[LRUG] Any reliable third party SMTP service other than Google Apps?

[Glenn @ Ruby Pond Ltd]

> Any recommendation for such service?, Please share your experience.

I've used or been involved with the integration of quite a few over
the past 18 months. Mailchimp is definitely my favorite for sheer ease
of integration, quality of documentation, and helpfulness of support.
If you've not found it already, search for the article on
"pseudo-transactional emails" to get it to do what you want.

Campaign Monitor looks quite good, but would be expensive for
transactional emails given their pricing structure (and gets very
expensive once you hit any real scale).

Emailvision is quite an extensive system that does almost everything
you'd want, we suffered from unreliable and slow delivery of emails
with them though.

Madmimi looks pretty good, with a very very simple API. I've not used
it as the API didn't actually support our requirements, but the
pragprog guys apparently use it so it can't be too bad... right?

We're currently trialling ExactRespone. Looks to be another very
flexible system with a rich API. The biggest problem with them is the
cost.

Sign-up.to had what appeared to be a very well designed system that
naturally solved many of the list management problems we'd encountered
with other providers, sadly they fell short on a few of our other
requirements so we never used them at any real scale.

Hopefully gives you some further places to look. Without confirming it
myself, I suspect you can probably take the Mailchimp approach to
doing transactional emails with any of them via their provided APIs.

Glenn
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