I am testing Mailtrap last weeks. You can send emails from your domain for free. They allow 1000 mails/month. It is quite ok. It can be used with good old SMTP connection or via API.
https://mailtrap.io/
I’ve dreaded setting up VPS’ to work with an external SMTP but @Mailtrap made things so easy! They’ve got the code and everything that you can copy and paste!
After all these years of web development, how have I only JUST started using @Mailtrap. I had heard about it, but never got round to using it. An awesome way of testing emails 👏
One thing we started using recently is @Mailtrap for our dev & staging environments. We were previously either turning email sending entirely off for staging or running SES + whitelist. Turns out, having a fake SMTP mailbox is great and you can test better with it.