as mandrill have just announced they are becoming an add-on to mailchimp, and transactional email service will be attached to a subscription to MailChimp. And as my provider mail service drop all bounces, I have to fall back on other solutions that can be integrated properly with CiviMail. What are solutions (free or very little expensive because we are a very small structure) that would send 600 messages per month maximum (Google, Zoho, ...)?
Thank you for your help.
This conversation has been taking place on the CiviCRM Partners' list in the past week. Fortunately, some folks from the list created a wiki page to track the best options, which is available here: Mailing Providers.
I like Amazon SES, which termdark referenced (I'm the author of that documentation they linked). However, CiviCRM partners with much larger installations don't like it because it lacks some high-end features (e.g. sub-accounting) and because they can vary their throttling.
If you're only sending 600 messages/month, you can probably use your web host's SMTP servers. If you're on a VPS, you can set up Posfix yourself - you're unlikely to get blacklisted with such a low volume if you configure it right, and being able to configure Postfix is an important part of how to set up Amazon SES.
EDIT: There's a lot of interest amongst the partners in SparkPost. They offer 100,000 free messages a month, and support many of the high-end features. There's also an extension under development by the folks at CiviDesk to use the more efficient (and easier to set up) API for bounce handling.
Amazon SES is a suitable replacement for those on a budget. There's some useful documentation on getting it set up with CiviCRM at: https://hq.palantetech.coop/projects/commons/wiki/Amazon_SES_for_CiviCRM
I'd advise you to set up the Postix server as SES lacks much of the more useful functionality of Mandrill.
