The SitePoint PHP blog has a post to their site introducing SparkPost, an email delivery service (in the same vein as Mandrill) that you can hook into your PHP applications to prevent the need to run your own mail servers.

I’ve used Mandrill for as long as I can remember. It sends transactional email, like the kind you receive when you sign up for a new account. Like me, many have been happy to use a free account for sending a relatively low number of emails a month. That is, until recently, when Mandrill caused a bit of a stir. The heart of the matter is that Mandrill removed their free tier. Anybody wishing to send mail through Mandrill now requires a paid-for MailChimp account

[...] Mindful that people are looking for alternatives (to power their personal newsletters or whatever), I spoke to Aydrian Howard. Aydrian is the Developer Advocate at SparkPost, whom I met at FluentConf. We talked for a bit about SparkPost and what makes it different from MailChimp.

After the little bit of Q&A about the service, the tutorial gets in and shows you how to get SparkPost set up for your application. They help you install their own client library and send a first test email using your account. Code is provided showing the configuration of the client with your key and the options you can define when sending the message.