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?”

Read More

Well, sort of– technically, we’re supporting Pseudo-Transactional Email Campaigns.  (We are not your SMTP server… yet.)  But what exactly is a Transactional Email Campaign?  Our Transactional Email Campaigns aim to give you the ability to send the same campaign over and over again without changing much of the content.  For example–

• Welcome/Sign-up emails for your website or mailing list
• Follow-up/Reminder emails
• Forgotten Password emails

This all happens through the magic of our API, or Application Programming Interface, which is essentially a set of code that allows MailChimp to interact with other applications.  Not a programmer?  The API is for nerds only.  If you can’t call a function or find a programmer in your company to bribe, you can always contact one of our MailChimp Experts.

Read More