Hey guys,
Just released a feature on my little website on the top trending books of the week (https://nextnovelproject.com/trending) that I think would be a pretty good fit for an automated weekly email. My question for my fellow indie hackers is if anyone’s had particularly good experiences with any of the email providers (sendgrid, mandrill, mailgun, etc...), especially in regards to sending well designed emails.
I've used SendGrid, Mandrill, and most recently Postmark.
SendGrid is alright. Probably not my favorite of the 3 since I think it's not great when it comes to actually designing an email and I find their UI difficult to use.
Postmark I'm still in the learning stages on, but it was easy to integrate into a Rails project and I appreciate their focus on transactional email only. We'll have to see how it shakes out, but so far I like it a lot.
Mandrill is the one I've used the most. At times, it feels like it's been stuffed into a basement closet by Mailchimp. The UI isn't very good and the docs can be hard to follow at times, but it certainly gets the job done. One of the best features is the test mode so that you can quickly validate if your messages are actually being sent or not before setting them live. It's quite a bit like Stripe's test mode if you're familiar with that.
On the designing emails front, are you looking for a service that lets you use a drag and drop type WYSIWYG editor to build templates?