First off we have been using SMTP Gateways for more than a decade now and send millions of emails with other providers. Never with a problem.

We wanted to give socketlabs a test as it seemed to be a promising SMTP Gateway.
However after a test period of 1 month ... i can only warn everyone to even bother about using them.

The scenario ...
The domain/store we used this one was first working great. Suddenly after a couple days it stopped working our transactional emails just weren't delivered anymore. We found out there is a queue of emails... means the emails were stuck at socketlabs. The emails were released from the queue very slowly. Like emails took about a day to be delivered ... on a small amount of emails send.

In total we had send over the many days about 800 Transactional emails.
Unfortunately a form spam bot hit us as well and created profiles with fake emails addresses.
9 of these emails were marked as spam. That resulted in a bad reputation at SL.

We did not see the complaints as socketlab only gives 10 days of data at our account level.
So only contacting support we found out why our emails got stuck.

After forward and backward with support i got the impression that the "Profile Creation" form is the issue, so SL wants us to use a captcha on these pages.

I understand this so far. I replied that we can not use a captcha on such a critical page (we used to have a simple captcha with no effect ... to easy to crack by AI) as captchas are hard for some people and we do not want to loose sales. But we do disable profile notification for this form so NO emails is sent to anyone that is not a real customer and has not paid.

Socket Labs made suggestion to use a captcha. I said ... no we can not use a google or any other 3rd party captcha based on "FORCED OPTIN RULES" of the EU GDPR and NEW Cookie Rules. So basically we must ... by law ... ask the user for permission to use cookies & services of specific 3rd parties before we can use them.

So a captcha as suggested makes no sense ... if people do not react on the request or even block it, we may not be able to sell to them because they have blocked the cookies 50 steps earlier.

But i highlighted once again that we have TURNED OFF emails for this form.

Now socketlabs replies that in their legal sense of GDPR we have no issue with 3rd party captchas and if we do not apply it to the form they will cancel our account.

They totally ignored the fact that we turned emails off for the form in question and make the whole account only dependent on this very form although there is other forms as well and other websites etc.

So from the 25K emails that we can send each month ... after 800 emails we already get issues with them we never experienced with anyone else.

The terms of them are nuts. The metrics are not transparent. Every little additional things costs money. The customer support tries to help but does not understand and seems highly flexible.

NO DEAL. I will ask for a refund.