

Ask HN: How do you email your users? - codegeek

Simple question. Ther are many tools out there including Postmarkapp, mailgun, sendgrid, mailchimp etc. If you have a bootstrapped app (&#60;1000 active users), do you still use these services or use your own SMTP server through your host?<p>EDIT: I am more interested in transactional emails such as user registration confirmation, password resets, payment confirmations etc. Not worried about marketing stuff.
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dangrossman
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.

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timjahn
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.

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rabidonrails
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>

~~~
TakeSeven
This is something that I have been wondering a lot about; would you use
MadMimi over MailChimp?

~~~
rabidonrails
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.

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veesahni
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.

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swanson
Have had a good experience with Mandrill (from MailChimp) for transactional
emails.

