CiviSMTP is an email delivery service for CiviCRM that has been around since the very early days of CiviCRM. Even with CiviMail, making sure that emails land in the inbox, and not in the spam folder, can be a challenge. CiviSMTP made sure that their IPs had a good reputation, well configured, and good bounce management. At the time, they were the only service around that supported CiviCRM, and you could often meet their team at CiviCRM conferences in San Francisco, back in the day. We have always been happy users for the civicrm.org website (which sends a pretty high volume of emails).
Recently CiviSMTP announced that they are shutting down on July 31, 2022.
Does this have an impact on your CiviCRM installation? Only if you are using CiviSMTP. How can you check?
- Go to Administer > System Settings > Outbound Email: if you see "civismtp.uas.coop", then you are using CiviSMTP.
- You should also have received an email from CiviSMTP announcing the shutdown (sent on July 1)
- And you probably have paid an invoice recently to CiviSMTP.
If you are indeed using CiviSMTP, you will need to find a new e-mail delivery provider.
If that is not your cup of tea, reach out to a CiviCRM partner. Email delivery is something that most partners have a lot of experience with.
Here are some resources to help you chose a new provider:
- Stack Exchange discussion: what low-cost third-party mailing platforms work well with CiviMail?
- Old 2016 blog post by Andie (AGH) is still relevant, but the prices are most likely out of date.
- Explore CiviMail-related extensions in the CiviCRM extension directory.
For example, sorted by popularity:
- Sparkpost: 694 (including forks)
- Airmail: 296 (recommended for Sendgrid, also supports Elastic Email and Amazon SES)
- Amazon SES: 83
- Mailgunny: 75 (for Mailgun)
Notable mention: Postmark is not currently supported (well, bounce processing), but they have a useful comparison sheet of email services.
Finally, on behalf of the CiviCRM Core Team, a huge thanks to the CiviSMTP team for all these years and for supporting CiviCRM!
Comments
Thanks for this post Mathieu. Some of my clients have been with CiviSMTP for more than 10 years and it's been remarkable to have a dedicated civimail service with real live people who know what they're doing. Thanks Shane and Leyla!