is it foolish to use gmail with PHPMailer?

Question

Soon I'll be launching my new site and i was planning on using gmail as the email server for things like registration and lost password.

I'll be using google apps (free version) so I can have admin@mydomain.com.

Besides the 500/day limit are there any other potential problems with using gmail for this service?

Answer 1

2 Years im using gmail apps + phpmailer, never had a problem (except the 500 limit as you mentioned).

Emails take (on my experience) not more than 1-2 seconds to be sent; Just remember to use ssl on port 465.

And noone of my emails is been market as a SPAM

Answer 2

Yes, SSL connections are slow as hell. Sending one email takes ~10 seconds. I use Google Apps, but I only send out the occasional New User and Forgot Password emails, so it's not that bad.

Answer 3

Using google app engine instead of sending mail via gmail

I haven't used gmail with PHPMailer, but I don't think it is foolish. But if you ask me you are better of using google app engine to send emails. I realize this isn't a php solution, but I think to achieve what you want the google app engine documentation will fit your bill. That way you don't have the hard limit enforced on you and it scales very well.

P.S: Google has a very generous free daily quota:
    Mail API Calls 7,000 calls, 32 calls/minute

Learn basics of deploying an application to google app engine

Also a little youtube video from Slatkin(<10 minutes) to learn the basics of deploying a app to Google App engine. When I saw this video I was sold to the power of app engine and python.

Send email via Python's app engine SDK

Here you will find a little snippet which I directly copied from there documentation.

from google.appengine.api import mail

mail.send_mail(sender="Example.com Support <support@example.com>",
              to="Albert Johnson <Albert.Johnson@example.com>",
              subject="Your account has been approved",
              body="""
Dear Albert:

Your example.com account has been approved.  You can now visit
http://www.example.com/ and sign in using your Google Account to
access new features.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

The example.com Team
""")

Answer 4

Sure. We send through Gmail / Google Apps service and it has worked fine for us.