Managing your own email server can be quite a task. If you're sending millions of emails per day you probably need a dedicated team just for this. Some compani

Managing your own email server can be quite a task. If you're sending millions of emails per day you probably need a dedicated team just for this. Some companies will prefer to outsource the sending of commercial emails and to keep the transactional emails in house. This is exactly what my employer is doing. We're currently evaluating SendGrid as provider and I'm quite impressed with their services. If you don't want all the vendor locking then you can just use the SMTP server. You don't need to worry about any configuration, they will manage your server and all you have to do is to send plain emails. If you want more services and are not afraid of vendor lockin then you can simple enable their "apps" and you get link tracking, event notifications, google analytics support, open tracking, etc.