E-mail services

[D. Strout]

I'm working on a project for a client who will soon be sending out lots of (legitimate) e-mails. He currently uses a different system that is more geared towards "regular subscribers", not one-off type e-mails like I'm trying to do. As such, I'm thinking of recommending he use something else, such as Mandrill or Amazon SES. What systems do you guys use, and what are the pros and cons thereof? I can learn a lot from their websites, but I'd like to know people's actual experience.

 

[raindog308]

I like Mandrill.  When I first signed up (free account) my mail went to backlog.  Opened a ticket and it was fixed in 30 minutes - fraud checks, new account, etc.

Since then, has worked fine.  Not huge volume - maybe 50 emails a day tops, often less.

 

[Aldryic C'boas]

We use AmazonSES for our mailing - works like a champ.  Guaranteed whitelisting, and can't beat the price either - I can push out several hundred thousand emails a month for about 5$ or so.

Tried using Google's services for email in the past.  Absolute nightmare.

Haven't tried Mandrill.

 

[mojeda]

I think Mandrill is the general go-to service, I can't speak for other services like AmazonSES but Mandrill is very easy to setup.

I use it on pretty much everything.

 

[SkylarM]

Was using Mandril, swapped to Amazon (We're using them for DNS as well, so wanted 1 invoice. Plus I have a $100 credit covering everything until the credit expires in 12 months, so hurray free stuff). Amazon ends up being cheaper at about the 20,000 email mark I think. Mandrill is good for low-volume stuff if you can keep it within or just over their free tier.

 

[D. Strout]

@MannDude care to chip in? I know vpsB uses Mandrill, how do you like it?

 

[raindog308]

I confess one of the reasons I use Mandrill is the first 12K emails a month are free and that's several orders of magnitude more than I'm likely to ever need 

 

[NodeWest-Dan]

I use mandrill on a service that sends about 43k+ emails a month upwards of 100k+ during busy season. Its wonderful and we haven't had an issue. The api integration is nice as well.

 

[SPINIKR-RO]

Using Mandrill for over a year, never had a deliverability problem. Only issues are clients that end up not paying and either reporting bills as spam, blocking, or fake signups/emails.

http://awesomescreenshot.com/03b3bfdm4a

Its also nice to be able to have information available to be sent back or looked up such as opens or mail responses, if a customer states they did not get emails from abuse@ and etc.

Have not put a dedicated IP on it yet since there has never been a issue.

Also if you are doing mail setups on behalf of a client they have sub-account feature.