Last time I tried to set this up, I think I was unable to get it for the super low advertised price, because they require you use an ec2 instance in order to skirt their minimum monthly charge and you can no longer get free tier ec2 after the first 12 months. so the monthly amount I would have to pay was going to be a non-insignificant amount.

SMTP2Go it is.

I've never in years ever been allowed out of their sandbox which restricts it to verified addresses.

This doesn't seem to be uncommon.

Conversely, I have a pre-MS hotmail address and verification emails never arrive for any number of services.

MS spreads it's toxic protection in every direction.

When I requested to escape the sandbox, my request was granted in nine hours...admittedly, this was six years ago, but it looks like the process is the same (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/request-production...).

From what I've gathered it's highly dependent on region, tried a few others but that probably set off some flags for them even more.

Send a dozen emails weekly, in the end felt a bit ridiculous begging. It's a generous free service so I can't complain.

I've been using it for over six years now, I'm always worried it'll stop working...but besides having to bump my node.js version a few times, so far so good, knock on wood.

Thanks, I'm pretty happy with my setup though. I use my server for lots of other stuff at the same time as email.