Ode to Sendgrid

I recently have been playing around with Sendgrid and it is pretty amazing. I have had some experience with sending email programmatically with AWS' SES product and it's nice, especially with its SNS integration, but Sendgrid's killer feature is its speed. I had about 6,000 emails to send, each one personalized with an individual URL and the person's first name. With AWS and a multi-threaded PHP program, I can send about 15 emails per second, which would have taken almost 7 minutes to process. With Sendgrid, I create a template in their system with template tags and then I create a massive data structure with up to 1,000 entries and then post it to the Sendgrid API. Rinse/repeat. I was able to send my 6,000 emails in 6 seconds! Sendgrid took care of the personalization on their end and I was seeing emails being delivered very soon after. Wow. Here's my script code:

I've only scratched the surface - there's lots more Sendgrid offers. One of the nice things is that you can get an activity feed and some nice stats after you send an email to see how people respond:

Activity Log, showing opens, clicks, delivered, etc.

Stat report, showing email performance.

If you're a Google Cloud customer, they offer a free trial with up to 12,000 transactional emails per month. Definitely worth a checking out!