GreenArrow Alternative: Managed Infrastructure

Teams choose self-hosted Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs) like Greenarrow for one reason: control. When you're sending hundreds of thousands of emails, owning the infrastructure feels like the only way to manage deliverability at scale. But that control comes with a significant, often underestimated, cost.

By 2025, the challenge isn't just sending the email; it's managing the complex ecosystem of domains, IPs, warmup schedules, and reputation monitoring required to actually land in the inbox. This is where self-hosted solutions create operational drag, demanding dedicated engineering resources just for maintenance.

This is why teams look for a Greenarrow alternative. They need the power and scale of a dedicated MTA but without the infrastructure management overhead. SuperSend Relay is built for this exact scenario—providing a managed infrastructure layer that delivers scale and control, without requiring you to become a server administrator.

High-volume senders adopt Greenarrow for its raw power, but they often start looking for alternatives when the operational burden outweighs the benefits of control. The core issues are almost always related to infrastructure management, not the MTA's capabilities.

1. Infrastructure Management Overhead: Running an MTA means you're responsible for everything: server patching, software updates, IP reputation monitoring, and handling blacklists. This is a full-time job that distracts from core business operations.
2. The Engineering Team Requirement: The license for an MTA is just the starting cost. The real expense is the salary for the deliverability engineer or sysadmin required to maintain, configure, and scale the system.
3. Deliverability Complexity: Greenarrow provides the sending mechanism, but you have to build the deliverability strategy. This includes manually warming up new domains/IPs, rotating them correctly, and interpreting deliverability data—a complex and error-prone process at scale.
4. Scaling Challenges: As volume grows from 100k to 1M+ emails per month, a single MTA instance becomes a bottleneck. Scaling requires provisioning new servers, acquiring and warming new IP blocks, and load-balancing traffic, adding significant architectural complexity.

When you're evaluating a Greenarrow alternative, the fundamental decision is between continuing with a self-hosted model or moving to managed infrastructure. It's a tradeoff between absolute control and operational efficiency.

Self-Hosted MTA (Greenarrow)

1. What you get: Complete control over the server environment, sending configurations, and IP addresses. You can customize every aspect of the sending process.
2. What it costs: You are responsible for all infrastructure maintenance, security, scaling, and deliverability monitoring. This requires a dedicated, senior engineering resource to manage effectively. A misconfiguration can permanently damage domain reputation.

Managed Infrastructure (SuperSend Relay)

1. What you get: An enterprise-grade sending architecture without the administrative burden. Automated domain warmup, inbox rotation, and deliverability monitoring are built into the platform. You focus on your sending strategy, not server logs.
2. What it costs: You trade granular server-level control for managed reliability and scale. The system is architected for best-practice deliverability, which means less room for non-standard, custom configurations.

For teams sending over 100k emails/month across 10+ domains, the bottleneck is almost never the MTA's raw sending speed; it's the operational capacity to manage the surrounding infrastructure safely.

SuperSend Relay is designed as the managed infrastructure layer you would otherwise have to build on top of Greenarrow. We solve the operational problems of high-volume sending so you can focus on your data and outreach, not your servers.

1. Managed Infrastructure: We handle the servers, IP pools, and uptime. You connect your domains and inboxes, and our platform manages the underlying sending architecture. No server administration is required.
2. Multi-Domain, Multi-Inbox Architecture: SuperSend is built from the ground up to manage hundreds of domains and inboxes. This distributed architecture is fundamental to safe sending at scale and is far more resilient than a single, monolithic MTA setup.
3. Integrated Warmup and Rotation: Domain and inbox warmup isn't an afterthought; it's a core, automated function. The system automatically ramps up volume and rotates sending across your assets to protect and build reputation.
4. Automated Health Monitoring: We provide built-in deliverability monitoring and placement testing. The platform flags issues with SPF, DKIM, or DMARC records and monitors domain health, preventing problems before they impact your sending.

The core difference is simple: Greenarrow gives you the engine. SuperSend Relay gives you the entire vehicle—engineered, maintained, and optimized for performance.

SuperSend Relay is not the right fit for every team. A self-hosted MTA like Greenarrow is the better choice in specific scenarios. This is about finding the right tool for your operational model.

You should stick with a self-hosted solution if:

1. You have a dedicated engineering team that specializes in deliverability and wants complete, granular control over the MTA's configuration and server environment.
2. You have strict on-premise compliance requirements that forbid the use of third-party cloud infrastructure for sending mail.
3. You are already heavily invested in a mature, custom-built infrastructure around Greenarrow and the cost of migration outweighs the operational benefits.
4. Your primary need is raw sending power and you have already built robust, in-house solutions for warmup, rotation, and deliverability monitoring.

Migrating from a self-hosted MTA to a managed infrastructure platform is a strategic process focused on preserving sender reputation. A phased approach ensures a seamless transition without impacting deliverability.

1. Phase 1: Infrastructure Setup & Warmup: Connect your sending domains and inboxes to SuperSend Relay. Our automated systems begin the warmup process immediately, preparing the new infrastructure while your existing Greenarrow setup continues to run.
2. Phase 2: Parallel Sending & Validation: Begin sending a small percentage of your total volume (e.g., 10%) through SuperSend Relay. Monitor deliverability metrics in parallel with your Greenarrow instance to validate performance.
3. Phase 3: Gradual Volume Ramping: Systematically increase the percentage of volume sent through SuperSend Relay (e.g., 25%, 50%, 75%) over a period of several weeks. This allows the new domains and IPs to mature their reputation with high-volume traffic.
4. Phase 4: Decommission Greenarrow: Once 100% of your sending volume is successfully flowing through SuperSend Relay, you can safely decommission your self-hosted Greenarrow infrastructure, eliminating server and maintenance costs.