The 5 Best Email API Services in 2023

The 5 Best Email API Services in 2023

Strong communication touchpoints are essential for real-time collaboration, productivity, and streamlined operations—making a reliable email service provider a must.

With an email application programming interface (API), your business can do more than just send and schedule emails. You can generate personalized content seamlessly with a proprietary mail transfer agent (MTA) and infrastructure built for users to achieve optimal inbox placement and make the process of sending emails scalable and flexible.

Here, we’ll walk you through the best email APIs and top features you can build into your email experience.

What is an email API?

An email API is a tool that enables email servers to:

• Send personalized emails
• Access performance data
• Manage email lists
• Perform other productivity functions

When you use an email API to connect software applications to email services, you automate your workflow and create efficiency—saving time and resources, ultimately elevating your email marketing campaigns.

Email API vs. SMTP

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and email API work similarly—both manage email communications and ensure high deliverability. However, there are several differences:

• SMTP is primarily for exchanging emails between servers, and email API integrates email servers into an application to enhance functionality.
• SMTP takes less time to implement and use, as its main function is to send and receive emails, while email API offers a wider range of features that help automate marketing tasks.

Email API and SMTP address your needs in different ways, but both are effective solutions to make your email communications easier and more efficient.

What to look for in email API providers

There are many available email APIs, but it’s crucial to choose one that’s user friendly and versatile. As you search for an ideal email API service, keep these features in mind:

• Robust security: In an online landscape rampant with cyberattacks, APIs become vulnerable. Because email APIs carry highly confidential information—like a person’s credentials—it’s imperative that developers take all measures necessary to protect and secure their email APIs.
• High deliverability rate: If you send an email that lands in the recipient’s spam folder, your outreach efforts become ineffective. The email API you choose should prioritize high deliverability for all email communications, whether sending one email or thousands.
• Consistent customer support: When your email API encounters a technical issue, time is truly of the essence—the faster the problem gets resolved, the quicker you can resume normal operations and minimize disruptions. An email API with strong customer support gets you the help you need, when you need it.
• Reasonable costs: As you browse email APIs, consider what features you need for your business, and how much you can afford to pay for them. Choose a cost-effective and robust email API.
• Reliable speed: If your company sends thousands of emails daily, having a scalable email API service is essential. Delays can negatively impact your customer relationships, while speediness is sure to create more positive interactions.

The best email API for your business 2023

To determine the best email API service, ask:

• What are our outreach goals?
• Do we have a budget to spend, or do we need a more cost-efficient solution?
• Which features do we need to effectively oversee our email deliverability rates, uptime, and sending volume?

Your ideal API service will vary depending on your priorities. Let’s take a look at a few APIs that will elevate your workflow and email sending.

1. Best overall: Twilio SendGrid

Emails can get lost or misplaced when a business sends them in bulk or to a large volume of customers. As the overall best email API, Twilio SendGrid prioritizes deliverability and works at scale to effectively send over 90 billion emails monthly. Regardless of the frequency or volume of your email activities, SendGrid’s speedy MTA creates a scalable infrastructure to support companies of every size.

SendGrid is among the best email validation APIs, trusted by many top brands, including Uber, Spotify, Glassdoor, and Yelp. Plus, compared to other email APIs, it covers the most bases and offers every feature you need to grow your business efficiently.

Key benefits:

• Technical support: Personalized customer support is available 24/7 and comes with a designated account manager who can anticipate your questions and help resolve any issues with the email API.
• Privacy: Secure data centers store user information, and the software utilizes two-factor authentication and encryption to enhance security. Additionally, SendGrid tests for new vulnerabilities continuously.
• Email deliverability: A worldwide cloud-based architecture and dedicated deliverability service helps the email API work strategically to improve your email deliverability rate.
• Productivity: Communication and collaboration goals on a central platform increase productivity, whether developer, marketer, or business professional.

Pricing:

You can get started with SendGrid for free or subscribe to one of its monthly plans (starting at $19.95) to take advantage of additional features.

2. Best for enterprises: MessageBird

Formerly SparkPost, MessageBird’s email platform accommodates enterprises and helps them send over 6 trillion emails annually. Users can oversee the sending process, manage their sender reputation, and make quick changes on the go.

Key benefits:

• Delivery monitoring: To ensure that your email ends up in the right place and at the right time, it’s essential to identify deliverability issues as quickly as possible. MessageBird allows you to access and mitigate these pain points to improve metrics like bounce rate and open rate.
• Robust MTA: With PowerMTA, you have more agency over your sending—whether running your email program on an independent server or a public cloud platform like Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.
• Scalable cost: Instead of having fixed costs, tailor the price according to your email management needs.

Pricing:

You can try MessageBird for free or purchase the Starter, Premier, or Custom monthly subscriptions to access more advanced features. Prices vary based on email volume.

3. Best for cost: Amazon SES

The Amazon SES API is scalable and allows you to send marketing and transactional emails to your customers. Its API can improve deliverability, monitor significant metrics, and send large volumes of emails within a safe sending quota so your bulk messages reach user inboxes. However, you must have an Amazon Web Services account and some technical knowledge to leverage the Amazon SES API’s features.

Key benefits:

• Customization: There are 2 methods to send an email: —formatted and raw. Formatted emails require you to fill out the “from” address, “to” address, subject line, and message. Afterward, it formats the rest of the email for you. Alternatively, if you want to deliver a more personalized email, you can format it “raw” to your liking.
• Visibility: The Amazon SES API provides the number of sent emails in the last 24 hours, current sending quota, and maximum send rate—which allows you to strategize accordingly.
• Accessibility: You can call the Amazon SES API through an AWS SDK, a direct HTTPS request, or a command line interface.

Pricing:

You can starts using the Amazon SES API for free, but pricing largely depends on the number of emails you send per month. For example, after 62,000 emails, it costs $0.10 for every 1,000 emails with an additional charge of $0.12 for every GB of attachments.

4. Best for user-friendliness: Postmark

With Postmark, you can deliver transactional and bulk emails with efficiency. Its expansive library and integration allows users to send emails, oversee domains and templates, and view stats for outbound emails.

Key benefits:

• Integration: The API documentation helps developers integrate Postmark’s API into their applications. It offers a library curated by Postmark developers and a community library that includes outside developer contributions.
• Deliverability: Postmark’s Message Streams separate emails by type—transactional or broadcast—and protect your reputation with internet service providers to improve overall deliverability.
• Versatility: Originally intended for transactional emails, Postmark has since expanded to send other types of email content. However, if you want to personalize your emails, there’s a 10 MB maximum email size and accepted file types.

Pricing:

You can get started with Postmark with a free trial and several paid tiers starting at $15.

5. Best for developers: Mailgun

Like Postmark, Mailgun provides extensive API documentation for integration. With email analytics, you can monitor delivery at various stages and analyze engagement metrics to optimize future campaigns.

Key benefits:

• Verification: Not only does Mailgun utilize verification services, but to check email addresses for legitimacy, it performs a risk assessment to determine the factors that might damage your sender reputation.
• Simplicity: Mailgun’s Inbound Routes software parses incoming email data to streamline email processing.
• Insight: Email metrics, like acceptance and delivery or open and click rates, help inform strategies to improve email campaigns.

Pricing:

You can try Mailgun for free, but its lowest plan starts at $35, then jumps up to $90 per month. In other words, this email API can get a bit pricey.

Elevate your communications with Twilio SendGrid’s Email API

The best email API is one you can customize, automate, and integrate with other tools to create and support efficient workflows. Designed by developers for developers, Twilio SendGrid’s Email API is a powerful tool with all the support you need to deliver emails reliably, efficiently, and at scale.

With SendGrid, you can:

• Build infrastructure in minutes with libraries that support your programming language
• Set up workflows for account creation, password, and purchase receipts emails
• Troubleshoot account management security and data analysis user interface issues quickly
• Ensure high deliverability rates on up to 100 billion business-critical emails monthly
• Send verification codes to keep your brand users safe from fraud
• Run real-time email activity and analytics reports

If you’re curious how to further enhance the customer experience through a scalable omnichannel strategy, read our guide, Omnichannel Marketing: A Complete Guide for 2023 to get started.