I'm looking for an alternative to Google Apps for sending email from my rails app. (Google limits the number of messages you can send).
Do most people roll their own, or is their a preferred provider?
I'd love to be able to dynamically create addresses for my customers: [email protected]
We use AuthSMTP which does a quality job of informing you when you've been reported as SPAM and keeping you off of block lists.
It costs, but is very reasonable.
If you're hosting on a Linux server and just looking for something to send emails from your rails application, rolling your own SMTP server really isn't rocket science. You'll find tons of manuals out there on how to deploy a SMTP server on your Linux distribution of choice.
Postfix would be the de-facto-standard and Qmail is my personal weapon of choice when it comes to security, reliability and speed.
If you want to provide your customers with mailboxes (POP and/or IMAP) for incoming emails, it wouldn't be rocket science either to deploy your own server, but the administration of this servers and the support calls from your customers could become a pain. :-) In this case I would go for Google Apps. The $50/year/customer for the business option probably would be the choice for your corporate customers.
I've had good success with Postfix with Rails and Linux in production. Once the site got beyond small, connecting to Google Apps for each email became impractical (it would fail or timeout somehow once every couple hundred emails). For doing a mass mail to all your users, very impractical.
There is a good series of articles for getting postfix set up on SliceHost's pages http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/9/2/mail-server-overview
Just to give an update, it looks like the new hotness is SendGrid. Take a look if you're in the market for hosted email for your rails app.