Sending email: which way suits you?
There are three ways to send email, and which one suits you depends on who writes the message and how many people it goes to. Writing yourself, to a handful of people? Your mail program is enough. Does your webshop, CRM or application send messages automatically? Then you need an SMTP relay. Sending one message to an entire list? A campaign platform is the right route.
Below are the three routes side by side, with what each of them runs into. After that: how much you may actually send, and why "sent" does not yet mean "arrived".
The three ways side by side
None of them is better than the others: they serve different situations. Most companies end up using two — a relay for what their systems send, and a platform for what marketing sends.
| Way | When it fits | Where it runs into limits |
|---|---|---|
| Your mail program | Personal messages you type yourself, to one or a few recipients. Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, Thunderbird. | Your provider applies a daily limit, and at hundreds of recipients at once your account starts to look like a spam source. On top of that, every address ends up in the copy field if you are not careful. |
| An SMTP relay | Mail your systems send themselves: order confirmations, invoices, password resets, alerts. You connect a webshop, CRM, ERP or your own application. | You do not write the messages — the relay delivers what your software hands over. To compose and measure a campaign you need a platform alongside it. |
| A campaign platform | One message to a list: an offer, an invitation, a newsletter. With design, address management, an unsubscribe link and statistics. | Every address on the list has to be there with demonstrable consent, and on a cold domain the volume has to grow in a controlled way rather than in one spike. |
At 2mail the relay and the campaign platform sit on the same infrastructure, but on separate sending streams. That is not a detail: if a campaign draws spam complaints, that must not drag down the delivery of your order confirmations.
How much email may I send?
There is no hard maximum, but there is a sensible pace. If you send through your own mail program, your provider imposes a daily limit — exceed it and your account is temporarily blocked. Through a relay or a platform that limit disappears, but something else takes its place: the pattern of your sending.
Mailbox providers look at what is normal for your domain. A domain that sent ten emails a day for months and suddenly pushes out five thousand shows exactly the behaviour of a hijacked account. That is why a new or long-unused domain has to build its volume up gradually. At 2mail that spreading happens automatically, with a warm-up for domains without a history.
Sent is not the same as arrived
An email that leaves your server has arrived nowhere. The receiving server decides for itself whether to put the message in the inbox, drop it in the spam folder or refuse it outright — and that decision depends above all on whether it can establish that the mail genuinely comes from your domain. Three DNS records exist for that: SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Without those three, every send is a gamble, however much effort went into the content.
If you want to know how the delivery works technically, read how an SMTP relay is put together. For the authentication itself — which record does what, and in which order to set them up — everything is on the page on SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
And once you know which route you are taking: sending a mailing covers sending one message to a list step by step, sending a newsletter treats the newsletter as a recurring channel, and transactional email covers the mail your systems send automatically.
Frequently asked questions about sending email
Sending email that arrives
2mail takes care of the sending side: authentication per domain, spreading, retries, bounce handling and per-message logging — from Belgian servers. Whether you connect over SMTP, through the API, or compose campaigns in the platform.