I'm considering starting up nudge emails for lost http://todoneapp.com signups. Mailchimp seems like a popular service, but my <i>signup</i> email from them went into my Gmail spam folder. That seems like a really bad sign.<p>Anyone have any opinions on Mailchimp or similar alternatives?
I like MailChimp fine. It does what it's supposed to do, and does it well. I have also used Mad Mimi and CampaignMonitor.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Let me know if you'd like to see some code.
I prefer Campaign Monitor. Their interface was easier to understand and get started with.<p>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 (<a href="http://ymlp.com" rel="nofollow">http://ymlp.com</a>). They're dirt cheap and they're more than 10 years on a market.
Shameless plug, I am the author of a mailing list tool: <a href="http://simplemailer.pearachute.com" rel="nofollow">http://simplemailer.pearachute.com</a><p>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.