Web Developers → Recommend SMTP provider?

Hi all,

I have a few customers who send mass emails to site members. I would like to contract an SMTP provider to handle this for me so that I can avoid batching and running into black list issues.

Ideally the service would provide:

1. metered billing (low bill in months when the service is not really being used, higher when it is)


2. metrics to help me see usage per sender/client/whatever in my single account

I see there are several providers available for this. SendGrid, in particular, looks pretty awesome.

My question, though, is "Do any of you have any experience with one you'd recommend?"

Thanks,
Jim

I'd check out Mandrill. My company uses MailChimp which is a sister (or maybe parent?) company for our email subscription lists. Mandrill is more for 1-to-1 emails, transactional emails (your order's been shipped!), and the like. They have a comparison to SendGrid here.

Unfortunately I've only just started to use them as we're looking to start sending out marketing automated messages for our customers to follow up with them on their experiences after a period of time. I haven't had any complaints about the service so far, but it's still early on.

I think that they would fit all your listed requirements. Their pricing starts at $free for up to 12,000 emails a month, $.20/thousand for the next 1m, $.15/thousand for the next 5m, and $.10/thousand for any higher, all of which appear cheaper than SendGrid.

I definitely know that they handle blacklists for people who have opted out. I'm not positive of what you're looking for with regards to batching but they do throttle your email send rate based on your overall reputation. Fewer complaints and clean recipients, faster rates...more complains, bounces, whatever slower rates. But they handle all the queuing up so you just send them as fast as you can and they handle how fast they get sent out.

I haven't had to use their technical support so I can't comment on that, however I have use MailChimps and it's always been excellent. We've had 2 or 3 incidents where complaints prompted an "investigation". In all the cases they were very prompt with responses, worked with us to get to the underlying cause, and in all the cases had no problem as we were doing everything right. I can't fault them for trying to keep their reputation clean and monitoring for potential spam-related issues. And during the investigation they weren't very punitive as well.

Edited to add: If you are a MailChimp customer already (or become one), you get additional twice as many Mandrill emails as what the upper limit is of your MailChimp plan. For instance, we're on the $75 5,801-10,000 plan for MailChimp. So we get 20,000 free emails + the initial 12,000 emails. That's easily more than what we'll regularly use so we basically get Mandrill free just for using MailChimp.

Wow, they look great. Thanks for the info!

Unfortunately I was pressed to make a decision before you replied, so we went with SendGrid's Bronze package. It looks great so far, although I think I'd prefer Mandrill--esp w/ their MailChimp relationship.

We'll see how it goes w/ SendGrid. It's nice to know I have an option if things don't go well or we need more.

Thanks again,
jim

For any future searchers on this - just wanted to do a +1 on Mandrill. Works great, especially when you don't have a lot to send, you can do so for free. They have lots of their own and community SDKs to easily get going.

I have worked with smtp.com. The founders are among the original authors of the SMTP protocol. I do have a small account with them and have, in the past, worked with them directly.

Matt Mankins founded SMTP.com according to their leadership page under board of directors. He's 35(ish). RFC 821 was the "birth" of SMTP, and that was in August of 1982. That would make him about 4 years old when he wrote the SMTP protocol. Impressive.

Well, I guess he's pretty smart.

At the time that I knew the smtp.com guys the protocol was still under development. It's now RFC 2822 I believe. It wasn't Matt that I met and I can't for the life of me remember the names. It doesn't matter, though. It's a good service and I recommend it.

I have some very minor non-bulk SMTP requirements... would sending a couple emails a month still qualify for their service or are they only available for big bulk emailers?

I don't think any of them care if you're low volume. As a matter of fact, Mandrill is free up to 12k emails, and SendGrid has a free plan and a metered plan for lower usage. Check out their various pricing schemes.

Amazon SES: »aws.amazon.com/ses/

I personally don't have much experience using it.