Who/What/Where provides your site email service?

[Tracy]

Honestly.. a fairly simple question.
Do you depend on the panel that your hosting provider (on shared) to set up your MTA services?
If you are on a VPS, do you use a panel and "expect" it to have perfectly set up your MTA services (specifically in this case dealing with rDNS)?
Do you use a 3rd party email processor for your transactional email (like SES, SendGrid, SparkPost, MailGun_?

Why did you decide to use the choice you made? Was it because it was "what was there" and you simply used it without setting up any of the other necessary structure that is required typically to be manually done?
Or did you decide that it would be easier to simply let a 3rd party provider process your transactional email with the understanding that their delivery rate would be better than what you could do either through your shared hosting (and the frequent trashed IP that they have) or the extreme hassle (even with packages like mailcow-dockerized to set up your own MTA?

 

[Cedric]

I've used SendGrid briefly but honestly, it's expensive for what it is if you need an upgraded plan. It's great to mask your servers identity but it's expensive. So now I rely on my built in mail server.

 

[Tracy]

I've used SendGrid briefly but honestly, it's expensive for what it is if you need an upgraded plan. It's great to mask your servers identity but it's expensive. So now I rely on my built in mail server.

"Built in" on a shared hosting or VPS using a panel? Have you confirmed that your rDNS is set for your base MTA hostmane? Not to mention your DKIM/SPF for those domains?
That is one of the weaknesses of "self-hosting"... there is so much work involved, it's honestly "cheaper" to farm it off (for your transactional email) to a third party and then use your "local" MTA for your bouced, unsubscribe and admin/user accounts

 

[Arantor]

I farm all the transactional stuff off to Mailgun, dealing with SPF, DKIM, DMARC is well within my skillset - but what I can't fix is the fact that I tend to host on commodity VPS hosting (Linode, Digital Ocean etc), half the IP range is in blocklists and fighting that's even harder than getting SPF/DKIM etc. right. At least with Mailgun the IP ranges are less problematic out of the box.

Plus I can deal with automating up the processing for bounces etc. to do something with them that isn't necessarily what the platform might normally do (is often project specific how this gets handled)