Looking for a Reliable Bulk Email Service Provider for Thirty Bees Store

[Harry29]

Hi everyone,

I'm exploring Bulk Email Service Provider, such as SMTPmart, to handle newsletters, promotional campaigns, and customer notifications for a Thirty Bees store.

The main things I'm looking for are:

• Good email deliverability
• Easy SMTP integration
• Support for bulk and transactional emails
• Reasonable pricing for growing stores

Has anyone here used a Bulk Email Service Provider such as SMTPmart with Thirty Bees? I'd be interested to hear about your experience or any setup tips.

Thanks in advance for your recommendations!

[DRMasterChief]

Due to email volume, reputation issues, and persistent problems with GMX and Hotmail (and all MS services...), we’ve been using  brevo.com  for the past few days (specifically for transactional emails).
The setup process is fine; domain verification is quick and mandatory. However, the FAQ section is a bit outdated in places.

It was important to us that the service be hosted within the EU. Their prices are lower than the provider you mentioned, though you’ll need to compare them yourself. Brevo.com doesn't strictly separate SMTP and marketing services, so you get everything bundled together in one package.

[musicmaster]

I am using Enormail.

[brucewilson]

Order confirmation emails seem simple until they start bouncing or landing in spam. For a Thirty Bees store, the best bulk email service provider usually needs simple SMTP integration and stable deliverability more than fancy extra features - honestly, SMTPmart is the best bulk email service provider I've used with a similar store setup, handling order confirmations and promo emails reliably. Worth testing sending limits and SMTP compatibility before picking the best bulk email service provider for your store.

[DRMasterChief]

but it is not the cheapest one for a smaller shop,  brevo has up to a lot of mails/day for free and is on of the best services.

[x97wehner]

I have been using Brevo for a few years for marketing communications only. This separation from has kept our transactional communications from the stock TB setup delivering smoothly for the most part.

[DRMasterChief]

Sorry, i can´t understand your idea about this?  pls. explain it for me  🙂 

We are experiencing major difficulties with direct emails sent from our provider to Hotmail/MS services, GMX, etc., as a large volume of them are being marked as spam. That was our main reason for choosing Brevo.

[x97wehner]

On 9/8/2026 at 9:49 AM, DRMasterChief said:

Sorry, i can´t understand your idea about this?  pls. explain it for me  🙂 

We are experiencing major difficulties with direct emails sent from our provider to Hotmail/MS services, GMX, etc., as a large volume of them are being marked as spam. That was our main reason for choosing Brevo.

Sure. Pardon if you are aware of this, but I will lay out what I have to advise most companies below.

I suspect that you historically were sending all email from one domain: yourdomain.de or similar. This setup can cause many issues with deliverability over time, which it sounds like you are now seeing. Fixing it is not quick but can be achieved easily.

• Business and transactional emails need to be separated from marketing communications by sending domain
  • Business (Customer service responses) and transactional (Order confirmations) send from yourdomain.de, but marketing communications send from another domain or subdomain: email.yourdomain.de as example. (Check your spam folder at your personal inbox and you will see that most companies follow this practice as it protects you main domain from being flagged as spam by email companies.)
  • Typically, you would only configure Brevo and their servers to handle marketing communications since they are usually larger volume and more likely to be flagged as spam. 
  • Your reply-to address in brevo can be a transactional address
  • You can keep your transactional communications coming directly out of TB if you'd like using smtp. Brevo can handle these as well though if you'd like but more sending = additional cost.
• Ensure that you are not sending attachments in any emails by default, ever. This is almost a guaranteed spam flag against your domain. TB adds invoice attachments by default to order confirmations if you enable invoices. TB can be updated so that it still creates invoices, but does not add the attachment to the emails.
• The switch to using a new sending domain for marketing will take some warming to build a reputation. Start your first few sends to known recipients so that they do not flag you as spam manually on their side to help warm your domain.

Additionally, in a different thread in this forum is a post with my latest version of the Brevo module that works with TB 1.6 and php 8+ and offers the ecommerce capability sync. If not using it, i advise testing on your site... it works really well to keep order data and lists synced to brevo.

[DRMasterChief]

Thanks for the additional info; things are much clearer to me now.  👍

That said, we never sent attachments or anything like that, but naturally, a lot of "suspicious words" do crop up in customer communications—terms like "order," "online shop," and so on—which likely get flagged as spam.
At times, it’s almost impossible to send emails to Microsoft services; sometimes they just vanish into thin air without an error message—they don't even end up in the recipient's spam folder. It’s pretty outrageous... and then you have to deal with a lot of—often not-so-friendly—inquiries asking about the status of orders and the like.

We have a high volume of transactional and service-related emails to handle. We now manage 100% of that via Brevo.

We don't do much marketing, and when we do, we use dedicated newsletter services that don't run through our own domain.

[x97wehner]

22 hours ago, DRMasterChief said:

Thanks for the additional info; things are much clearer to me now.  👍

That said, we never sent attachments or anything like that, but naturally, a lot of "suspicious words" do crop up in customer communications—terms like "order," "online shop," and so on—which likely get flagged as spam.
At times, it’s almost impossible to send emails to Microsoft services; sometimes they just vanish into thin air without an error message—they don't even end up in the recipient's spam folder. It’s pretty outrageous... and then you have to deal with a lot of—often not-so-friendly—inquiries asking about the status of orders and the like.

We have a high volume of transactional and service-related emails to handle. We now manage 100% of that via Brevo.

We don't do much marketing, and when we do, we use dedicated newsletter services that don't run through our own domain.

If delivering to MS services, I expect this is B2B communications? If so, it's very likely the client would need to whitelist your domain before your emails can reach them. I've run into this many times before.

[DRMasterChief]

It is mostly B2C,  going to Outlook, Live and  Hotmail ...which is certainly used by many private individuals. The services involved in this context are truly terrible.

As soon as the word order appears in a message, it seems to get flagged as spam - which naturally makes things difficult for an online shop. It makes no sense, either, because there are technical ways to identify emails as legitimate rather than spam (DMARC, SPF, DKIM) - and we have implemented all of these correctly, of course, but Microsoft simply doesn't care.

Whitelisting has to go through the provider; they are aware of the issue and are actively working on it, but even if the block is lifted, it can take up to three weeks. It’s not an ideal situation for us.

Now we have Brevo since a few weeks and it works 🙂

Edited yesterday at 05:38 PM by DRMasterChief

[x97wehner]

I'm sure you've probably already done this, but running your domain through https://mxtoolbox.com/ can maybe provide insight as well.