Input Sought on Email Solutions

To handle real incoming mail for real business customers who aren't interested in Nigerian wire transfers and male enhancement, Google Apps. It's only $5/mo/user, and provides more than just e-mail.

To handle real outgoing automated mail, services like Mandrill for transactional mail and Mailchimp for bulk mail are excellent.

Yes, these services cost money. Turns out that setting up an e-mail server is trivial, but becoming trusted to send good mail to the rest of the world is not easy.

Thanks for the reply! This part of your reply is what made me reconsider my original plans:@hoopycat:

… becoming trusted to send good mail to the rest of the world is not easy.

Could you expand upon this a bit more? I assume that being 'untrusted' means mail ends up in the recipients spam folder? How does one become trusted or, alternatively, what other trusted services are available? I have some time to play around with possible solutions before I commit to one, at this point I am trying to figure out what I need to become familiar with before utilizing it in a production environment. Thanks again!

As two examples, Gmail tends to put messages from unknown IP addresses to the Spam folder, until a certain number of them are "saved" with the Not Spam button. This isn't difficult, but it does take time (and making your customers dig through their Spam folder when you add a new server is ridiculous).

Hotmail (now known as Outlook.com) is somewhat more onerous, sometimes requiring a bit of paperwork to get them to accept your mail.

I can't provide a complete list of all the outsourced e-mail providers out there, but Rackspace has mail hosting options and Amazon has a transactional mail service.