Head to head

Email Bump vs Postal

Postal is a mail server you run. We're a hosted platform on Amazon SES. The entire comparison is whether owning IP reputation is a project you want.

Eight rows below, including the three where Postal wins.

8 rows Checked 2 August 2026
The short version

Which one you want, in three sentences

Pick Postal if you want total control — your IPs, your queues, your data, your rules — and you have someone who will own deliverability as part of their job.

Pick Email Bump if you'd rather someone else warmed the IPs and answered for inbox placement, and you also want campaigns, segments and flows.

Pick useSend or FreeResend if you want the self-hosted middle ground: your own dashboard and database, with Amazon SES carrying the reputation.

Line by line

8 differences that matter

Postal's column comes from their published pricing and documentation on 2 August 2026.

 
Postal
Email Bump
What it is
A complete mail server — sends and receives.
A hosted platform sending through Amazon SES.
Licence
MIT, self-hostable, no network clause.
Proprietary. No self-hosted build.
Cost
Free software plus servers and IPs.
$19/mo at 10,000 contacts, sending included.
IP reputation
Yours — warm-up, blocklists, feedback loops, abuse handling.
Ours, on shared SES pools with monitoring.
Infrastructure
Database, message queue, DNS, reverse DNS, clean IPs.
None on your side.
Inbound email
First-class — it's a mail server.
Included on every plan, without running an MTA.
Campaigns and contacts
None — it's infrastructure.
Campaigns, live segments and flows on the same plan.
Support
Documentation, GitHub discussions and a Discord.
Human support on every plan, including free.
Against us

Three places Postal is the better choice

Total control. Your servers, your IPs, your queues, your data, your retention. No provider can change terms, raise prices or close the account. For some organisations that's the requirement and nothing else matters.

MIT, and genuinely mature. Around 16,700 stars, years of production use, and a permissive licence with no network clause. We have neither the licence nor the history.

It receives as well as sends. A real MTA handling inbound natively, which the SES-wrapper projects don't. If you're building something mail-server-shaped rather than API-shaped, Postal is the correct tool.

FAQ

Email Bump vs Postal, asked and answered

Is Email Bump more expensive than Postal?

On the invoice, yes — Postal's licence is free and you pay for servers. What you're buying from us is not having to warm IPs, chase blocklist removals or answer for inbox placement.

At very high volume with dedicated staff, Postal wins on cost. For a product team, it usually doesn't.

Do you run your own mail servers?

No — we send through Amazon SES, which means AWS carries the IP reputation and we carry the monitoring, bounce handling and abuse response on top.

That's a deliberately less controlled position than Postal and a much less demanding one.

Can I self-host Email Bump?

No. Postal, useSend, Plunk, Notifuse, listmonk, FreeResend, Mautic, Keila and Ghost are the self-hostable options on the alternatives page.

Try it against your own list

Import a segment and compare

5,000 contacts and 5,000 emails free. Run one campaign through both and let the delivery and click numbers decide.