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Ask HN: What is your startup email solution?

I am curious to know what you guys use for your startup email solution.

I am currently considering moving to AWS, and possibly using their Amazon SES. However I see that there are other alternatives like mailgun.com or sendgrid.com

what would be the advantage of using 3rd party solution vs in house Amazon SES? I see that the pricing is pretty similar and I am leaning towards using SES, but I would like to hear opinions.

Thank you.

( 7 comments | 6 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: What is your startup email solution? by thibaut_barrere on Tuesday June 25, 2013 @03:19PM (#5941750)
I'm using Mandrill for transactional email, and will most likely start using Mailjet for email campaigns.

I believe that Mandrill etc give a better deliverability compared to SES.

Re:Ask HN: What is your startup email solution? by pestaa on Tuesday June 25, 2013 @03:23PM (#5941777)
Can you please share more of your experience regarding deliverability of various services? I'm somewhat surprised to hear SES can be surpassed in this department.
Re:Ask HN: What is your startup email solution? by thibaut_barrere on Tuesday June 25, 2013 @03:44PM (#5941922)
I only tested SendGrid and Mandrill for transactional email.

I switched off SendGrid after seeing quite a bit of gmail owners got their email sent into spam (but I believe they fixed the issue).

I use DKIM/SPF with Mandrill and nobody mentioned a spam issue since then.

On SES: I cannot find back the precise article I was thinking about right now (a benchmark if I remember well), these are just my memories.

Re:Ask HN: What is your startup email solution? by ra on Tuesday June 25, 2013 @07:13PM (#5943078)
I use SES with DKIM and SPF. It's fast, cheap and I've never had a single email go to spam.
Re:Ask HN: What is your startup email solution? by lsiunsuex on Tuesday June 25, 2013 @03:09PM (#5941687)
We were using campaignmonitor.com until we found out about sendy.co

Sendy uses SES to send the emails on our behalf - so far so good - we do a weekend update to about 1500 address (so far) and it's worked quite well.

Someday I'll script something to dumb the current user email list into sendy so I don't have to export it to csv and reimport it every weekend...

Re:Ask HN: What is your startup email solution? by codegeek on Tuesday June 25, 2013 @03:42PM (#5941912)
I asked a similar question recently

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5634319

Re:Ask HN: What is your startup email solution? by rush-tea on Tuesday June 25, 2013 @05:08PM (#5942472)
Thanks for the info. I searched earlier before post, but I can not find it. Not sure how HN search engine actually works... :(