Choosing an SMTP Service Provider for Dolibarr Email Notifications

Using my Dolibarr
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Hi everyone,

I’m reviewing options for improving email delivery from Dolibarr (invoices, notifications, and customer communications). Has anyone recently compared an SMTP Service Provider such as iDealSMTP with other solutions for Dolibarr integrations?

I’m mainly interested in reliability, delivery rates, and ease of SMTP configuration within Dolibarr. Any experiences or recommendations would be appreciated.

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Hi Raju,

A few thoughts from setting this up on a number of Dolibarr instances:

In my experience the provider matters less for deliverability than how your sending domain is authenticated. Before comparing relays, make sure the domain you send from has SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place and aligned — that moves your delivery rate far more than the brand of SMTP service. Most reputable transactional providers (Brevo, Mailgun, Amazon SES, Postmark, SMTP2GO…) deliver well once the domain side is right. I haven’t benchmarked iDealSMTP specifically, so I can’t speak to it directly.

On the Dolibarr side it’s straightforward:

  • Home > Setup > Emails — set the sending method to “SMTP/SMTPS socket library” rather than PHP mail() (PHP mail() is the usual cause of poor delivery).
    • Enter the host, port and credentials from your provider, and match TLS/STARTTLS to the port (commonly 587 + STARTTLS, or 465 + SSL).
      • Use the “Test” button on that page — it sends a test message and shows the raw SMTP exchange, which makes auth/TLS issues easy to spot.
    • Two extras: if you also send mass mailings via the Emailing module, recent versions let you define a separate SMTP profile so bulk and transactional traffic don’t share reputation; and if you’re on Microsoft 365 / Gmail, use the OAuth2 option rather than a plain password.
  • If you ever push a high volume of automated notifications and want retry/visibility beyond Dolibarr’s native mail logs, that can be extended with a little custom work — but for what you’ve described, native SMTP + a reputable provider on a properly authenticated domain should give you both reliability and good delivery rates.

Happy to share a sample DNS (SPF/DKIM/DMARC) setup if it helps.

—

Ali — Dolibarr AI Consultant

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