What is a good free email service to use and why?

Is there an email marketing service with features like Campaign Monitor or MailChimp where you can use your own SMTP gateway for free?

• So instead of paying them for each email you send,  if you had for example the Bronze package with SendGrid and could send 40,000 email a month free.   Looking for the nice subscription management features and campaign creation features but without the cost of email delivery?

• Answer:

  Making such a system with the features you require is not very complex or difficult. I suggest you look into hiring a good developer to make you a proprietary solution tailored to your needs. It shouldn't take too long to plan our build, I've churned out two such systems in less than a month or two each, and you'll end up paying less in the long run I believe. Sendgrid's major advantage is the fact that they go through an amazing effort to whitelist their IPs even after they get flagged, so they offer some of the lowest "flagged as spam" notifications. If this is what you're concerned about, I'd recommend getting Sendgrid AND a proprietary solution for yourself, and use Sendgrid just as a sending proxy. I've done this, too, and such a tandem has worked wonders for our open/view rates and their stats screens aren't bad either.