I just witnessed the first real production “stress test” of SendGrid as an EWL email provider. Todd needed to send out a bulk email to about 6,000 employees of a company. We sent these out at a rate of 3,000 messages per hour and had no problems. I can see exactly how many were delivered, how many bounced, how many were opened, and how many were flagged as spam (1).
I can now say with more confidence that EWL email is reliable and versatile if you use SendGrid. The same probably goes for Mandrill, but I don’t have personal experience with it.
I have experience and can say the same about Mandrill. I’m also very happy that Mandrill has been 100% free to use. This month we’ve sent 6045 of our 12000 free transactional emails. Being able to see exactly what emails were successfully delivered (and even opened!) has been awesome because I’ve been able to increase their reach by finding typos in email addresses, for their users who didn’t know were missing out on emails. I’m also very happy to know that even if you reach the maximum sending quota for an hour, the rest of your emails don’t bounce, they just automatically go into a queue and will be sent when throttle is lifted.
We were just using NOPCommerce and had copied it over to a new server where email wasn’t set up properly yet. Some emails failed to send out. We fixed the config problem and then we were able to re-send the items in NOPCommerce’s queue. Pretty cool. Is this a feature that EWL should have or that SendGrid provides? Are they mutually exclusive?
Once you hand an email over to SendGrid, it will try for several days to deliver it. If it fails, the email will be added to an exportable report containing all the messages that couldn’t be delivered. You can do whatever you want with that.
EWL itself has no concept of an outgoing mail queue. I suppose it wouldn’t be mutually exclusive with SendGrid’s queue, but it’s not implemented because we’ve never needed such a feature.
My company just dumped Amazon SES email (like - an hour ago) because we exceeded the daily quota (after several months of not, and after building up a good reputation - didn’t matter) and it just started rejecting emails and there was no way to solve it immediately . As Sam pointed out, if this had happened on Mandrill, it would have queued them instead of killing them. We switched everything to Mandrill in less than an hour and everything worked first try.