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I built a newsletter web application but it is going to be far too much work for me to write my own service and host a machine with enough bandwidth to send the newsletters myself.

I would prefer to use an API and have a 3rd party handle the server load. What are the best and cheapest mail sending services that provide an API for my C# code to interface with? I don't need anything fancy. I have a database with users and my application knows what to send and who to send it to. I just need to be able to take that information, drop it on a 3rd party service, and have it begin sending out the emails one by one.

Note: I cannot BCC recipients. Each email is customized for the reader it was sent to.

Thanks everyone!

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how many users do you have, and on average how many emails would you be sending out per month? – GSto May 5 '11 at 21:57
Right now it's about 500 users and it is a daily newsletter. So about 15000 emails a month. The site is growing too so I'd probably want to go more than that for some breathing room. – user13280 May 5 '11 at 22:58

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3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

I'm a fan of Amazon's Simple Email Service.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers.

For high email deliverability, Amazon SES uses content filtering technologies to scan a business’s outgoing email messages to help ensure that the content meets ISP standards. The email message is then either queued for sending or routed back to the sender for corrective action. To help businesses further improve the quality of email communications with their customers, Amazon SES provides a built-in feedback loop, which includes notifications of bounce backs, failed and successful delivery attempts, and spam complaints.

Emphasis added. That's right, they'll even let you know when the mail is marked as spam (using services they've partnered with). Some spam sniffers even see mail out of SES as more likely to be ham. They have a very low tolerance for spam complaints. If you're sending double-opt-in newsletters, then you shouldn't worry too much about that.

The API is pretty straightforward and language-agnostic, and they have language-specific SDKs -- here's the one for the .NET framework.

Because you're sending newsletters, you might want to consider one of the more marketing-specific services, like Constant Contact and Exact Target.

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This is EXACTLY what I was looking for. Thank you! I have no need for all the marketing tools as I tend to like to track that information myself as much as I can so SES is perfect. – user13280 May 5 '11 at 22:59
up vote 2 down vote

Never used it but mailchimp has an API. They can handle the volume. Why would you want to use anything that is cheap?

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mailchimp can send up to 12,000 emails a month to up to 2,000 subscribers for free. depending on the scale of @Chevex 's project, it may be well within his price range :) – GSto May 5 '11 at 21:46
I think cheap is a subjective word. I just meant cheap as in gets the job done and is the cheapest on the market. I'd rather not pay for a more expensive service if another service does the same thing for less, that's all. – user13280 May 5 '11 at 23:00
I've deployed a mailchimp email api integration with xmlrpc for a client, and it was straightforward, and has been rock-solid for over 8 months. I used Python on our end, standard-library xmlrpclib module. No additional software was needed. – Christopher Mahan Aug 22 '11 at 17:39
up vote 1 down vote

I haven't tried every provider out there but I have been using SendGrid on one of my projects and have found it to be really simple and it includes some nice features.

I believe their cheapest pricing tier is $10/month for 10,000 emails per month.

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