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Goodbye, SendGrid

River Oaks Church - Created July 2025

SendGrid recently removed their free tier, resulting in me needing to find an alternative (since I don't think we can justify $35/mo for sending <5 emails per day.)

I came accross MailerSend, and that's what I switched us to.

Our outbound email domain is now ms.riveroaks.cc, not sg.riveroaks.cc anymore (see a pattern there?).

Services that Utilize SMTP

Some devices or services use SMTP for outbound email alerts. These occurances are listed below:

  • Bitwarden

  • Copy Room Fiery (For scans)

  • Jamf

These have all been configured to use the same SMTP login to MailerSend (as they don't offer multiple SMTP credentials)

Dynamic Template Emails

My favorite feature of SendGrid was their Dynamic Templates, and how I could send an email just by filling in some variables. It made it very easy. MailerSend only offers 3 templates on the free tier, unfortunately. The solution is another software I set up (hosting it at the datacenter for now), called BillionMail. It basically is just an easy way to create dynamic templates. It's using the same SMTP login as the other services listed previously to send outbound mail.

BillionMail is apart of the same VLAN the rest of the River Oaks VMs are, so it's covered under the static route via VPN to the datacenter, and can be accessed "locally" at River Oaks via it's IP, 10.141.74.109. DB NodeRED talks to this to send some mail.

Plaintext Emails

There were a few emails that were simple enough for me to move to plaintext instead of fancy HTML emails. These emails still route through MailerSend, but are processed in NodeRED differently. These emails include:

  • (WiFi) - Admin Login Resend

  • (WiFi) - Admin Approval Request

  • (PCO) - Weekly Scheduled Team Members for WiFi Access

  • (Key Fob) - New User Key Fob Confirmation

MailerSend allows us to send I think 100 emails a day or 3,000 a month, which is plenty for what we are doing.

Future Plans

I will move BillionMail to be hosted at the church (its a lot faster to spin up a VM on the cluster at the DC than at the server at church at the moment).

If we gave BillionMail a public IP from Surf, we could easily get rid of MailerSend. It handles DMARC, SPF, DKIM, and all the DNS records we would need if we wanted to run that as our primary mail server. Could be pretty cool.