Last week, Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) launched, which is a very simple, very scalable, very affordable, API-based email delivery service. People in the dev and email communities were geeking out over it, because this is potentially a very disruptive force in the email industry.

Some people pointed out that SES appears to be (mostly) a transactional email service. In case you don’t know, transactional messages are usually one-to-one “system” notifications (examples include account setup emails, password reminder emails, purchase receipts, shipping notifications, etc). There’s a good techie discussion over at Hacker News about all this.

Other people wondered out loud how this might affect ESPs like MailChimp, who specialize in sending one-to-many messages. Did Amazon just make it extremely easy for programmers to develop a competing email delivery service?

“What does MailChimp think of all this?”

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As a part of the $1 Million Integration Fund, there’s a new way to bring in your content from an iOS device. The team over at Second Gear has updated their MarkdownMail app to integrate with MailChimp! What does this mean for you? Now, you can create content on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad and send it to your MailChimp account as a new campaign.

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We just announced our $1 million MailChimp Integration Fund. It’s sort of inspired by Ycombinator, except there’s no equity involved. We basically want to help small startups with small, paying projects. Projects that involve integrating their apps with the MailChimp API. If you’ve got an idea for integrating with MailChimp (along with all these other great apps), you can fill out this online application.

Here’s the story behind the Integration Fund…

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We’ve just added the ability to add labels to the API keys you’ve generated in your account.

This is a particularly nice feature because MailChimp integrates with so many different apps. When you’re generating separate keys for all those integrations, you might want to go ahead and label them in order to track them. So in the future if you want to revoke a key for a particular app, you’ll know which is which by name instead of having to guess from the long string of letters and numbers.

You’ll find your MailChimp API keys under Account ==> API Keys & Info in the top left corner of the application interface.

Let’s say you have a subscriber list of tens of thousands of customers. Chances are, you’ve got a handful of “VIP” customers on that list that you want to follow very closely (big spenders, thought leaders, long term friends, members of the press, etc).

At MailChimp, we have a name for those people: Golden Monkeys.

Sometimes we’ll send them email newsletters with links and inside jokes, specifically to see if a certain customer clicks something (we recently sent an email with a link to this, to gauge their geeky-ness). Anyway, constantly logging in to our campaign stats and hitting “refresh” over and over again to see who clicked what is a chore. We started to think up ways to make that easier, then we thought “heck, this is probably something our customers would love, too.”

So the guys in our new Mobile Lab (more on that later) have built an iPhone app that will send push notifications whenever a Golden Monkey opens or clicks anything in one of your MailChimp campaigns. If it sounds interesting, maybe you can help us beta test it.

Here’s how it basically works…

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