What email service is best in your opinion?

What's the best email service for a web application?

• Not a mailing list service, but a service such as http://postmarkapp.com/ or http://sendgrid.com that deals with email a webapp itself sends such as invites and alerts.  Which ones have you used and what's your opinion of them?

• Answer:

  If you are trying to increase email deliverability then services like http://sendgrid.com, http://smtp.com, etc can help. However, unless you are going to be sending a large volume of email for these purposes it may not be cost-effective. I have used sendgrid and http://smtp.com. I like sendgrid but there are other services ive been eyeballing lately such as http://elasticemail.com/ (aws ec2 based email service) which i have not used yet. If, on the other hand, you are referring to a simple email service to send email for your application, you could start with any of the following: google apps email service, an internal mail-transport-agent (mta) configured such as postfix that you configure yourself (open source) use a cost-based email service such as rackspace hosted email Regardless of your intent its important to make sure your dns records are setup correctly for your mail server. Correct SPF (see http://www.openspf.org/) and DKIM (see http://www.dkim.org/) records are important for email campaigns. Aside from everything else you should monitor your email servers and ensure they do not end up on a blacklist. I have had to deal with this even when using email deliverability services. I usually setup test accounts in all the major web mail services and periodically verify that email from my service is delivered and NOT sent to the spam folder. Another check that has proved useful is monitoring the blacklists themselves with sites such as: https://admin.uribl.com/ http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx Ryan