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by randomtask 5353 days ago
Seems to me like this has the potential to be something I'd pay for, but confusingly the article focuses on MIME, when the real problem you seem to be solving is providing a more usable abstraction over the complexity of sending email in general.

Having wanted a service to send emails to customers recently, I hit upon a distinct lack (or apparent lack at least) of services that allowed me to do this. While this should sound ridiculous, sending email reliably is a hard thing to do these days.

2 comments

Yes, this blog post was meant to be the first in a series that described the new features of the new API release. Best way to see all of the capabilities is to look through the user manual and API reference.
Lack of services to send emails? Seriously?

Mailchimp

SilverPop

CampaignMonitor

SendGrid

YMLP

MadMimi

JangoMail

TinyLetter (free)

I should have qualified that by saying that there were a lack of services that suited our particular needs. We ended up concluding pretty quickly that for our purposes services like Mailchimp would have been prohibitively expensive. Also, we weren't particularly interested in running a campaign oriented service, which seem to be what Mailchimp and most of the services on your list are for. I don't remember seeing Sendgrid though. That might be what we were looking for, a simple API for sending mails that aren't tied to campaigns, but which provide the template niceness of services like Mailchimp.
MailChimp also provides a great API and they even have an extended API (http://apidocs.mailchimp.com/sts/1.0/) on top of Amazon SES that doesn't cost you anything extra (you just pay for SES).
Sure, but how many offer a simple API for flinging email programmatically?
That's the only thing Sendgrid does. And, they do it quite well.
SendGrid, Postmarkapp, amazon email service....all of them do.
Add CritSend to that list. I'm using it and am quite happy with it.
I think almost all of them.