Do I need email delivery infrastructure or can I just use Gmail SMTP?

You can often start with Gmail SMTP, but whether it’s enough depends on what you’re sending and how production-like your setup needs to be.

Gmail SMTP is okay for:

• Personal projects
• Low-volume internal tools
• Small-scale notifications where reliability and deliverability aren’t mission-critical
• Testing/prototyping

Gmail SMTP is usually not enough for:

• Production apps with real users
• Transaction emails like password resets, receipts, alerts, OTPs
• Marketing/bulk email
• Anything where you need good deliverability, monitoring, bounce handling, or scaling

Why Gmail SMTP is limited

• Sending limits: Gmail has daily/hourly caps
• Not designed for app-level email sending
• Authentication and deliverability are weaker for application use compared to dedicated providers
• Hard to manage bounces, complaints, suppression lists, logs
• Can be flagged or throttled if usage looks automated

When you need email infrastructure

If email is part of your product and must be reliable, you’ll want:

• A dedicated email service provider (SES, SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, etc.)
• Proper DNS setup: SPF, DKIM, DMARC
• Retry logic, bounce tracking, complaint handling
• Monitoring/logging
• Possibly separate transactional vs marketing streams

Practical recommendation

• If you’re just getting started: Gmail SMTP is fine for development or very small internal use.
• If you’re sending emails to customers: use a dedicated email delivery service rather than Gmail SMTP.

If you want, I can help you choose between Gmail SMTP vs SES vs SendGrid vs Postmark based on your use case and volume.