Which email providers do you use?

Which email providers do you use, which features do you use and what do you like about their APIs?

So far:

AWS SES
Gmail
Mailchimp
Mailgun
Mandril
Nylas
SendGrid
Self-hosted (Servers: Postfix, Apache James)

Mail Clients:

Rainloop
Roundcube
Outlook

What features would you love to see in your Mail APIs?

Ability to send transactional mail (all of them should offer that)
See bounced emails
See spam reports
Email scraping
Scheduling
High volume throughput
?

What templates would you love to be able to use in your transactional mail?

Handlebars
JSP
Loops, conditionals, WYSIWYG editor and template versioning a must have
?

I'm currently using Mandril, the things I miss the most are template versioning, some logic into them and a WYSIWYG editor (so people stop asking me to change the emails every 2 weeks).

We change the templates a lot and I need to create another version to test and keep the old one for the production, it kinda sucks;
Conditions and loops inside the templates would be awesome, Mandril actually has it using Handlebars but it's still buggy (at least it was the last time I tried);
WYSIWYG editor: the marketing staff sadly don't know HTML...

That's awesome, looking forward to use your service.

Regarding templates for Mandrill, you can reference MailChimp templates from emails sent through Mandrill.

@wattengard I tried that for a while but it appeared to be a little buggy, I'll test it again if I continue with Mandrill, thank you.

In my previous company we used Mandrill for all transaction/newsletter type emails and Sendgrid for customer feedback emails.

Sendgrid apparently works quite well for emails with feedback forms.

I use SendGrid Lite, it's basically a wrapper for AWS SES without any special features (costs the same as AWS SES as well), Mandril I haven't checked out yet. Thanks for the feedback!

I am using Gmail and Google Apps for Work. For sending emails programmatically I use Mandrill. I have never tried other APIs like Amazon SES, Mailgun etc. But Mandrill is working out quite well for me.

What features does Mandril offer, just transactional mail or does it offer features that allows you to see bounced email, unsubscribes, spam reports, mail scraping and other?

@JanVladimirMostert Mandrill is for sending transactional emails. It also lets you see bounced emails, spam reports etc. But if you want to maintain a list of subscribers and see who unsubscribed etc you need to maintain your list on MailChimp (its parent company). I think there is an easy way to integrate Mandrill with MailChimp.

Awesome! I'm looking to build a unified Email API that can handle all types of templates and offers all features across all mail providers - so I'm trying to get a feel for what people are actually using. I'm personally using SendGrid, from your description, it sounds very similar to the combination of MailChimp and Mandril.

Basically live and die by Gmail - very rarely goes down; works across all my devices; always in sync and always up to date. The spam filter is pretty damn good too.

And as much as I'm a pretty die hard Apple user - I really love Microsoft Outlook for iOS - instant notification of new emails.

Any web developer needs to test emails with other providers so the random AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, etc... accounts are maintained also.

For sending out email notifications and newsletters and such - I'm a big fan of AWS SES but due to complexity, tend to go with Mailgun often for projects that require it (old habits die hard).

I've liked Mailgun due to the API being easy to use - but they've been really flaky lately (as I've mentioned elsewhere) - and I'm considering a coup to AWS SES for all projects. It'll require a lot more code to do what's fairly easy in Mailgun - but once some basic structures are setup - copy / paste / modify to other projects.

What I want - and if I had the time to build it myself, I would - is a system where I can setup email templates - say, 1 for new user registration, 1 for stripe invoice, 1 for whatever. Those templates would use handlebars (of sorts) where I can pass in a json array and fill it in - example: Hello {{user.fullname}} - each template would have a unique ID of course.

Then I could send an API request to this service with the basics - to, from, subject, template_id and pass in my array of values and have it send the email off automatically or schedule it.

Consistent emails, every time.

(I've yet to find something like this)

Do you have any preference in mail templating? You mentioned handlebars as an example, would you use a templating system that matched AngularJS' templating for example?

What features in your opinion are missing from Mailgun and its API?

Well - the email will need to render to pure html with inline styles - so the templating system would really only be used to mail merge the data into the email. I'm not sure I'd build an email template out of angularjs or handlebars - as much as < IE10 is pretty much dead now - people do still use rather archaic email providers - look at how an email renders in AOL or Yahoo - garbage! So - the template needs to be broken down into the most basic html / css syntax.

Self-hosted. My webhost comes with an email service for upto 200 email addresses. The main advantage is that I get to choose everything. I use that with Rainloop as the web front end and Outlook for native client.

Do you know what they are running as the server? Is it Postfix or something like Apache James?

Good guess. They run on OpenSUSE Enterprise and as a result run Postfix and Cyrus.

Postfix is pretty reliable, but often blocked on some cloud providers - example, on Google Cloud, you can run Postfix, but you need to tell Postfix to reroute the mail via a third-party provider such as SendGrid. Thanks for the feedback!

I'm still using Gmail, although I'm thinking about running my own VPS with Roundcube or Rainloop.

I don't have any experience with a VPS, so I'm hesitant to start :(

Oh wait, I use Gmail as an e-mail client, not like a provider. I think I misinterpreted the question? Both Rainloop and Roundcube are just e-mail clients. Rainloop can be included with Owncloud if I remember correctly. Not sure about APIs, never used them :)

I've included Rainloop and Roundcube under email clients, very useful information, thanks Robert!

I'm going to try to install Roundcube on my non VPS server soon (this weekend). Might be faster than Gmail ;)

Amazon SES and Mandrill are my preferred providers. But most of the time I stick to Amazon SES.

A number of the bigger transactional mail providers actually run on top of AWS SES including SendGrid which is recommended by Google. AWS SES looks like a good option.

What do you like about Mandril and what features would you love to see added?

Mandrill is great. They already have handlebars support which is good. But handlebars itself lacks some important things like checking equality between strings etc. I think a better templating engine seems like a nice idea

Google mail. Can't kill old habits >_< And it's the only service which works on all my devices.
Posteo a German based secure provider for Mail, Calendar, Contacts and Notes. Syncing has some issues ATM.
Yahoo mail. My ever first own email (1997) - Don't use it for serious stuff since Gmail.
MailDrop Using it for things like email-to-download. Best service ever!

Edit: Lol I can't read today. 'what do you like about their APIs?' Well, in that case, I should delete my comment and replace it by https://www.nylas.com/ It supports REST and Webhooks. The API is clean and straightforward -> docs

Gmail is awesome, I agree! Do you use it for sending transactional mails from your apps as well?

What features does Nylas offer that you like and what is missing from their offering?

I'll need to make a list of which components render properly and warn users if their template will render incorrectly in certain mail providers. I was thinking using AngularJS to prerender the HTML and then just send the HTML; JS is not allowed in most email clients. Great feedback, thanks!

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