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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

I dare you to look at the API for some of the "traditional" email service providers. I've had the displeasure of working with a few from some of the big names and they are real DailyWTF material.

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I have worked with Constant Contact and it was a Constant Headache. My favorite was when they took the API down for maintenance and maintained HTTP 200 OK status codes for requests but instead of XML returned it was an HTML page saying they were down. I took a screenshot of the page because it was so surprising:

http://www.jongales.com/blog/2009/10/17/constant-contacts-in...

EmailLabs/Lyris decided to invent their own XML-over-HTTP API format rather than use REST or even SOAP or anything else you might already have a library for. They combined this with a very poor understanding of how XML is supposed to work (lots of <DATA> tags) and return results that aren't guaranteed to validate. Dates are represented in one of six different formats depending on which particular function you're calling. If there's a problem, you might get an error, you might get back nothing. I could go on.

Silverpop is similar.

Have you had any experience with Exact Target, at the API level or other? And don't get me started about a certain email broadcaster vendor out of Seattle that starts with "what" and ends in "counts"... their idea of XML is to parse an entire file line-by-line and treat each line independently of the whole. So it kind of looks like XML... to a kid who just learned Java I suppose.

Care to explain what you think about Exact Target - I might have to deal with them and would appreciate any feedback you have of them.

I'm in the same boat as you. :)

Without providing a biased opinion I thought the following link might help with your understanding of the ExactTarget API capabilities and structure - http://wiki.memberlandingpages.com/API_References

Hope this helps!

The API does not seem to be bad, really. It's just not consistent with other AWS APIs, which would simplify writing language bindings for them.

Um, postmark? It's an extremely simple API to implement.

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