MailerSend Review 2026: Every Limit Published, and Twenty-Four Hours of History
The Best: Rate limits published per endpoint, and daily quotas per plan
The Worst: 24 hours of history on Free and Hobby, and a single SMTP port
The short version
MailerSend tells you more about its own limits than any other provider in this category. Not headers, not “dynamic”, not “contact support”: actual numbers, per endpoint. General endpoints 60 requests a minute. Sending 120 a minute. Bulk 10. Activity 10. SMTP 120. On top of that, daily API quotas by plan: 100 a day on Free, 1,000 on Hobby, 100,000 on Starter, 500,000 on Professional. SendGrid publishes none of this. Mailgun publishes none of it. SparkPost calls its limits “dynamic”.
It is also being built at a real pace. The changelog’s most recent entry is dated 4 August 2026, three weeks before we read it, adding 2048-bit dual CNAME keys for DKIM. Before that: stronger SMTP credential protection in July, template translation in June, blocklist monitoring in March, a CLI in February, DMARC monitoring in December. There is a public roadmap and it is being kept.
Two things are genuinely tight. The SMTP relay documents one port, 587, and nothing else. Ports 25, 465 and 2525 do not appear anywhere in the configuration documentation, which matters if your network blocks 587. And activity history is 24 hours on both the free and the $7 Hobby plan, seven days on Starter, and thirty days only at Professional.
The lineage is worth knowing. MailerSend’s about page says it plainly: “We’re the people behind MailerLite, a team of creators dedicated to building outstanding online products and industry-leading email marketing software.” MailerLite is the marketing product and scores 7.4 with us; MailerSend is the transactional one. Same team, two jobs.
The best-documented transactional relay in this comparison and a genuinely strong MCP implementation, at a fair price. Start on Starter rather than Hobby if you will ever need to look up an email from last week.
SMTP settings
| Hostname | smtp.mailersend.net |
|---|---|
| Port | 587, and only 587. The documentation says “double-check that the server name is set to smtp.mailersend.net and that you’re connecting to port 587”. Ports 25, 465 and 2525 do not appear in the configuration documentation. |
| Encryption | “MailerSend’s SMTP relay supports TLS versions 1.2 & 1.3” |
| Credentials | An SMTP user generated per domain in the Domains screen. The password is shown once: “You won’t see it again after this.” |
| Note on the username | It “is not intended to be used as the sender/from address unless explicitly specified” |
| SMTP throughput | 120 requests per minute |
| API base | https://api.mailersend.com/v1/, Bearer token |
| Attachment size | 25 MB per individual attachment. A total message ceiling is not published. |
| Recipients | “Approved accounts can include up to 50 TO, 10 CC and 10 BCC recipients. Unapproved accounts can include up to 10 TO, 1 CC and 1 BCC recipient.” |
| Bulk | Maximum 500 email objects per request |
Every other relay in this family gives you alternatives. SMTP2GO publishes eight ports including 80 and 443 precisely so mail escapes restrictive networks. SparkPost adds 2525 for Google Compute Engine. SendGrid offers four. MailerSend documents 587 alone. If your host blocks it, there is no documented fallback. Note also that MailerSend publishes a general educational blog post titled “SMTP Ports Explained: 25, 465, 587, 2525”; that is a teaching article about the protocol, not its own configuration, and it is easy to mistake for one.
Snapshot
| Who builds it | The MailerLite team. Their about page: “We’re the people behind MailerLite.” Founding year and founder names are not published on it. |
|---|---|
| Legal entity | “MailerSend is a United States-registered company.” The group structure relative to MailerLite’s Lithuanian parent is not documented publicly. |
| Free | $0. 500 emails a month, 10 verification credits, 100 API requests a day, 1 template, 1 domain, 1 seat. |
| Hobby | $7 / mo. 5,000 emails a month, 5 seats, 10 templates. Overage “$1.50 per 1,000 additional emails sent”. |
| Starter | “from as little as $35 a month”, or $31.50 annually. 50,000 emails, 100 SMS, 10 domains, 250 templates. |
| Professional | “start at $110 a month”, or $99 annually. 50,000 emails, unlimited domains and seats. |
| Overage above Hobby | Disputed. The pricing page says $0.90 per 1,000; the help documentation says “a metered rate starting at $1.30 per 1,000 emails sent”. We publish both. |
| Add-ons | Domain spaces $4 per domain, phone numbers $2 per number, extra SMS $1.40 per 100 |
| Dedicated IP | Enterprise only, “Contact our support team”. No price published. |
| API rate limits | General 60/min, send 120/min, bulk 10/min, activity 10/min, SMTP 120/min |
| Daily API quotas | Free 100, Hobby 1,000, Starter 100,000, Professional and Enterprise 500,000 |
| Activity retention | Free 24 hours, Hobby 24 hours, Starter 7 days, Professional 30 days (with 7 days of logs) |
| Webhooks | 24 event types, including separate unique-open and unique-click, survey opened and submitted, inbound forward failures, and maintenance start and end |
| SDKs | PHP, Laravel, Node.js, Go, Python, Ruby, Java, plus an OpenAPI collection. A C# SDK is on the roadmap for Q1 2026. |
| Official MCP | Yes: https://mcp.mailersend.com/mcp, a hosted streamable HTTP server, shipped Q3 2025 |
What MailerSend does well
It publishes every limit, and nobody else in this family does
This is the headline strength and it is worth laying out against the field, because the contrast is stark:
| Provider | Published API rate limit |
|---|---|
| MailerSend | Per endpoint: 60, 120, 10, 10 per minute, plus daily quotas per plan |
| Customer.io | Per API: 1,000/s track, 10/s app, 3,000 per 3s transactional |
| Resend | 10 per second per team |
| Amazon SES | Sandbox figures published, production varies by account |
| SendGrid | None. Headers only. |
| Mailgun | None. Headers only. |
| SparkPost | None. “These limits are dynamic.” |
MailerSend goes further than anyone by also publishing the daily API quota attached to each plan. That means you can size an integration and choose a tier before you sign up rather than after you hit a wall.
An 80-tool hosted MCP server, shipped a year ago
MailerSend runs an official MCP server at mcp.mailersend.com/mcp, described as “a streamable HTTP endpoint up to the latest MCP server specifications” with client-side OAuth. It shipped in Q3 2025 and it is not a token effort: the tool inventory covers email sending and bulk sending, domains, SMTP users, messages, templates, webhooks, inbound routing, recipients, suppressions, activity and analytics, email verification, DMARC monitoring, blocklist monitoring, tokens, users and invites, sender identities, and SMS.
Together with Resend’s hosted OAuth server and Customer.io’s per-user permission model, this is one of the three best MCP implementations we have found across all thirty-six platforms.
A release cadence you can check
The changelog is public and current. The most recent entry when we read it was 4 August 2026, adding 2048-bit dual CNAME DKIM keys. Working backwards: PayPal payment in July, stronger SMTP credential protection in July, one-click template translation in June, blocklist monitoring in March, a command-line interface in February, DMARC monitoring in December 2025.
Set that against Sendloop, also reviewed here, whose last blog post is dated May 2023, or SparkPost, whose Node SDK has not shipped since 2018. A dated changelog is the cheapest signal a vendor can give you and most of this category does not give it.
Deliverability tooling built in rather than sold as an add-on
DMARC monitoring, blocklist monitoring, email verification credits on every plan including free, and the DKIM key upgrade above. These are the things that determine whether your mail arrives, and MailerSend has been shipping them steadily rather than reserving them for an enterprise tier.
Twenty-four webhook events, with useful distinctions
Notably it separates activity.opened from activity.opened_unique and activity.clicked from activity.clicked_unique, which saves you deduplicating downstream. It also publishes maintenance.start and maintenance.end events, so your systems can know when the provider is working on itself.
Where MailerSend falls short
Twenty-four hours of history on the free and Hobby plans
This is the sharpest limit in the product. Activity retention is 24 hours on Free and 24 hours on Hobby, rising to seven days on Starter and thirty days on Professional. On a $7 plan, a question about yesterday afternoon may already be unanswerable.
| Provider | Retention on the cheapest paid plan |
|---|---|
| Resend | 30 days, and 30 on free too |
| SMTP2GO | About a month |
| SparkPost | 10 days on every plan |
| MailerSend | 24 hours on Hobby, 7 days on Starter |
| Mailgun | 1 day on Basic |
One SMTP port, with no documented fallback
Covered above. 587 alone. For an application on a normal host this is fine. For a device on a locked-down network, or anything running where outbound 587 is filtered, there is no alternative published and no equivalent of SMTP2GO’s port 443 escape hatch.
Unapproved accounts are heavily throttled on recipients
An unapproved account may address 10 TO, 1 CC and 1 BCC per message. Approved accounts get 50, 10 and 10. That is a five-fold difference and the approval process is not described in the limits documentation. If your first integration test sends to a dozen internal addresses, expect it to fail before you understand why.
The pricing page does not render two of its four prices
On both of our passes the Starter and Professional price cards displayed an empty currency followed by “/month”, with the figures injected client-side. We took the numbers from MailerSend’s own help documentation instead. This is the third platform in this project where the pricing page renders no usable price, after Drip and Campaign Monitor.
Worse, the two official sources disagree on overage. The pricing page says $0.90 per 1,000; the help page says “a metered rate starting at $1.30 per 1,000 emails sent”. We publish both rather than choosing, and you should establish which applies before committing volume.
The review corpus contains reviews of the wrong product
Several of the 62 Capterra reviews describe MailerLite rather than MailerSend: “I really can’t find anything I don’t like about Mailer Lite”, “I use an older version of Mailerlite”, “my experience with Mailerlite”. Given that the two products come from the same team with near-identical names, this is understandable and it still means the transactional corpus is smaller than 62 and the 4.4 average includes marketing-product sentiment.
It is a milder version of what we found on SparkPost’s listing, where reviews of a graphic design app had been filed under an email API.
No dedicated IP price, and no independent placement figure
Dedicated IPs are Enterprise-only with no published price, where SparkPost lists $20, Amazon SES $24.95 and Resend $30. And like every provider in this family, MailerSend has never been in the seedlist inbox placement panel, which has since been discontinued, so there is no third-party number for its deliverability.
Ratings breakdown
Six categories, each out of 10, judged against the same evidence rules on every platform we cover. The overall is the unweighted arithmetic mean, rounded to one decimal: 7.5 + 4.0 + 7.5 + 7.0 + 7.5 + 9.0 = 42.5, divided by 6, equals 7.1.
Ease of use, 7.5. A Capterra ease sub-score of 4.3, one hostname, one port and per-domain credentials. Held below 8 by the unapproved-account recipient throttle and a pricing page that does not render.
Automation, 4.0. Templates, inbound routing and suppression management. Email broadcasts are on the roadmap for Q4 2026 and not shipped. This is a relay.
Deliverability, 7.5. No independent figure. DMARC monitoring, blocklist monitoring, verification credits on every plan and a 2048-bit DKIM upgrade shipped this month are a stronger feature set than most of this family carries. Held down by 24-hour retention, which limits how far back you can investigate a problem.
Support, 7.0. A 4.3 Capterra customer service sub-score, above SendGrid, Mailgun and SparkPost, below SMTP2GO’s 4.8. Note the corpus is partly contaminated by MailerLite reviews.
Pricing value, 7.5. 500 emails a month free, $7 for 5,000, $35 for 50,000, all competitive. Held down by 24-hour retention on the two cheapest tiers, two official pages disagreeing on overage, and no published dedicated IP price.
API and MCP, 9.0. The most precisely documented limits in this category, seven official SDKs, 24 webhook event types with unique-open and unique-click separated, and a hosted streamable HTTP MCP server with a very wide tool surface. Held below Resend’s 9.5 by the single SMTP port and the unpublished total message size.
Who should use MailerSend, and who should not
MailerSend is the right call for
Look elsewhere if
Third-party validation
| Source | Score | Volume | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capterra | 4.4 / 5 | 62 reviews | Ease of use 4.3, customer service 4.3, features 4.4, value for money 4.3. Product ID 214665. Several reviews describe MailerLite rather than MailerSend. |
| G2 | 4.1 / 5 | 46 reviews | Product name confirmed. |
| Trustpilot | N/A | – | No verified listing found. |
| Inbox placement | No figure | – | Never included in the seedlist panel, which has since been discontinued. |
Top 3 alternatives
| Alternative | Our score | Take it instead if |
|---|---|---|
| Resend | 7.4 | You want thirty days of logs on a free plan, five SMTP ports and an OAuth MCP server. Weigh the missing API versioning and a ten-review track record. |
| SMTP2GO | 7.5 | Your mail has to escape a restrictive network, or you want the best support scores on this site. Eight ports including 80 and 443, and a free dedicated IP at 100,000 a month. |
| Postmark | 7.1 | Transactional email where separated streams and long history matter more than published rate limits. |
Continue reading
- MailerSend SMTP settings
- MailerSend API, rate limits, webhooks and the MCP server
- MailerSend pricing, plans, quotas and retention
- MailerLite review, the marketing product from the same team
- Resend review
- SMTP2GO review
Frequently asked questions
How much does MailerSend cost?
Free is $0 for 500 emails a month with 100 API requests a day. Hobby is $7 a month for 5,000 emails, with overage at $1.50 per 1,000. Starter is from $35 a month for 50,000 emails, or $31.50 annually. Professional starts at $110 a month, or $99 annually, with unlimited domains and seats. Note that MailerSend’s pricing page and its help documentation disagree on the overage rate above Hobby, quoting $0.90 and $1.30 per 1,000 respectively.
What are the MailerSend SMTP settings?
Host smtp.mailersend.net on port 587. That is the only port documented; 25, 465 and 2525 do not appear in the configuration documentation. TLS 1.2 and 1.3 are supported. Credentials are an SMTP user generated per domain in the Domains screen, with the password shown once and never again.
Is MailerSend the same as MailerLite?
Same team, different products. MailerSend’s about page says “We’re the people behind MailerLite”. MailerLite is the marketing platform and scores 7.4 with us; MailerSend is the transactional relay and API. MailerSend states it is a United States-registered company, while MailerLite’s historic parent is Lithuanian; the group structure is not documented publicly. Be aware that several reviews on MailerSend’s Capterra listing are actually about MailerLite.
What are MailerSend’s API rate limits?
Published per endpoint, which almost nobody in this category does: general endpoints 60 requests a minute, email sending 120 a minute, bulk email 10 a minute, activity retrieval 10 a minute, and SMTP 120 a minute. On top of that there are daily API quotas by plan: 100 on Free, 1,000 on Hobby, 100,000 on Starter, and 500,000 on Professional and Enterprise. Approved accounts may address 50 TO, 10 CC and 10 BCC per message; unapproved accounts get 10, 1 and 1.
Does MailerSend have an MCP server?
Yes, an official one at https://mcp.mailersend.com/mcp, described as a streamable HTTP endpoint meeting the latest MCP specifications, with OAuth through your client. It shipped in Q3 2025 and covers sending and bulk sending, domains, SMTP users, messages, templates, webhooks, inbound routing, recipients, suppressions, analytics, email verification, DMARC and blocklist monitoring, tokens, users, sender identities and SMS.
Changelog
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 27 August 2026 | First publication. All 62 Capterra reviews read, with several identified as describing MailerLite rather than MailerSend. Every hostname, port, rate limit, quota, retention window and price verified twice against MailerSend’s own documentation, with the pricing-page and help-page disagreement on overage published rather than resolved. Product activity confirmed from a changelog whose most recent entry is dated 4 August 2026. Search volumes measured for the United States. |
This review follows our email infrastructure testing methodology. We disclose affiliate relationships in our editorial independence policy.
