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  3. Email Services
  4. Transactional Email
  5. Amazon SES vs Mandrill vs Postmark

Amazon SES vs Mandrill vs Postmark

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon SES
Amazon SES
Stacks9.9K
Followers6.0K
Votes328
Postmark
Postmark
Stacks351
Followers184
Votes52
Mandrill
Mandrill
Stacks4.4K
Followers1.6K
Votes926

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Advice on Amazon SES, Postmark, Mandrill

Kevin
Kevin

Jun 29, 2021

Decided

We chose Postmark as our transactional email service for several reasons:

  • Laser-focus (at the time) on transactional email - their success/speed/reliability with delivering transactional email is amazing. Note, they have now branched out and offer marketing/broadcast email services too.

  • Developer-friendly - Awesome docs and resources. Their Rail gem integrates directly with ActionMailer so nearly all of our code worked without changes.

  • Servers - You can set up "Servers" for different mail streams/workflows to keep things separate and easy to review.

  • Bootstrapped - Wildbit (who makes Postmark) is bootstrapped just like the Friendliest.app and they offer a service credit to other bootstrapped startups.

48.3k views48.3k
Comments
Slawomir
Slawomir

Head of Product at Coresender

Oct 15, 2020

Decided

Of course we chose Coresender to send our own transactional emails :) So I thought I'll let you know how we use it.

  • We set up separate sending accounts for all company needs, eg. transactional emails, monitoring alerts, time to inbox. We even configured our office printers to send emails through Coresender.

  • We have a real-time and extremely usable view into what emails go through each account, so each time anybody reports an email not arriving we're able to assist them in a few seconds

  • We utilize our message timeline feature, so we can learn eg. if people are clicking on password reset links

  • We always know how many of our onboarding emails are being opened which helps us improve them

  • Finally, we have full controll over our suppressions lists, so we can add (and remove!) from them whenever necessary.

To sum up, at Coresender we're eating our own dogfood and it helps us stay connected to the product and understand our customers better.

88.6k views88.6k
Comments
Imelda
Imelda

Engineer at pounce3 Project Management

Dec 9, 2020

Decided

We did a quick test on the reliability of these three common email services, sending a few emails an hour at random intervals.

Unfortunately, none of them had 100% availability over the 30 day test. I don't understand why this is so hard?

Mailgun performed the best with the most reliability and fastest response times. Mandrill was notably bad.

30.9k views30.9k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon SES
Amazon SES
Postmark
Postmark
Mandrill
Mandrill

Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2.

Postmark removes the headaches of delivering and parsing email for webapps with minimal setup time and zero maintenance.

Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.

Simple – Amazon SES eliminates the complexity of licensing, installing, and operating a third-party service, or building and maintaining an internally hosted email solution. Sending email through Amazon SES is as simple as using SMTP or calling an API, and Amazon SES makes it easy for you to monitor your sending activity and deliverability statistics.;Inexpensive – There are no up-front fees or fixed expenses with Amazon SES, and you benefit from the efficiencies of Amazon’s scale. Your only costs are low charges for the number of emails sent and data transfer fees.;Reliable – Amazon SES runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters. All outgoing email messages are stored redundantly across multiple servers and datacenters, providing high availability and data durability.;Scalable – Amazon SES is based on the scalable technology used by Amazon web sites around the world to send billions of messages a year.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – You can track your bounces and complaints in Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), and you can set up Easy DKIM or verify any domain you administer via Amazon Route 53 with a few clicks of your mouse. There is also a free usage tier for emails originating from Amazon EC2 and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
Create a new virtual server- Instant access to our infrastructure, no waiting required. Create as many servers as you want, for each of your web applications and environments.;Drop code into your app- Swap in our SMTP endpoint, or get started with our APIs using one of our send API libraries for Ruby, Rails, .NET, Python, PHP, and more.;Send emails and track delivery- A beautiful interface to monitor volume, bounces, spam complaints, and send activity. View full email content to troubleshoot issues.;Parse replies & other inbound email- Let Postmark automatically convert email replies into simple JSON documents and send them into to your application for processing.
Inbound Email- Set up inboxes for Mandrill to control. When they receive email, we’ll make an API call to your app with all the relevant information, so you don’t have to worry about what’s happening behind the scenes.;Webhooks Support- Create custom event notifications, keep track of new signups and unsubscribes in real-time, get a notice of every spam complaint so you can flag them in your database.;Rules Engine- Modify the content of email coming through Mandrill without having to involve developers. For example, you could tell Mandrill to take any email coming from confirmation@yourdomain.com, give it a new template, and add Google Analytics tracking.;Advanced Tagging and Reports- Generate custom reports based on the stats that matter to you. Add campaign tags like “confirmation email” and “mailing list,” and combine them with data Mandrill automatically tracks. Tagging allows you to graph sets of data like “bounce rate for confirmation emails to Gmail addresses.”;Meaningful Metrics- Observe trends and monitor delivery to see if you’re on track or if you need to make adjustments. Search by recipient or domain, sort sent email by bounces or rejections, and track opens and clicks.;Status Updates- Troubleshoot from wherever you are, and send status messages to recipients from Mandrill;Mobile Access- Your transactional email is generated at all hours. Mandrill is the only service with a mobile app, so you can monitor your performance even when you’re away from your desk.
Statistics
Stacks
9.9K
Stacks
351
Stacks
4.4K
Followers
6.0K
Followers
184
Followers
1.6K
Votes
328
Votes
52
Votes
926
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 102
    Reliable
  • 97
    Cheap
  • 57
    Integrates with other aws services
  • 52
    Easy setup
  • 18
    Trackable
Pros
  • 18
    Simple
  • 10
    Great analytics
  • 8
    Email, done right
  • 5
    Heroku Add-on
  • 5
    Easy setup
Cons
  • 1
    No 24x7 support
Pros
  • 189
    Simple installation
  • 141
    Great api
  • 123
    Generous free allowance to get you started
  • 114
    Cheap and simple
  • 99
    Trackable
Cons
  • 1
    Really hard to pull analytics out via api
Integrations
No integrations availableNo integrations available
Parse
Parse
sendwithus
sendwithus

What are some alternatives to Amazon SES, Postmark, Mandrill?

Twilio SendGrid

Twilio SendGrid

Twilio SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. Twilio SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability & real-time analytics along with flexible API's.

Mailgun

Mailgun

Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly.

sendwithus

sendwithus

Send email from your app with a simple API call, Sendwithus manages the rest. Templates, testing, data management, segments, and analytics are all accessible through a friendly dashboard.

Mailjet

Mailjet

Mailjet is a real-time Cloud Emailing platform: scalable, agile and flexible. Our unique algorithm boosts your deliverability and our platform provides in-depth insight so you can optimize more than ever.

SparkPost

SparkPost

SparkPost is the world’s #1 email delivery provider. We empower companies with actionable, real-time data to send relevant email to their customers which increases engagement and both top and bottom line revenue.

Mailtrap

Mailtrap

We offer one platform that covers all email-related needs in one place: testing, sending, and in-depth tracking to control how email infrastructure works and performs.

Apostle.io

Apostle.io

Transactional emails are the forgotten step child of internet marketers. Apostle.io empowers marketers to manage transactional emails themselves, as they would their list based campaigns. Preview, Update, Analyse and Test your transactional email all in one place.

Nodemailer

Nodemailer

It is a single module with zero dependencies – code is easily auditable. The email delivery is Secure using TLS/STARTTLS. You can use HTML content, as well as plain text alternative.

Resend

Resend

It is a modern email sending platform focused on providing the best developer experience. Build, test, and deliver transactional emails at scale.

Postal

Postal

Postal is a complete and fully featured mail server for use by websites & web servers. Think Sendgrid, Mailgun or Postmark but open source and ready for you to run on your own servers. Postal was developed by aTech Media to serve its own mail processing requirements and we have since decided that it should be released as an open source project for the community.

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