First we replaced SMTP that was distributed and designed to be resilient to outages (i.e. not lose messages) with proprietary HTTP APIs and now we complain that they don't notify us via email when they are down. Nice.
I am guilty of using SES myself, but it's sad to see email becoming increasingly centralized.
We use SendGrid for transactional email, but handle (solicited) bulk email in-house. The centralization of email is at least partly due to the fact that ensuring email gets delivered is difficult and time-consuming.
While I'm sure a lot of SendGrid's customers don't want (or don't know how) to configure a mail server, there are other customers who know that delivering email isn't as simple as installing Postfix. The rise of centralized email services is the inevitable byproduct.
Yeah, I know. Not blaming SendGrid in the slightest. Spammers have spoiled it for us all. Freedom disappearing because of a minority of abusers seems to be a common pattern...
I am guilty of using SES myself, but it's sad to see email becoming increasingly centralized.