What is an SMTP provider?
An SMTP provider offers infrastructure for sending email: servers, IP addresses, and connections to receiving mail systems. Unlike full ESPs, they focus on transmission rather than marketing features. You provide the message; they deliver it.
SMTP providers are infrastructure layers. Your application connects via SMTP protocol, authenticates, and hands off messages. The provider handles queuing, retry logic, bounce processing, and the actual delivery to recipient servers.
Use cases include: applications generating transactional email, custom email systems needing reliable delivery, high-volume sending requiring dedicated infrastructure, and organizations wanting separation between message creation and transmission. Amazon SES, Mailgun, and SendGrid's API represent this category.
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