If you send email in a web application, you should know how hard it is. Not the implementation, which is trivial, but making sure your emails aren’t being blacklisted, marked as spam, or simply discarded.

Jeff Atwood described some of the steps needed on So You’d Like to Send Some Email (Through Code). I remember doing those and some more when I was working on Stream19, just to get emails to show up on spam folders, let alone inboxes.

Fortunately, now there are other options. SendGrid and Postmark are two good email delivery platforms you can use. SendGrid is already integrated with Heroku (the hosting service I’m using), but Postmark’s pricing scales better. In alternative, you can always send through GMail.

On my next web app, I will try out Postmark, and then review it here.