Personally I find that services like Mailgun, Mandrill or SES work well enough for this purpose and are not particularly expensive if your volume per month isn'

Personally I find that services like Mailgun, Mandrill or SES work well enough for this purpose and are not particularly expensive if your volume per month isn't huge. On Mailgun for example you can send up to 10k emails per month for $0. And that's 10k emails that you can send on your own terms, not just in bulk.