Finally, in 2007, some people have figured out how to provide email communications as an open service. Despite the popularity of syndication feeds with first-adopters, and tech-savy users, e-mail remains as the medium of choice to reach most stakeholders. This may be changing, as younger users see e-mail as a tool old people use, but that is a post for another day.

Programmable web lists 16 online APIs available for working in one way or another with email. Traditionally, you had the choice of outsourcing it to a proprietary vendor, or keeping it in-house. The former meant your data was silo'd away, frequently with only rudimentary tools for importing or exporting data. The latter, required you have technical expertise on operating and maintaining mail servers 24x7, a full time job for sure.

E-mail APIs provide rich access to your lists.

Programmatic access via one of these services opens up a number of intriguing integration opportunities, both for how you manage communications internally, and how you present email offerings on your own site. You could:

• Integrate sending email blasts to constituents with another contact management application or your membership management database.
• Automate regular email messages, generated from content added to your Website or CMS
• Customize the subscription process to your liking. Visitors would never have to leave your website to a 3rd party site, instead your web server talks behind the scenes with the email service through the API.