Introducing Mailtrap, an Email Deliverability Powerhouse
Over at Clean Email, we’re all about receiving emails and cleaning up the inbox. However, we also need to send some emails to keep the communication wheels with our users rolling. And, since not many email platforms focus on deliverability, it was refreshing to stumble upon Mailtrap.
Namely, Mailtrap offers a free SMTP service and email API for developers and product teams, as well as email marketing features for creating, scheduling, and launching campaigns. All of this comes with high deliverability rates, industry-best analytics, and 24/7 support.
- High inboxing rates
- Fast email delivery
- Industry-best analytics
- Safe and fast scaling
- 24/7 expert support
- Email API/SMTP relay
- Limited third-party integrations
- Basic workflow automation builder
- Restricted email logs on low-tier plans
💡 Tip: While Mailtrap focuses on sending and deliverability, Clean Email takes care of the other side of the equation, managing the inbox. It automatically organizes, filters, and cleans incoming messages to keep your workspace clear and manageable, even as your team scales its email activity.
Email API/SMTP
One of Mailtrap’s main selling points is its Email API/SMTP service, which is built for developer teams and high-volume senders who are building on scale. Why? Because the service comes with all the speed and advanced functionality you’ll ever need. Most importantly, it’s super straightforward to integrate into your project/application.
To integrate Mailtrap, all you need to do is verify your sending domain, then you can either use one of the official SDKs (i.e., Java, Python, Node.js, etc.) or copy/paste one of the 25+ pre-made code snippets. And, believe it or not, that’s the whole science behind it.
The interface is also clean and has everything you need in one place, from credentials like API keys to code snippets.
So, the question begs the answer: how does Mailtrap achieve the high deliverability rates it advertises? Firstly, it offers dedicated sending streams, which let you send transactional and bulk emails separately at the same time, without any performance hiccups. On top of this, you get access to dedicated IPs, auto warm-up, throttling, and other deliverability features.
It’s also important to note that, according to Mailtrap, high deliverability rates are there by design, meaning your emails will avoid the spam folder and you’ll get solid results regardless of whether you’re on a free or paid plan.
Besides that, we appreciated the fact that Mailtrap offers its very own MCP servers, which let you send emails from your favorite IDE or AI assistant. There are also several other useful integrations with AI-powered tools like Retool or Lovable, and some for email designs and automations.
However, that’s as far as Mailtrap goes when it comes to integrations, since, besides the ones I mentioned, you can only connect to a few other platforms. You can connect to Zapier, which opens up your app ecosystem a bit, but that's it. So, if you need advanced integrations with, for example, CRM platforms, you might have to look elsewhere.
In-depth Analytics
To help you keep an eye on the performance of your emails, Mailtrap offers helicopter-view dashboards and drill-down reports. There, you can track the most important metrics, such as opens, click rate, bounces, spam complaints, and more.
We liked the fact that you can see stats for all major mailbox providers, like Google and Microsoft. Additionally, you can turn on color coding, which will tell you how well each metric is performing based on Mailtrap’s pre-determined values.
Besides the analytics dashboards, you also get access to email logs, which let you see the status of your emails, event history, spam analysis, and more. They are super detailed and easy to navigate, although we didn’t like the fact that you only get to keep them for 3 days on the free plan.
Email Marketing and Campaigns
As I’ve mentioned previously, Mailtrap offers a suite of features for email marketers. Essentially, you can use Mailtrap for everything from designing emails with the drag-and-drop editor to managing contacts and launching campaigns.
The drag-and-drop builder is super easy to use and even has some actually useful AI features for generating headings, text, buttons, and images. There are also some basic email templates you can choose to get started, and once you’re satisfied with a design, you can preview how it looks on different devices, resolutions, in dark mode, and more.
We also appreciated contact management, since it’s quite intuitive with Mailtrap. You can import your contacts in CSV, manage their details, define personalization variables, and sort them into lists, all in one place. There are also suppression lists where you can add users who have unsubscribed or marked you as spam. This way, you can improve your deliverability in your future campaigns.
Now, I must mention a downside that stood out to me while reviewing Mailtrap. Namely, if you’re looking for an advanced automation builder or fancy features like AI email automation, I don’t think what Mailtrap offers will do the trick. You can use it to make welcome series emails, event-driven follow-ups, and a few other flows, but not much more than that.
Customer Support
Another one of Mailtrap’s key features is its 24/7 expert support team, which consists of engineers and developers. Now, since we didn’t have any issues with the platform ourselves, we thought it would be better to check out what the user base thinks of the support.
So, we hopped over to popular review platforms, such as Trustpilot, G2, and Capterra, to see what the people have to say. To our surprise, most people praise Mailtrap’s customer support for responsiveness and reliability, as one SMB owner from G2 says:
Mailtrap Pricing
Pricing-wise, Mailtrap is quite scalable, offering several different plans and a slider that lets you choose your email-sending volume. For your convenience, here are the plans with monthly fees:
- Free: 3,500 emails per month and 100 contacts (free forever, no credit card required)
- Basic: $15/month for 10,000 emails and up to 50,000 contacts
- Business: $85/month for 100,000 emails and up to 750,00 contacts
- Enterprise: $750/month for 1,500,000 emails and up to 2,500,000 contacts
📌 Note that bootstrappers and indie hackers get a 35% lifetime discount for the Business plan.
As you can see, Mailtrap has a generous free plan, although it’s not all sunshine and roses. For instance, you don’t get dedicated IPs, and you can reach customer support only via email. To make it worse, this goes for the Basic plan too, which can be a nuisance for some users.
The Basic plan is a solid choice for starting out or if you don’t need to keep your email logs for long.
The most popular plan, Business, comes with all the features that cover pretty much all use cases. You get dedicated IPs, SaaS safeguard, auto warm-up, customer support live chat, and more.
Of course, Mailtrap offers a separate plan for its Enterprise users, which comes with every feature the platform offers and a sending limit that is through the roof. And, for users who are looking for a mass email service and want to take it a step further, you can check out the custom high-sender plan.
Combining Mailtrap with Clean Email
Mailtrap helps teams send transactional and marketing emails that actually reach their audience. But once those campaigns start generating replies, delivery alerts, and test messages, your own inbox can easily become cluttered. Clean Email complements Mailtrap by managing this incoming flow intelligently, so your focus stays on performance, not inbox cleanup.
You can use Clean Email to automatically organize and clean the incoming messages generated by your Mailtrap campaigns.
To give you a rough idea, Clean Email’s Auto Clean rules can automatically archive or label delivery confirmations, bounce reports, or user replies.
Its Smart Folders feature can group all related emails into dedicated views for easy tracking.
The Unsubscriber tool lets you unsubscribe in one click from all those unwanted mailing lists, including the ones that don't even give you a clear link to stop the mail.
💡 This can be super handy for tidying up after testing subscription-based messages or talking to third-party integrations.
And to top it off, Clean Email works wherever you do. It’s available on macOS, iOS, Android, and as a web app, so you can manage your inbox and automation rules from any device.
📌 In short, combining Mailtrap’s reliable email sending and deliverability tools with Clean Email’s intelligent inbox management creates a complete workflow for effective email communication. Mailtrap handles sending; Clean Email ensures you only see what matters, keeping your workspace organized, efficient, and distraction-free.
Final verdict
So, summing it up, does Mailtrap get a yes or no from us?
If you’re a developer looking to send transactional and bulk emails at scale, then it’s a hard yes. Who can pass up on high inboxing rates, fast delivery, and 24/7 expert support?
On the other hand, if you need advanced email marketing automations or a plethora of 3rd party integrations, we recommend you check out some other options on the market.
In any case, Mailtrap offers a generous free plan, so be sure to try it out and see whether you like it. It won’t cost you anything, and you can always upgrade to a paid plan if it turns out it’s the right fit for you and your team.
