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. Twilio SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability & real-time analytics along with flexible API's. ...

  • Amazon SES
    Amazon SES

    Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. ...

  • Mailgun
    Mailgun

    Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly. ...

  • Mandrill
    Mandrill

    Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp. ...

  • Amazon SNS
    Amazon SNS

    Amazon Simple Notification Service makes it simple and cost-effective to push to mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire, and internet connected smart devices, as well as pushing to other distributed services. Besides pushing cloud notifications directly to mobile devices, SNS can also deliver notifications by SMS text message or email, to Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues, or to any HTTP endpoint. ...

Postfix alternatives & related posts

Dovecot logo

Dovecot

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52
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An open source IMAP and POP3 email server
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      Axigen logo

      Axigen

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          Twilio logo

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          • 88
            RESTful API
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            Clear pricing
          • 61
            Great sms services
          • 58
            Low cost of entry
          • 29
            Global SMS Gateway
          • 14
            Good value
          • 12
            Cloud IVR
          • 11
            Simple
          • 11
            Extremely simple to integrate with rails
          • 6
            Great for startups
          • 5
            SMS
          • 3
            Great developer program
          • 3
            Hassle free
          • 2
            Text me the app pages
          • 1
            New Features constantly rolling out
          • 1
            Many deployment options, from build from scratch to buy
          • 1
            Easy integration
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          Hi, We are looking to implement 2FA - so that users would be sent a Verification code over their Email and SMS to their phone.

          We faced some limitations with Amazon SNS where we could either send the verification code to email OR to the phone number, while we want to send it to both.

          We also are looking to make the 2FA more flexible by adding any other options later on.

          What are the best alternatives to SNS for this use case and purpose? Looked at Twilio but want to explore other options before making a decision.

          Would be great to know what the experience with Twilio has been, especially the limitations/issues with Twilio...

          Appreciate any input from users of Twilio and others who have had similar use cases.

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          Cheri Booth
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          Searching for options for SMS that integrates with SiteLink and will allow personalization of text and tracking of both incoming/outgoing messages with reporting (Time, date, call#, etc) Have been looking at Twilio, and seems most leaning toward this. Are there any other options known that integrate into SiteLink? Also looked at Clickatell.

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          Twilio SendGrid logo

          Twilio SendGrid

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            Easy email integration!
          • 86
            Reliable
          • 58
            Well-documented
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            Generous free allowance to get you started
          • 25
            Trackable
          • 21
            Heroku add-on
          • 15
            Azure add-on
          • 13
            Better support for third party integrations
          • 6
            Simple installation
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            Free plan
          • 4
            Helpful evangelist staff
          • 4
            Great client libraries
          • 3
            Great support
          • 3
            Better customer support than the competition
          • 3
            Great add-ons
          • 2
            Nice dashboard
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            Scalable
          • 1
            Web editor for templates
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            Easy set up
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            Free
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          CONS OF TWILIO SENDGRID
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          Luke Hamilton
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          At StackShare we were discussing how to increase the retention of our newly signed up users. We hypothesized that if we made certain changes to the emails in our on-boarding process we could increase our retention and activation of users.

          We decided to use sendwithus because it offered us the ability to A/B test our transactional emails. We also utilized the sendwithus analytics dashboard to gain real time insight into the performance of our email campaigns. Furthermore sendwithus has a Rails gem that allowed us to easily integrate the product into our application. We were also able to integrate sendwithus with our SendGrid account. #ABTestingAnalytics #TransactionalEmail

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          Julien DeFrance
          Principal Software Engineer at Tophatter · | 3 upvotes · 545.3K views

          Nexmo vs Twilio ?

          Back in the early days at SmartZip Analytics, that evaluation had - for whatever reason - been made by Product Management. Some developers might have been consulted, but we hadn't made the final call and some key engineering aspects of it were omitted.

          When revamping the platform, I made sure to flip the decision process how it should be. Business provided an input but Engineering lead the way and has the final say on all implementation matters. My engineers and I decided on re-evaluating the criteria and vendor selection. Not only did we need SMS support, but were we not thinking about #VoiceAndSms support as the use cases evolved.

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          Twilio won on all fronts. Including costs and implementation timelines. No-one even noticed the vendor switch.

          Many years later, Twilio demonstrated its position as a leader by holding conferences in the Bay Area, announcing features like Twilio Functions. Even acquired Authy which we also used for 2FA. Twilio's growth has been amazing. Its recent acquisition of SendGrid continues to show it.

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          Amazon SES logo

          Amazon SES

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            Mailgun logo

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              Easy setup
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              Ridiculously reliable
            • 53
              Extensive apis
            • 30
              Great for parsing inbound emails
            • 25
              Nice UI
            • 22
              Developer-centric
            • 15
              Excellent customer support
            • 12
              Heroku Add-on
            • 4
              Easy to view logs of sent emails
            • 4
              Email mailbox management for developers
            • 2
              Great PHP library
            • 2
              Great documentation
            • 2
              Great customer support, love rackspace
            • 1
              Better than sendgrid not ask too many question
            CONS OF MAILGUN
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              No HTTPS tracking links supported
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              Emails go to spam due to blacklisted IP's of mailgun
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              Cannot create multiple api keys

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            at

            We've moved our transactional email away from Mandrill to Mailgun. We had continued using Mandrill after Mailchimp deprecated the service awhile back, because the amount of credits we were offered essentially made it free.

            However, following a couple weeks of frequent downtime and poor service transparency from Mandrill, we decided it was time to make the switch. It appears they no longer had any engineers with the ability to identify the core problems.

            Mailgun has been more reliable, yet not as reliable as we expected. We still see issues a few times per week with the API failing when we attempt to make a call. The Reporting UI is way better.

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            Mandrill logo

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              Great api
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              Generous free allowance to get you started
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              Cheap and simple
            • 99
              Trackable
            • 59
              Well-documented
            • 54
              Doesn't go to spam
            • 47
              Great for mailchimp users
            • 32
              Webhooks
            • 28
              Client libraries
            • 7
              Heroku Add-on
            • 6
              Easy to use
            • 5
              Meaningful Metrics
            • 5
              Free
            • 3
              Advanced Tagging and Reports
            • 3
              Mobile Access
            • 3
              Status Update
            • 2
              Very chimp-like
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              Great Documentation
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              love this service
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              Free Plan
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            However, following a couple weeks of frequent downtime and poor service transparency from Mandrill, we decided it was time to make the switch. It appears they no longer had any engineers with the ability to identify the core problems.

            Mailgun has been more reliable, yet not as reliable as we expected. We still see issues a few times per week with the API failing when we attempt to make a call. The Reporting UI is way better.

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            Amazon SNS logo

            Amazon SNS

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              Cyril Duchon-Doris

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              • Managing AWS backups
              • Processing emails received on Amazon SES and stored to Amazon S3 and notified via Amazon SNS, so as to push a message on our Redis so our Sidekiq Rails workers can process inbound emails
              • Pushing some relevant Amazon CloudWatch metrics and alarms to Slack
              See more
              Ravi Sathanapalli
              Director Product Management at Centime · | 7 upvotes · 122.2K views
              Shared insights
              on
              TwilioTwilioAmazon SNSAmazon SNS

              Hi, We are looking to implement 2FA - so that users would be sent a Verification code over their Email and SMS to their phone.

              We faced some limitations with Amazon SNS where we could either send the verification code to email OR to the phone number, while we want to send it to both.

              We also are looking to make the 2FA more flexible by adding any other options later on.

              What are the best alternatives to SNS for this use case and purpose? Looked at Twilio but want to explore other options before making a decision.

              Would be great to know what the experience with Twilio has been, especially the limitations/issues with Twilio...

              Appreciate any input from users of Twilio and others who have had similar use cases.

              See more