A few months ago, we added a list of “recommended SMTP / Custom” providers when users would go to connect their email accounts.
This was done for a few reasons:
- recommend custom providers we know work well
- recommend established providers vs a new one popping up every week
- protect our warmup network
We also discussed blanket banning all other custom SMTP providers from warmup at a future date.
We’re now looking to roll this out this week. You can still connect custom SMTP accounts that are approved, but they will no longer be allowed on the warmup network.
The biggest reasons we’ve found is that no matter how strict we try to enforce compliance, the users who bring custom accounts to warmup are either:
- not experienced
- buy from shady providers
- high school kids / vibe bros setting up mailservers and making a ton of technical mistakes
- or people looking to do custom scraping
- or people trying to send bad emails (phishing, etc.)
To jog memory, the list of approved custom SMTP vendors are:
We could put these users into an isolated warmup pool but then that doesn’t really help them, nor does it help our customers if they end up interacting with sketchy accounts.
