Rackspace, SendGrid Partner for Cloud Messaging Service

SendGrid is bringing its trademark secure e-mail infrastructure to Rackspace Hosting customers with the announcement of a strategic partnership that allows for the sending of up to 40,000 transactional messages a month for free. Rather than focus on providing mailboxes to users, the Rackspace/SendGrid partnership is focused on enabling customers to securely send transactional e-mails from their cloud applications and servers.

To hear SendGrid tell it, building a transactional e-mail system  – which is to say, an e-mail system that sends out promotional and sales material such as newsletters, announcements and other marketing messages key to running a business – is costly and immensely difficult to scale as the organization grows.

But now, when running a Rackspace server, all of that is now built in. As noted above, 40,000 messages per month are free. Here are the details on the pricing structure, taken from the press release:

Any more than that, and SendGrid is willing to work out custom pricing.

We have a close eye on Rackspace after it came out that it was migrating its Slicehost customers to the Cloud Servers offering. While this news doesn’t provide much of a clue to the future of Rackspace cloud initiatives, rest assured, we’re watching.

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