# Transactional Email Services Compared

Many application need to send emails at some point or another: either for user confirmation, password reset, newsletters, support and more. Whatever the use-case, sending emails with a transactional email service removes the time and stress of configuring a custom SMTP server.

Remember, it's important to test your email sending functionality end-to-end. MailSlurp is a email test account generation API (opens new window) that lets you create random unique email addresses and then send and receive real emails with them.

# What is a transactional email service?

Email sending services are often called transactional mail services as emails are commonly sent on demand after particular application events. This means services typically provide an HTTP API or SDK so that customers request the sending of email from their application.

# Benefits of email as a service APIs

Transactional mail services are plentiful and offer many advantages:

They are easy to setup (compared with regular SMTP mail servers)
Calling APIs is simple in application code (compared with SMTP APIs)
They can handle high load and scale
Some offer graphical templating systems to make email composition easier

# Downsides

Email sending APIs do have disadvantages too over more traditional email sending techniques:

They're mostly paid
They all have different API abstractions (so vendor lock-in can occur)