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An interesting announcement from Amazon which offers a free cloudy email service (my bold).
Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) (beta)
Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. With Amazon SES there is no long-term commitment, minimum spend or negotiation required – businesses can utilize a free usage tier and after that enjoy low fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfer fees.
I have not used this service yet so I cannot comment on how it compares to alternatives such as Postmark or Sendgrid which offer value added services such as templates and reporting. If you have, or have used Postmark or Sendgrid please add a comment to this post.
Dr James Bayley 
Why not just use google apps?
Please forgive me but I don’t understand your comment. Do you mean “deploy to Amazon but use a Google Apps email capabilty” or do you mean “Why target a new application at Amazon Cloud when you could target it at Google App Engine?”.
If you meaning is the second then as Wikipedia says
If you have existing skills (Postgresql), code (Java) and deployment technologies (Tomcat) then it may not be worth targeting the Google platform. This is the case for my application at present.
Thank you for commenting, it is good to hear from you.
James
I think what he means is you’re allowed to use Google smtp if you are a google apps user.
I meant the former but you are quite right that the rest of the Amazon cloud infrastructure is richer… especially with the new AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
Good pace on your blog, have added it to my reader so watch out 🙂
We have used sendgrid for the past 4 months and our members send up to 100k emails per month through our site that is hosted on AWS. Sendgrid has been good for the most part but REALLY watch out on our settings in CF Admin Email for timeout since we ended up sending a bunch of dupes due to this through their service. They seem to have some communication issue — email still gets sent but CF thinks it didn’t so it re-sends it.
In the end the best way to solve it was run a local postfix email server and have CF pass over the emails to it and have Postfix talk to sendgrid.
Sendgrid’s attitude though is totally different! We found the timeout issue through a fluke and probably sent about 15%-20% of dupes which they had no problem billing us for an extra 20k emails each month — when we asked for a credit they were pretty much like “piss off — we are the best”.
We are testing Amazon SES right now and have high hopes for it and ditching sendgrid. Another one we are testing is http://www.deliverhq.com and they have been GREAT to deal with — product is still in beta but very stable so far! FYI, deliverHQ.com is even in your area of the country.
Jeremy
Thank you Jeremy for your helpful comment. I look more to hearing about your experience with Amazon.