Sending email from India: INR billing, GST invoices and getting delivered

The short version

1. Who this guide is for. If your company is registered in India and sends email to customers, this guide is for you.
2. Plans billed in rupees. MigoSMTP plans can be billed in INR, so you are not tracking a dollar rate or paying foreign-currency charges on a card.
3. GST invoices and paying by UPI. Each billing period you receive a GST invoice, which is what your finance team needs for input credit and bookkeeping.
4. What your domain needs before you send. Mailbox providers decide quickly whether to trust a sender, and the first thing they look at is authentication.
5. The rules that apply to you, wherever you are. Google and Yahoo require bulk senders to authenticate their mail, keep spam complaints low, and make unsubscribing easy.
6. Consent and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 sets rules for how organisations process the personal data of people in India, and an email address is personal data.

Who this guide is for

If your company is registered in India and sends email to customers, this guide is for you. That covers an online shop sending order and shipping updates, a fintech or edtech product sending passcodes and receipts, an agency running campaigns for several brands, and a software team that wants an SMTP relay or an API without running mail servers.

Most of what makes email arrive is the same everywhere: authenticated domains, clean lists, steady volume. What changes for an Indian business is the practical side, such as paying in rupees, getting an invoice your accountant can use, and meeting the privacy law that now applies to you. We cover both here.

Plans billed in rupees

MigoSMTP plans can be billed in INR, so you are not tracking a dollar rate or paying foreign-currency charges on a card. On the pricing page the monthly plan for 10,000 emails is ₹799, 100,000 emails is ₹5,999 and 500,000 emails is ₹26,999. If you go over your monthly volume, extra emails are billed at the overage rate for your plan: ₹85, ₹72 or ₹55 per 1,000 on Starter, Growth and Scale.

There is also a free plan with 1,000 emails a month and no credit card, which is enough to test an integration end to end before you commit. The current numbers are always on the INR pricing page, so check there before you plan a budget, because that page is the source we keep up to date.

GST invoices and paying by UPI

Each billing period you receive a GST invoice, which is what your finance team needs for input credit and bookkeeping. If your accountant has a specific requirement for how the invoice is addressed, tell our billing team before the first payment rather than after, because it is far easier to set up correctly once than to reissue invoices later.

You can pay by UPI. You can also choose to be billed monthly, quarterly, half-yearly or yearly. Quarterly saves 5 percent, half-yearly saves 10 percent, and yearly gives you two months free. For a product that will clearly keep sending, a longer period is usually the cheaper way to run the same volume.

What your domain needs before you send

Mailbox providers decide quickly whether to trust a sender, and the first thing they look at is authentication. Publish SPF so receivers know which servers may send for your domain, sign your mail with DKIM, and add a DMARC record so receivers know what to do when a message fails. Do this on the domain you actually use in the From address, whether that is a .com, .in or .co.in domain.

Do not send business mail from a free webmail address such as a Gmail or Yahoo account. Receivers apply stricter rules to those domains, and you cannot add your own SPF or DKIM to a domain you do not own. Use an address on your company domain, and use a subdomain such as mail.yourcompany.in for bulk or marketing mail so a problem there cannot affect your day-to-day business email.

The rules that apply to you, wherever you are

Google and Yahoo require bulk senders to authenticate their mail, keep spam complaints low, and make unsubscribing easy. Microsoft has set similar expectations for high-volume senders to its consumer mailboxes. Many of your recipients are on Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook or Microsoft 365, so these rules apply to your mail whether you are in Jaipur or Johannesburg.

In practice this means a working List-Unsubscribe header on marketing mail, a complaint rate that stays well below the thresholds the providers publish, and no purchased or scraped lists. Our provider requirements guide links to the official pages, which are the right place to check the exact numbers because they change.

Consent and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act

India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 sets rules for how organisations process the personal data of people in India, and an email address is personal data. In plain terms, you should know why you hold each address, have a clear basis for emailing it, tell people what you will use it for, and honour a request to stop.

We are not your legal advisor, and the rules are being phased in, so ask your own counsel what applies to your business and when. What we can say from the sending side is that keeping clean consent records and removing people who unsubscribe straight away is good practice under any rulebook, and it also protects your delivery.

Keep transactional and promotional mail apart

A password reset, an OTP or an order confirmation is something the customer is waiting for. A sale announcement is not. Mailbox providers watch how people react to each, and if both come from the same stream, a burst of ignored promotions can slow down the messages that matter most.

Send transactional mail from its own subdomain and, as you grow, its own sending stream, and keep promotional mail on a separate one. If a campaign gets complaints, your OTPs and receipts keep their reputation. This is the single most useful structural decision for an e-commerce or fintech sender, and it costs nothing to do on day one.

Moving over from another provider

If you are leaving another service, do not switch everything in one night. Add MigoSMTP alongside your current provider, send a small share of one low-risk stream, watch bounces and complaints for a week, and then move the next stream. Authentication records can list both providers at the same time while you transition.

We have step-by-step migration guides for people moving from Amazon SES, SendGrid, Mailgun and Postmark, and they cover the SMTP settings, the API differences and the DNS changes.

A short checklist for your first week

Create your account and pick the INR currency. Add your sending domain and publish the SPF and DKIM records. Add a DMARC record in monitoring mode. Send a test to mailboxes you control on Gmail, Outlook and your own domain, and look at where each lands. Then send a small real batch to engaged recipients before you scale up.

After the first week, look at bounces, deferrals and complaints by recipient domain, remove addresses that bounce, and increase volume in steps. If anything looks off, our team can look at the message logs with you.

Further reading and sources

• Google: Email sender guidelines
• RFC 7208: Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

Related guides and tools

• Pricing in INR: Plans from ₹799 a month.
• Check SPF, DKIM and DMARC: Test your domain's records.
• Mailbox provider requirements: What Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo expect.