How To Migrate
To Mailtrap

👋 New to Mailtrap? Check our 5 minute 🎥 overview of our Email API/SMTP.

Step 1: Prepare for Migration

Before migrating to Mailtrap, you should do a simple prep to ensure you don’t lose important data. 

1. Export your current suppression list

The suppression list contains all the email addresses you can’t email based on events such as bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribes. 

It’s highly recommended that you import your suppression list to Mailtrap before you start sending emails. This is needed to protect your email deliverability and sender reputation. Skipping this step may cause high bounce rates and spam complaints, leading to your account being temporarily suspended.

So, one of the first steps during preparations is to export it from your current sending provider and have it on hand.

2. Export your sending stats (if possible)

Sometimes, we ask bulk and marketing customers to provide email-sending stats from the previous provider. If your provider allows exporting stats or reports, it would be beneficial to have those on hand.

Make sure you’ve set up Google Postmaster Tools for your domain, as the Mailtrap Compliance Team may ask for its stats. We recommend setting it up anyway, as it helps track your deliverability.

3. Estimate your maximum hourly sending rate

Estimate your maximum hourly sending rate and communicate it to our support team to avoid potential email delivery delays.

4. Get familiar with Mailtrap docs

Check the side-by-side comparisons for popular providers and Mailtrap. Compare API endpoints, terminology, and technical features. This will help you get familiar with Mailtrap and transfer all the data correctly. Read the following guides for more information:

• SendGrid to Mailtrap
• Mailgun to Mailtrap
• Mailchimp Transactional Email to Mailtrap
• Amazon SES to Mailtrap

Here are the API docs if you want to compare everything yourself or if you use a provider not covered above. 

5.  Talk to our deliverability experts

If you’re a high-volume sender (>200k/month), talk to our Deliverability team before you start migration. They will help you through the process, assign a dedicated IP, and check if everything is set up correctly. 

6. Contact our support team if you have a multi-tenant service

If you have a multi-tenant service (i.e., multiple domains or services), please contact our support team before you start sending. We’ll arrange a special compliance process and ensure one tenant’s (domain’s) bad reputation doesn’t block your whole account and other domains.

Step 2: Set up Mailtrap

Once you gather all the necessary data from your previous provider, you can start setting everything up in Mailtrap. 

1. Create an account

This process is really easy. Simply go to the signup page, choose your preferred registration method, and fill out the necessary fields. 

2. Add your billing information 

If you’re using our paid plans, add billing data. Contact our support team if you need an annual plan or use a payment method different from a credit card. 

3. Add and verify your domain

To start sending emails to your recipients with Mailtrap, you must add and verify a sending domain you own. Verification means adding Mailtrap DNS records to your domain provider. You can read detailed instructions on that process in this article. 

4. Wait for verification and Compliance Check to be completed

Domain verification usually takes a few minutes to a few hours if you add all the records correctly. The next step is Compliance Check. 

It’s the process of checking every new domain added to Mailtrap. Once all the DNS records are successfully verified, your domain will undergo an automatic review. This usually takes a couple of minutes. More information is available here.

Remember that, in some cases or high sending volumes, our deliverability team might require access to your Google Postmaster data. If you’re a bulk sender, we may ask for information about your email lists and stats from your previous sending solution. 

Important note: We don’t allow cold outreach.

5. Import suppressions 

As mentioned earlier, importing suppressions is highly recommended before you start sending emails with Mailtrap. You’ll find all the needed instructions here. 

6. Integrate Mailtrap with your app, service, or platform 

The next essential step is integrating Mailtrap with your app, service, or platform using SMTP or API. 

SMTP Integration

For SMTP integration, open the SMTP configuration in your app or project and substitute the Host, Port, Username, and Password with Mailtrap credentials. You can access them in the Integration tab under Sending Domains. Follow the instructions in this article. 

To send transactional emails, use the credentials below:

You’ll need the following credentials to send emails with Bulk Stream:

API integration

Like SMTP credentials, you’ll find API credentials in the Integration tab under Sending Domains. Here, too, you should substitute existing credentials with the Mailtrap Host (API endpoint) and the API Token. Detailed instructions are available here.

SDK integration

Mailtrap has SDKs for PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, and Elixir. If your project is written in any of these languages, you can import the package and configure the email-sending script as shown on GitHub. 

7. Request dedicated IP (>200k emails/month)

If you send more than 200k emails per month, you must request a dedicated IP. It helps maintain high deliverability rates and ensures your reputation isn’t affected by other senders. 

We provide automatic warm-ups for our dedicated IPs. Please contact our support team to request one. 

Keep in mind that, in some cases, our deliverability team may ask you to enable a dedicated IP for lower volumes, too. 

Dedicated IP is included in the Business plan or higher.

8. Rebuild the templates in Mailtrap (optional) 

If you already have templates with your current provider, you can rebuild them in Mailtrap. At this moment, you can’t import templates directly, but you can copy them manually. Mailtrap uses Handlebars as a template markup. 

Mailtrap has drag-and-drop and code editors, and you can choose the desired option. You’ll also find ready-made templates to help you get used to the editors and easily rebuild the old templates. Read more here.

Our Templates can be used with all Mailtrap products: Email API/SMTP, Email Marketing, and Email Testing. For template schemas, refer to the API docs.

9. Optional steps 

Mailtrap also allows you to configure the following features: 

10. Test the setup 

At this point, your project is ready to send emails with Mailtrap. However, to ensure everything runs smoothly, we recommend testing your setup in staging. That will help you check if you migrated all the credentials correctly and if your configuration has any errors. 

Important: Don’t test your setup by sending emails to non-existent email addresses as it increases your bounce rates and negatively affects your sender reputation. Instead, use Mailtrap Email Testing to test your emails in staging and dev environments, automate workflows, and validate HTML/CSS.

Other useful features 

Here are other features you may find useful: 

• User Management to manage user permissions;
• API Tokens to create different API keys for different applications;
• Email Marketing to create, schedule, and send email campaigns to your customers.