Ask HN: How do you email your users?
Simple question. Ther are many tools out there including Postmarkapp, mailgun, sendgrid, mailchimp etc. If you have a bootstrapped app (<1000 active users), do you still use these services or use your own SMTP server through your host?
EDIT: I am more interested in transactional emails such as user registration confirmation, password resets, payment confirmations etc. Not worried about marketing stuff.
Comments
Absolutely. SMTP through your own host is likely to result in mails ending up in SPAM folders without you even knowing it, because you have better things to do than monitor dozens of RBL listings on a daily basis.
It also creates a significant business risk -- virtually all hosting providers have a zero tolerance policy for spamming, and overzealous enforcement of that could mean a few undeserved spam reports originating from your server can have your whole site shut down.
I used to use SendGrid. Now I use Mandrill. They're bigger, cheaper, and I like their people.
We use SendGrid for all transactional emails at matchist (http://matchist.com/talent). Been basically flawless so far. No point in running our own SMTP server when SendGrid's entire business is making sure this specific functionality works flawlessly.
We use Amazon SES. A word of warning, it has gone down for a couple of minutes from time to time.
For sending marketing/newsletters we use MadMimi. Clickable: http://madmimi.com
This is something that I have been wondering a lot about; would you use MadMimi over MailChimp?
We actually switched from MailChimp. We went with MadMimi because we thought that the email templates at MailChimp were "too flashy" which we thought might distract our readers. We wanted elegant but simple and MadMimi does a great job of that.
I'm sure that you could accomplish the same on both, but I must admit I do like the simplicity of MadMimi UI.
Email deliverability is a field of landmines - definitely use a service that specialises in email.
At http://SupportFu.com we use mailgun & postmark for transaction emails.
Have had a good experience with Mandrill (from MailChimp) for transactional emails.