Mass Emailing API? (EmailBlast).

Question

We have a project coming up where I want to create a webservice (EmailBlast) that will talk to our 3 or 4 intranet apps. These intranet apps will make webservice calls to EmailBlast informing EmailBlast of the emails that need to be sent out. I will have a simple Approval workflow so that when a request comes in I will notify admins and request thier approval before sending the emails.

So rather than do the entire project myself I was wondering if there is a Email API that can queue up emails, create reports on bounce backs etc.. And then I would wrap all that up with my Workflow stuff and web services to communicate with my intranet apps.

Is there something like that out there? Or am I going about this the wrong way?

Answer 1

I wrote the SOAP API for Lyris Listmanager. It is an excellent product. Sending out emails is no trivial task. You need things like domain keys, SPF etc or your emails will end up in the junk mail box, or you can easily be blacklisted. You don't want this to happen to your corporate sendmail.

Also automated bounce handling is a huge time saver. You can have the system retry after x number of times, and remove from the list if you want.

Most commercial email management systems will handle this for you. Listmanger is one of the few stand alone email management systems that you can install locally and start using it. Check out the free trial, it will save you alot of headache down the road.

Answer 2

MailChimp offers a great mass-mailing service and has an API for it. However, it's an external service, not something you can install internally.

There are also hardware systems that you can install internally that do this sort of thing. Google "mail appliance".