LocalSMTP for coaches and consultants

Four decisions face you before you pay: how many mailboxes you need, which tier matches that number, what you supply yourself, and when to move up. Take them in turn. What the money covers is mailboxes you can sign into, open in a browser and connect to a mail client over standard SMTP and IMAP, with warm-up and authentication checks alongside setup.

You are the one writing the messages. LocalSMTP gives you the place to send them from, the browser webmail for when you are away from your laptop, and the authentication records that tell receiving servers who you are. The lifetime tier is priced by how many mailboxes you hold, not by how many messages you send.

Your list stays your own work. Coaches filling a cohort usually have a small set of people they researched themselves, a note about why each one fits and a reason to write. The mailbox carries that message; it does not source the people or fill in a name field from a database.

Starter gives you five mailboxes. For a coach running a first cohort, that is enough for a primary address, a second for scheduling, and three spare for separate programmes or a colleague. Each mailbox is a standard SMTP and IMAP account you can set up in the browser or in your phone's mail app.

Studio raises the count to fifteen. That fits a consultant with several offer lines, a small assistant or a set of regional addresses for different audiences. The work per mailbox does not change; you still write by hand, still use the webmail when travelling, and still run the warm-up and authentication checks before the first real send.

Floor takes you to fifty mailboxes. Reaching this tier usually means a practice with a team, several coaches under one roof or a steady rhythm of small campaigns that each need their own sending address. The same browser webmail and the same checks apply across the count; only the number of sign-ins changes.

The worry that templates read like a mail merge is fair. A mailbox has no opinion about your writing. The merge feel comes from pasting the same paragraph into a field and swapping the first name. LocalSMTP will send whatever you put in front of it, so the fix is in the draft, not the tier.

What the service does give you is room to write each message separately. With five mailboxes at Starter, you can keep a cohort conversation in one address and a programme enquiry in another, so a reply arrives in a thread that makes sense. That separation does more for a human tone than any template setting.

The authentication and warm-up checks help the message arrive without looking like bulk post. They cannot make the words sound like you. If your objection is to writing the same thing to everyone, the answer is fewer messages written one at a time, and a mailbox count small enough that you can keep doing it.

Move from Starter to Studio when you find yourself sharing a mailbox with a colleague or sending two unrelated programmes from one address. That is a sign the count, not the send volume, has become the constraint. Fifteen mailboxes let you separate lines of work without mixing threads.

Move from Studio to Floor when a small team needs its own addresses and a single shared practice inbox no longer works. At that point the lifetime tier is a question of how many people need to sign in and how many distinct programmes you run, not how many messages go out in a week.

Stay where you are if the list is still short and the writing is still by hand. A larger tier does not improve replies on its own; it only gives you more places to send from. The upgrade is worth making when the current count forces you to compromise on how you separate conversations.