Using SendGrid Free Plan for Bulk Mails

[evcom]

SendGrid allows to send 100 e-mails per day if on the free plan. I am not sure how SendGrid handles this limit, if a Bulk Mail is sent/scheduled to reach several hundred subscribers. 
Will SendGrid send 100 mails/day until all Bulk Mails are sent? I fear this is not really possible and SendGrid would attempt to send all mails at once. I could also try to limit the number of mails to be sent via the task cycle...but this would make it somewhat complicated. 

Any suggestions on this? Or would it be best to upgrade so the daily mail limit is lifted? 

 

Edited September 8, 2020 by evcom
better explanation

[Genadii Skaraev]

Quote

Once you verify your account, you can send 40,000 emails during the first 30 days of your trial. After that, you can send 100 emails per day. If you need to send more than that, you can easily upgrade to a paid plan!

 

So, if you have less than 40k subscribers, you can use sendgrid once for BulkMail. After that you better use other services or upgrade.

100 messages per day is too little, even for sending service notifications on a low-traffic forum.

[Genadii Skaraev]

And yet, very important!
Once I used Sendgrid for bulk mail - most of the messages do not reach users, because sendgrid's ip-addresses are blacklisted.

Edited September 8, 2020 by Genadii Skaraev

[RchatR]

Coming to this thread a little late... but just wondering if Sendgrid has worked out for any of you? I want my members to get their forum notifications faster than currently.  @Genadii Skaraev @evcom

Edited September 15, 2020 by Ranya Renee Fleysher

[rfcontreras]

Today I've tried Sendgrid. Almost all IP from Sendgrid are blocked for hotmail, msn, outlook, etc. 

 

550 Rejected because 167.89.24.164 is in a black list at zen.spamhaus.org https://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/query/SBL495736

 

50 5.7.1 Service unavailable, Client host [167.89.12.138] blocked using Spamhaus. To request removal from this list see https://www.spamhaus.org/query/ip/167.89.12.138 (AS3130). [DB8EUR05FT042.eop-eur05.prod.protection.outlook.com]

 

550 Rejected because 50.31.49.42 is in a black list at zen.spamhaus.org https://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/query/SBL495733

You get what you pay for... at least for the free plan.

[Steve Grant_189967]

Even the entry-level paid plan for SendGrid places you in shared IP pools, so you still run a high risk of being blocked from Microsoft's email servers. You need to upgrade to their Pro plan (starting at $89.95 a month) to get access to a dedicated IP address where you would be in complete control of your own spam score.

My site is hosted on AWS, so I use their SES setup, which seems to do the job pretty well. The main downside is the reporting on opens, bounces, etc, is rubbish, but there are ways around it, albeit those ways are a bit fiddly and time-consuming.

[evcom]

In the end I tried the SMTP service from Mailgun. Transactional e-mail delivered well, but as a new user, one is on a probation period (sending limitation). So no bulkmails...Not sure when such a probation period would be lifted. 
As I had some issues with bulkmail sending in general, I contacted my hosting company. As I found out, they offer an SMTP mail service as well with up to 250 mails/h. That's good enough for me (approx. 1000 mails/month) and I can limit the number of bulkmails in constants.php with for example:

define ( 'BULK_MAILS_PER_CYCLE', 25 )