People have recommended MailChimp which is a good vendor for bulk email. If you're looking for a good vendor for transactional email, I might be able to help.
Over the past 6 months, we used four different SMTP vendors with the goal of figuring out which was the best one.
Here's a summary of what we found...
AuthSMTP
- Cheapest around
- No analysis/reporting
- No tracking for opens/clicks
- Had slight hesitation on some sends
Postmark
- Very cheap, but not as cheap as AuthSMTP
- Beautiful cpanel but no tracking on opens/clicks
- Send-level activity tracking so you can open a single email that was sent and look at how it looked and the delivery data.
- Have to use API. Sending by SMTP was recently introduced but it's buggy. For instance, we noticed that quotes (") in the subject line are stripped.
- Cannot send any attachment you want. Must be on approved list of file types and under a certain size. (10 MB I think)
- Requires a set list of from names/addresses.
JangoSMTP
- Expensive in relation to the others – more than 10 times in some cases
- Ugly cpanel but great tracking on opens/clicks with email-level detail
- Had hesitation, at times, when sending. On two occasions, sends took an hour to be delivered
- Requires a set list of from name/addresses.
SendGrid
- Not quite a cheap as AuthSMTP but still very cheap. Many customers can exist on 200 free sends per day.
- Decent cpanel but no in-depth detail on open/click tracking
- Lots of API options. Options (open/click tracking, etc) can be custom defined on an email-by-email basis. Inbound (reply) email can be posted to our HTTP end point.
- Absolutely zero hesitation on sends. Every email sent landed in the inbox almost immediately.
- Can send from any from name/address.
Conclusion
SendGrid was the best with Postmark coming in second place. We never saw any hesitation in send times with either of those two - in some cases we sent several hundred emails at once - and they both have the best ROI, given a solid featureset.
