Support for sending emails through Gmail on Google Workspace

Product Support
1

Your software
My Mautic version is: 6.0.4
My PHP version is: 8.2.29
My Database type and version is: 10.11.11-MariaDB-0+deb12u1

Your problem
I have a Google Workspace Gmail account with a custom domain name and I am trying to set up Mautic to send out emails with this account with no success. I’ve tried using the SMTP relay feature of Google Workspace, but honestly, I am not exactly sure if SMTP relay is what I want? I get password denied when I try this. The documentation on Google is super vague on how authentication works, but I can’t seem to find anything else.

I also found a Gmail plugin for Mautic, but there’s zero documentation on how to set it up.

First question is, does Mautic even support sending out email through Google Workspace/Gmail? If not, why can, for example, Apple Mail send on Gmail, but not Mautic? Does Google only allow certain email clients?

The second question is, why is it so hard to find an answer on this? I’ve seen some forum posts in passing mention they got Gmail to work, but nothing else. Surely Gmail is a pretty popular service and there should be some sort of documentation mentioning whether Gmail is supported or not. But I am new to the mass emailing world, so maybe not?

Thank you!

2

Hi @danb91 ,

I think most folks avoid using Gmail as an email service provider because it has quite a lot of limitations on what you can do - it’s not designed to be used for mass mailing, which is what Mautic is designed to do. Especially if you start to scale, it just won’t allow you to send at volume.

A standard Gmail account has a daily sending limit of 500 emails. Google Workspace accounts can send up to 2,000 emails per day. These limits apply to emails sent in a rolling 24-hour period.

There’s also some things that it just doesn’t let you do, some of which are quite important as a marketer.

Bounce monitoring is problematic as it rewrites the return path - from the docs:

If sending mail through GMail, the Return Path of the Email is automatically rewritten as the GMail address. It’s best to use a sending method other than GMail

Base64 encoding also doesn’t work:

While it’s technically feasible to do at lower levels, I believe, using app passwords, it’s probably a good idea to explore an actual Email Service Provider (many of which have free tiers for lower volume sending) as it will just cause a world of pain further down the line.

Sorry, and hope that helps!