When I decided to use a service for sending emails, I signed up for Amazon SES. It seemhttp://aws.amazon.com/ses/ed like a great way for my website SellersToolbox to get email sent. Initially things worked, but then some customers commented that they were not getting emails. I checked into it and it appears that the domain amazonses.com is being blacklisted. Most of the stories I read were from back in April 2012 so I thought they might have gotten those problems resolved by now. They haven't though. I started having email problems within the first week of use and I had only sent maybe 50 to 60 emails.

I then switched over to where I have my email hosted which is GoDaddy.com. I have an unlimited email account there for the website and figured it would work well. They only allow 250 messages per day and you have to buy more relays. Worse, I started having trouble right away with email messages just not showing up. Then I started getting errors when sending emails where it said I was talking to a plain text server. I was using port 465 and the smtps protocol so I know that was not true. I created a support ticket and was told that unless the email originated from their own servers through one of their scripting tools, they couldn't check into the problem.

So after doing some research, I found that RackSpace has a deal with SendGrid where you get their $10 per month service for free if you are using cloud servers. I am going to give them a try but it looks hopeful. They have special API's if you pay $80 per month, and it looks like they have a good handle on what it takes to get email delivered. Sure beats setting up my own smtp server.

EDITED: I have been using SendGrid for a month now and am quite happy with the service. The emails get out, I see stats on which ones have been opened. I don't get any bounces. And so far no blocks because of blacklisting or considering my email spam. I would call this a win.