Ask HN: Do you like Mailchimp? Alternatives? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you like Mailchimp? Alternatives?

15 pointsfamfam14 comments

I'm considering starting up nudge emails for lost http://todoneapp.com signups. Mailchimp seems like a popular service, but my signup email from them went into my Gmail spam folder. That seems like a really bad sign.

Anyone have any opinions on Mailchimp or similar alternatives?

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I like MailChimp fine. It does what it's supposed to do, and does it well. I have also used Mad Mimi and CampaignMonitor.

I'm sticking with CM for now. It has more features and offers you the capability of setting up clients and allowing the to send email campaigns under your account, which can be cool. It also has excellent template features.

All three are good, but this depends a lot on how much power you need, the number of emails you're going to send. The pricing structure varies a bit so I would look at that and figure out what works for you.

We use something custom - we deliver contact emails via Google AppEngine, via a private webservice.

It was really simple to set up, virtually free (0.0001c per email), and Google's got pretty much the gold standard for delivering mail.

One drawback is your from: user has to be verified and set up in the AppEngine dashboard (not difficult), and on the free AppEngine account you can only send 2k emails per day. Once you're on billing, the quota sky high.

Let me know if you'd like to see some code.

While not the original poster, I'm sure there's others of us that wouldn't mind seeing that code (myself included). I wouldn't mind stepping away from MailChimp either (although I've got no complaints with spam levels).

Thanks for talking about this. Definitely aware of the AppEngine solution, but one of the reasons I was looking for a turnkey solution was for guidance in complying with CAN-SPAM as well as having them manage opt-outs, bounces, things like that.

Agree with the other commenter that it would be killer for you to open source your app :)

I am currently working on a Google App Engine based CRM app, which now has a preview of this feature : Bulk-email, using email-templates..

http://blogs.ifreetools.com/2010/05/feature-preview-email-te...

The app is not open-source - but free with resource restrictions and ads. Custom deployments are available for as low as $99/year (yes, per year), which enables you to use the free quota (upto 2000 emails / day) and purchase additional resources as required directly from Google.

Works with Google / Google Apps accounts.

I prefer Campaign Monitor. Their interface was easier to understand and get started with.

Plus, MailChimp automatically filtered out a lot of valid addresses and I couldn't find any way to override that (for instance admin@site.com would cause an error because of "admin").

There's a simple straight alternative called YMLP (http://ymlp.com). They're dirt cheap and they're more than 10 years on a market.

Sendgrid.com has been very good for us.

+1 for Sendgrid.

There's an extremely interesting post by Jeff Atwood about sending email programmatically. It's a good read - explains why a lot of mail ends up in spam. ( http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/so-youd-like-to-sen... )

SendGrid takes care of everything in Jeff's post and it handles both bulk and transactional email, so it's a great pick.

We also use SendGrid and have been very happy with it.

Ditto for SendGrid -- works very well for programmatic emails.

We also use MailChimp for some manual campaign-type emails.

Shameless plug, I am the author of a mailing list tool: http://simplemailer.pearachute.com

It's still a little beta, but several businesses are using it, and support is an email away. :)

I've used MailChimp and I think it's great. No issues with spam. I use their RSS-to-email feature a lot, and it saves me tons of time. Haven't tried any other delivery services.

You can try MadMimi.com and Aweber.com (not sure how the integrations works or their API's)

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