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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

Doing it yourself seems to be a great idea if you want all of your emails to end up in people's spam folders. Here's a great article explaining all of the reasons why you might end up that way:

http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/ensuring-your-ht...

Much easier is to just use something like Constant Contact. Our emails seem to have a very high delivery rate through them. There's definitely some pain in the ass as they don't offer an API for syncing your userbase with their list, but if you're a small company for whom development time is valuable it's hard to beat.

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As long as you're diligent, it's not that difficult to deliver e-mail successfully. It really depends on what kind of e-mail you're sending and how frequently you send it. That being said, monitoring bounces, watching junk mail reporting programs, etc can quickly become a full-time job.

The answer isn't do to one or the other -- it depends on the situation.

It can be done, I just can't see doing it yourself being worth it until you have a large number of people to whom you are frequently mailing.

Someone else said "it's really not worth it to go third-party unless you're sending heavy HTML newsletter type e-mails to hundreds of thousands or millions of people. "

My thought is the exact opposite. When you're small, it's not worth committing the resources to doing all you need to do yourself. Third party services cost $10 or $20 a month and save you hours of work, and increase delivery rates greatly. (At least they did for us and the few other startups I've talked to about this.) When you're large, the cost of third party services exceeds the cost of doing it yourself, and you can get better quality in house.

If you are doing it yourself, I hear good things about Return Path, but have no first hand experience.

I think when you're small it really depends on your application. If email isn't an important part and you aren't sending high volume, then I definitely agree it can be a huge time-sink and very tough to figure out.

But if you really want control of your email it's not that difficult to do if you follow best practices.

WRT Return Path - I'm pretty sure Twitter turned to them when they had trouble delivering mail. Part of what they do is email whitelisting, which I fundamentally disagree with. But if you read the paper on how they helped twitter out with best practices there is actually a lot of good stuff in there (things that you can do on your own if it's important or you're at that scale).

The author of that article is from CampaingnMonitor, which has a great user interface, and their pricing makes them one of the best options for startups or smaller companies that want to do something like send a monthly newsletter. They do have an API for synching your userbase.

I am working at StreamSend, a small company that has some of the best rates for sending thousands of emails a month, and an API which exposes basically the entire app.

Here is a link with some overviews of the different email service providers out there. http://www.emailmarketingoptions.com/providers.php

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