Question posted in 
Bit confused on the pro’s and con’s of using some of these services when it comes to transactional emails via a website. I was using basic php to send the mail, but it seems to be getting blocked by some of the recipients spam filters. So I am looking at alternatives which include setting up it up to send via the cPanel’s email service or using a delivery service like mailgun or maybe setting up an office 365 plan.
From what I’ve read email through an office 365 plan is often blocked as well, plus its another monthly fee so that’s not ideal. So that leaves me with cPanel service or mailgun. I currently set it up to use mailgun and I’m pretty happy with it, but is cPanel service just as good? Is it really true SMTP and does it have just as good delivery rates? Theres also the issue with cPanel being if the web server goes down the email goes down, so that’s another reason why I’m shying away from it.
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Answers
I personally use Sendgrid if our website is having issues sending emails, or getting blocked by spam filters. I’ve yet to have any problems with it. If it’s just for one website, and it isn’t huge, the free plan should suffice. Various SMTP plugins support it these days, such as Post SMTP.
cPanel’s option will send via your local mail exchanger, EXIM, which isn’t much different from sending through PHP. If you’re going to send any sort of newsletter or bulk message, you really should use a delivery provider like MailGun or SendGrid and setup a subdomain like news.example.com, so that your primary domain’s reputation doesn’t become damaged.