Roundup of 17 External SMTP Providers

21 November, 2011

By Simone D'Amico

Do you need a cloud service for your transactional emails? In this post we have collected 17 providers which allow you to manage and improve the communication with your customers.

We’ve also summarized some interesting features of each provider in the following comparison table. The features compared are the following:

SMTP support
Realtime support
If the provider sends transaction emails
If the provider sends bulk emails
Tracking
WYSIWYG newsletter editor
Free plan offered
Price
Customer Support
APIs

Comparison Table

Provider	SMTP Support	Realtime	Send Transaction emails	Send bulk emails	Tracking	WYSIWYG editor	Free Plan	Price	Support	API
Amazon SES	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	US$0.10 per thousand, plus traffic charges	Yes	Yes
Axiway Emailing Director	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	€0.80 per thousand and below: rates depend on volume.	Yes	Yes
CritSend	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	US$0.28 to $0.50 per thousand	Yes	Yes
Dyn	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	US$19.95 year – $195/mo	Yes	Yes
Elastic Email	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	US$0.40 to $1 per thousand	Yes	Yes
JangoSMTP	Yes		Yes		Yes		Yes	US$1.02 to $7 per thousand
Mailchimp STS (SES wrapper)	No	No	Yes		Yes		Yes	US$0.00 (free for paying mailchimp customers) (amazon SES rates apply)		Yes
Mailgun	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	US$0.10 to 1.00 per thousand	Yes	Yes
Mailjet	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	US$0.00 to $0.25 per thousand	Yes	Yes
PostageApp	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	US$0.40 to $1.00 per thousand	Yes	Yes
Postmark	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	US$1.50 per thousand	No	Yes
SendGrid	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	US$0.10 to $1 USD per thousand	Yes	Yes
SMTP.com	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No		Yes	US$0.30 to $2.50 per thousand	Yes	Yes
turboSMTP	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes			Yes	US$0.80 to $1.40 USD per thousand	Yes
SocketLabs	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes		Yes	US$39 to $799 per Messages	Yes	Yes
Authsmtp	Yes		Yes				No	US$2.50 per month for up to 1000 emails	Yes
YMLP	No		Yes		Yes	Yes	Yes	from 3.75 €/month	Yes	Yes

Providers

Amazon SES

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. 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.

Link: http://aws.amazon.com/ses/

CritSend

CritSend is a simple and most cost efficient way to reliably deliver emails to their appropriate inboxes and preemptively filter spam. CritSend makes sure that your emails reach their inboxes. Their Deliverability Engine automatically handles all aspects of delivery for you, from compliance and headers to full unsubscription management and bounce processing. Their advanced filters catch and alert you of emails seen as spam before it leaves our servers. Your mails are sent with valid signatures from whitelisted servers. You never worry about IP reputation or blacklisting. Using CritSend as your ESP ensures legitimate transactional emails, password reminders, invoices, newsletters, and social networking notifications will reach their destinations.

Link: http://www.critsend.com

Dyn

DynECT Email Delivery offers three different solutions for the transactional or bulk email delivery of your growing business. Some of its features are:

Ideal for high volume (bulk) or single (transactional) email
Connect from SMTP or API
Intelligent queuing & message delivery
RepCheck reputation monitoring tool
Open, read and click tracking
Self-adjusted throttling by ISP
Dedicated IP(s) available
SPF/Domain Key Creation Tool
Spam complaint & bounce reporting
Suppression Lists for each user
24/7 tech support
Account management
Global deliverability monitoring

Link: http://dyn.com/email/

Elastic Email

Elastic Email is a simple, fast email delivery service for your cloud application. No monthly committments, no minimums, no limits. Just pay for what you use at $0.001 / email or less. Elastic Email is designed as an SMTP relay for reliable delivery of bulk email marketing or single recipient transactional emails with detailed delivery statistics.

Link: http://elasticemail.com/

JangoSMTP

Jango SMPT is a cutting edge transactional email delivery service that adds tracking and authentication to email. Connect to the SMTP relay or use the transactional email API to send emails. Some of its benefits are:

Open Tracking
Click Tracking
DomainKeys/DKIM Signing
SenderID/SPF Compliance
Access to SMTP Log Files
API to Access Reporting Data
Group Different Types of Emails
Send via SMTP or API

Link: http://www.jangosmtp.com

Mailchimp STS

MailChimp helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results. It’s like your own personal publishing platform.

Link: http://mailchimp.com/

Mailgun

Mailgun is a programmable email platform. It allows your application to become a fully featured email server. Send and receive messages, create mailboxes and email campaigns with ease using your favorite programming language.

Link: http://mailgun.net/

Mailjet

Mailjet is a real-time Cloud Emailing platform: it is scalable, agile and flexible. No more SMTP and server maintenance: just click on “send”, we take care of the rest. Our unique algorithm boosts your deliverability and our platform provides in-depth insight so you can optimize more than ever.

Link: https://www.mailjet.com

PostageApp

PostageApp is a service that makes it easy to send and manage outbound emails from applications. PostageApp allows you to easily manage and track all the email that your web apps send, using a set of tools built by developers just like you.

Link: http://postageapp.com

Postmark

Postmark enables web applications of any size to deliver and track transactional email reliably, with minimal setup time and zero maintenance. Postmark helps deliver and track transactional emails for web applications. In a nutshell, the service replaces SMTP (or sendmail) with a far more reliable, scalable and care-free environment. In addition, you can track statistics for number of emails sent, bounces and spam complaints.

Link: postmarkapp.com

SendGrid

SendGrid’s cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability and real-time analytics along with flexible APIs that make custom integration a breeze.

Link: http://sendgrid.com/

SMTP.com

SMTP.com provides cloud-based management services for email deliverability and reputation management including bulk and transactional sending, compliance auditing, abuse processing and diagnostics.

Link: http://www.smtp.com/

turboSMTP

turboSMTP is perfect for anyone looking to send emails more efficently and with better results. Some of its features are:

Truly reliable servers
Isp relationships
Easy and quick installation
Flexible service plans
Compatible with any internet service
Compatible with all major email clients
Email tracking and reporting
Bounce management
Step-by-step tutorials
Expert customer service
100% money back guarantee

Link: http://serversmtp.com/

SocketLabs

SocketLabs trusted, cloud-based SMTP relay service provides easy, reliable delivery for marketing and transactional email applications.

Link: http://socketlabs.com

AuthSMTP

AuthSMTP is an authenticated SMTP mail service (also known as a SMTP relay or smart host) designed to solve most of the problems experienced when sending mail from your email program, application, server, cell phone or mobile device.