Good Email Notification Sending Service

Question

I need to send a few but important email notifications to individual users. For instance, when they register their software I send them a confirmation email.

Right now, I am using 'sendmail' from my Perl CGI script to do the job.

Most of my automated email are lost or marked as junk. Unfortunately, I am using shared hosting services and not a very good control over the SPF and SenderID DNS records. Even more bad, some other user of that shared server has been infected with some kind of SPAM-BOT and the IP is now blacklisted until further notice!

Anyway I just don't want to deal with this kind of headache. I am looking for an online service that I will be able to subscribe to and pay something like 0.10$ per email I send with no monthly fees. I just need and API to be able to send the email from PHP or Perl code I will have to write.

I have been looking around at all those "Email Sending Services" and they are all wrapped around creating campains and managing lists for bulk email marketing distribution and newsletters.

But remember, I want to send an email notification to a "single" recipient.

So far, I have look at MailChimp, SocketLabs, iContact, ConstantContact, StreamSend and so many others to no avail.

I have seen one comment at Hackers News saying that MailChimp

have an API for transactional e-mails (i.e. ad-hoc ones to welcome a user for example). So you're not just restricted to using them for bulk emails

But I cannot find this in the API documentation supplied, maybe this was removed.

Any suggestions out there. Here is a summary of my requirements:

1. Allows ad hoc sending of email to a single recipient. Throughput may well be throttle I don't care, i am sending like 2-5 emails a day.

2. API available in PHP or Perl to connect to that web service. Ideally I can send HTML formatted emails, otherwise I will live with text only.

3. Solution not too expensive, between 0.01$ and 0.25$ per email would be acceptable.

4. No recurring monthly fees.

Answer 1

We started using the lamson project internally ..

It is written by Zed Shaw who gained some notoriety in the Ruby community for writing the Mongrel server and then loudly departing from the Ruby world.

It is written in python, basically is billed as an "application server" for email management - it layers on / proxies for an MTA using internal state machines to handle customer interactions.

We are not a python shop but were able to pretty quickly integrate it into our database / web environment.

It's not for everyone - it behaves a bit differently than you might be used to, but I think the design is quite sensible once you grok the patterns.

lamsonproject.org

I do have a concern that this might end up as a hobby project in his mind and never get supported, but it does what I need for now and there are no outstanding bugs I'm aware of.

Answer 2

Fastmail.fm does have a Perl API, though I've never used it, more details here:

http://wiki.fastmail.fm/index.php?title=FastServicesPerl

Most of Fastmails account levels do have yearly fees, but if you're willing to pay $.10 per email and might send 5 per day, it wouldn't take long to get up to the $5 per year for the lowest account level that's ad free and have SMTP access.

I can't say for sure that the API supports what you want, but since you'd have SMTP access you should be able to send what you want I'd thought unless I'm missing something about SPF etc?

Answer 3

Never used this service before, but it sounds cheap:

http://www.smtp.com/

The pricing said for sending 500 emails/month is $2.00. I don't think you could possibly beat that.

Answer 4

can't you just use the Google SMTP mechanism?

Answer 5

We have used SocketLabs Email On-Demand service and have been extremely satisfied with deliverability and they do all of the DNS setup and DKIM setup for you. It was very easy to get setup and they have a very easy REST API to pull down results - www.socketlabs.com/od/signup.