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.
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.
Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly.
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.
Optimized Queue;Scheduled Delivery;MIME Assembly;Test Mode;ESP Feedback Handling;Unsubscribe Handling;Spam Complaint Handling;Bounce Handling;HTTP POST to your App;Routing w RegEx Filters;Parsing to UTF-8;Signature Separation;Quoted Reply Separation;Wildcard Domains;Spam Filtering;Live Logs;Message Tagging;Event Webhooks;Open/Click Tracking;Unsubscribe Tracking;Complaint Tracking;Bounce Tracking;Mailing Lists;Template Variables;A/B Testing;Link Performance;Geo Performance;Recipient Level Data;SMTP or HTTP API;Clean IP Addresses;SPF Authentication;DKIM Authentication;SSL/TLS;Scales on Demand
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
7.8K
Stacks
351
Stacks
4.4K
Followers
4.2K
Followers
184
Followers
1.6K
Votes
656
Votes
52
Votes
926
Pros & Cons
Pros
178
Quick email integration
148
Free plan
91
Easy setup
67
Ridiculously reliable
53
Extensive apis
Cons
2
No HTTPS tracking links supported
2
Cost
1
Cannot create multiple api keys
1
Emails go to spam due to blacklisted IP's of mailgun