Bring your own email service

Bring your own email service is planned for HLB. The proposed feature would let you send your account email through your own outgoing mail (SMTP) provider instead of the default HLB email system. It would be meant for businesses with an established sending setup or a preference for managing their own email service.

How it is planned to work

• You would go to Settings, then Email Services, and open the SMTP Service tab.
• You would click Add Service and choose a provider: Gmail, Yahoo Mail, SendGrid, or Other for services such as Mailgun, Amazon SES, Postmark or Zoho.
• You would enter the SMTP host, port, username, password or API key, from name and from email.
• You would save the service, then set it as active.

You could save several services and switch between them, but only one could be active at a time. You could switch back to the default HLB email system at any time, and your saved services would stay in your account. With Enable reply turned on, replies to emails sent through your service would come back into Conversations. Contacts would see only your from name and from email.

For Gmail or Google Workspace, you would need 2-Step Verification enabled on your Google account to create an app password in your Google account security settings and enter it instead of your regular password; Google Workspace policy could block app passwords.

Some built-in deliverability tools would not be offered with your own service. These would include creating dedicated sending domains in the app, postmaster tool integrations, inbox placement testing, the spam score checker and the blacklist monitor. For a failed email, the error from your provider would appear in the conversation. The most common fix would be to make sure the sender email matches the one set up with your provider.