+1 for Mailgun - as @umuplus said, it's pretty easy to setup, free or cheap in most cases and is reliable.
I use it for side projects that send hundreds a month, to my day job that sends 1 million+ a month. Works fine for both.
I do track my emails (those that aren't just new user welcome email or password recovery) - I use my own in house built system for tracking, as well as systems I've built to send newsletters. For tracking I write to my own database as well as appending Google Analytics tracking codes.