# MailBaby vs Amazon SES vs SMTP2GO for hosting providers

Source: https://srvscripts.com/guides/mailbaby-vs-amazon-ses-vs-smtp2go/
Updated: 2026-10-03
Publisher: srvScripts (https://srvscripts.com/)

Every hosting provider eventually decides that managing outbound IP reputation in-house is not worth the engineering time, and the question becomes which relay to use. The three that come up most often for panel-based servers are MailBaby, Amazon SES and SMTP2GO. They are built for different customers and the differences matter more than the price per thousand. This guide compares them on the criteria that decide the outcome on a multi-tenant server.

In short: For a shared or reseller hosting fleet with unvetted customers, MailBaby is the best fit: it filters outbound content, blocks a single compromised address rather than the whole account, authorises domains with one DNS record, keeps 60 days…

**Short answer:** For a shared or reseller hosting fleet with unvetted customers, MailBaby is the best fit: it filters outbound content, blocks a single compromised address rather than the whole account, authorises domains with one DNS record, keeps 60 days of per-message logs and costs $1 per month plus $0.20 per 1,000 messages. Amazon SES is cheaper at volume but does no filtering, requires every domain to be verified as an identity, and can suspend the entire account over one customer’s bounces and complaints, which makes it right for a provider’s own transactional mail rather than customer mail. SMTP2GO sits between them and suits agencies with a modest number of known client domains.

## Who each service is built for

MailBaby is built for hosting servers specifically. It expects a stream of mail from hundreds of unrelated domains, applies a content filter that bounces spam back to the sender, blocks individual compromised addresses rather than the whole account, and publishes configuration for cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk and Webuzo. It is outbound-only.

Amazon SES is transactional infrastructure for application developers. It is cheap and scales without limit, but it assumes a single organisation that owns and verifies every sending identity, monitors its own bounce and complaint rates, and can be suspended as a whole if those rates rise. It offers no outbound content filtering.

SMTP2GO is a general-purpose relay for businesses and agencies. It has a polished dashboard, per-sender reporting and reasonable multi-domain support, and it sits between the other two on both price and strictness.

## Pricing model

MailBaby charges $1 per month for the account, which includes roughly 5,000 messages, then $0.20 per 1,000. There is no per-server or per-domain fee, so a fleet of forty servers costs volume alone. Blocked and rSPAM messages are billed, which is deliberate: it makes a compromise cost you money and gives you a reason to fix it fast.

Amazon SES bills per message at a rate around a tenth of a cent per message in most regions, plus data transfer for attachments. Sending from a large fleet is very cheap. The hidden cost is engineering: getting out of the sandbox, requesting sending quota, verifying each identity and building the bounce and complaint handling that SES requires you to run yourself.

SMTP2GO uses tiered monthly plans keyed to message volume, with a free tier for a few thousand messages. Per message it is more expensive than either of the others at volume, and the plan ceiling means a busy month can require an upgrade rather than a pro-rated overage.

## Limits and throttling

MailBaby caps sending at 6,000 messages per hour per sender address and discards the excess. That is a per-address cap, so a server sending for 500 customers has 500 separate allowances; only a single bulk sender is affected. New accounts warm up under stricter thresholds.

SES enforces an account-wide maximum send rate and a 24-hour quota, both raised on request. Exceeding them returns a throttling error that the MTA retries, so nothing is lost, but a single spammer on the server consumes the whole account’s rate for everyone.

SMTP2GO throttles by plan and can rate-limit per SMTP user; per-user credentials are how it separates tenants.

## Panel integration and multi-tenancy

For cPanel and DirectAdmin the integration is an authenticated smarthost in all three cases: an Exim authenticator, a `manualroute` router and an SMTP transport with `hosts_require_auth`, exactly as in [our cPanel guide](/guides/mailbaby-cpanel-whm-exim-setup/). SES requires SMTP credentials generated from an IAM user, port 587 or 2587, and TLS; SMTP2GO uses port 2525 or 587 with a username and password. All three pass a locally applied DKIM signature through, so per-domain DKIM on the panel keeps working.

The difference is what happens with 500 sending domains. MailBaby authorises a domain with an SPF include or a single `_mailbaby` TXT record and does not otherwise care how many there are. SES requires each domain to be verified as an identity, with its own DKIM records published, or mail from it is rejected; automating that for churned shared-hosting domains is real work. SMTP2GO verifies domains through its dashboard or API and is manageable for dozens of domains, tedious for hundreds.

## Compromise handling

This is where the products diverge most. MailBaby scores content, bounces spam, and blocks the single compromised address while the rest of the server keeps sending; the [delisting procedure](/guides/mailbaby-compromised-account-delisting/) is per address. SES does no filtering and measures bounce and complaint rates across the account; a single compromised mailbox pushing spam to a scraped list can put the entire account under review, taking every customer’s mail with it. SMTP2GO monitors bounce and spam-report rates per account and can suspend, but per-user credentials let you isolate a tenant if you have issued one credential per customer.

## Logs and support

MailBaby keeps 60 days of per-message logs with score and outcome, viewable in the portal and through the REST API. SES keeps no message log by default; you build one from SNS event notifications to a queue or database. SMTP2GO provides searchable per-message activity in its dashboard for a retention period that depends on plan.

## Choosing

For a shared or reseller hosting fleet where customers are unvetted and compromises are a weekly event, MailBaby’s content filtering and per-address blocking are the features that save the most staff time, and the pricing is trivial at hosting volumes. SES is the right choice for a provider’s own transactional mail, such as panel notifications, billing and monitoring, where the identities are few and controlled and the engineering to handle bounces is worth it. SMTP2GO fits agencies with a modest number of well-known client domains who want a dashboard rather than a log API.

Before committing, verify the choice on one low-volume server: relay it for a fortnight, compare the rSPAM rate and delivery rate against what the server achieved on its own IP, and check the portal or dashboard actually answers the support questions your team gets. The common pitfall is choosing on price per thousand alone; at hosting volumes the difference is a few dollars a month, while a single account-wide suspension costs a day of engineering and a wave of tickets.

## MailBaby vs Amazon SES at a glance

Covers: Who each service is built for, Pricing model, Limits and throttling and Panel integration and multi-tenancy.

**Official documentation:** [RFC 5321 (SMTP)](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321), [Linux man pages](https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/).

**Related guides:** [How MailBaby handles feedback loops and abuse reports, and what to do when you get one](https://srvscripts.com/guides/mailbaby-feedback-loops-abuse-reports/) · [Warm up a new mail server IP or sending domain without landing in spam](https://srvscripts.com/guides/warm-up-new-mail-server-ip-domain/) · [Setting up MailBaby with cPanel/WHM Exim: router, transport, SRS and DKIM](https://srvscripts.com/guides/mailbaby-cpanel-whm-exim-setup/).

## Frequently asked questions

### Can I use Amazon SES as the outbound relay for a cPanel shared hosting server?

Technically yes, with IAM SMTP credentials on port 587 and the same Exim smarthost configuration, but every customer domain must be verified as an SES identity with its own DKIM records, SES does no content filtering, and one compromised mailbox can put the whole account under review. It works far better for the provider’s own transactional mail than for customer mail.

### How much does MailBaby cost compared with SES and SMTP2GO?

MailBaby is $1 per month including roughly 5,000 messages, then $0.20 per 1,000, with no per-server or per-domain fee. SES is around a tenth of a cent per message plus data transfer, and SMTP2GO uses tiered monthly plans with a free tier. At hosting volumes the difference is a few dollars a month, so features matter more than price.

### Which relay handles a compromised mailbox best on a multi-tenant server?

MailBaby, because it scores content, bounces spam and blocks only the offending sender address while the rest of the server keeps sending. SES measures bounce and complaint rates across the whole account, and SMTP2GO can isolate tenants only if you issued a separate SMTP credential per customer.