Who is this article for?

Users interested in learning about the different email notification methods.

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Smartforms (Professional) supports two methods to send email notifications: SMTP and SendGrid. This article aims to explain the differences between the services, so that you can make an informed decision on which one you would like to use.

1. Overview
2. Comparison

1. Overview

The decision of whether to use SMTP or SendGrid is largely transparent to the end user, with the exception of attachment size limitations (see table below). While earlier hosted/SaaS deployments used SMTP, we strongly recommends migrating to SendGrid due to its ability to handle larger message volumes.

The most significant impact of migrating to SendGrid is the 20MB limit for the total size of all attachments in a single email. In the event that a user attempts to trigger a mail notification that exceeds this limit, Smartforms will send the email but will remove all attachments from it. In their place a single text file will be attached to the email containing an explanation of why the original attachments were removed as well as a list of the filenames of those original attachments.

Finally, a separate email will be sent to administrators of the Middleware instance alerting them to the event.

Selection of SMTP or SendGrid is made in the web.config file of Smartforms Middleware.

2. Comparison

The following table compares SendGrid to SMTP using Ideagen's Office365 account.

For an on-premise deployment, in which SMTP is connected to your own Office365 account, limits may vary depending on your subscription and any settings imposed by your IT department.

*SendGrid's documentation cites a maximum total message size of 30MB and a recommended maximum attachment size of 10MB, due to encoding of attachments that may increase the file size. In practice, we have found 20MB to be a usable maximum size.

**Messages are also restricted to the limitations of the receiving mail server. Emails sent to Gmail addresses are limited to 50MB. Emails sent to other Office365 accounts are limited to the settings of the recipient's account, which typically default to 20MB.