Hot on the heels of a number of advances for the OpenStack community, including the news that VMware is all set to join up with the foundation and the release of Piston Cloud’s new, simplified version of the open source platform, Rackspace has just announced a brand new acquisition, snapping up San Francisco-based Mailgun.

Mailgun, who confirmed the deal in a blog post, is a successful start-up that simplifies things for developers that want to integrate email services into their OpenStack applications. Using Mailgun’s API, users can ““send, receive and track email from within their applications – without managing an email server or becoming an expert in email setup, operations and deliverability,” explained Rackspace in a press release earlier this morning.

Being able to do so is a big bonus for developers, the majority of whom are busy enough integrating their own functions and features without having to worry about emails and other basic necessities.

Since its start up last year, Mailgun has accumulated a pretty impressive list of clients, including The Financial Times and Parse, while their services have also been integrated with PaaS providers AppFog, Engine Yard and Heroku.

Mailgun said in its blog post that its services will continue without interruption:

“It’s business as usual. You do not need to make any changes to your code, account or anything else. Mailgun customers will not have to use Rackspace’s hosting products in order to use Mailgun, but you may want to when you see how awesome the integration is going to be :).”

As part of the deal, Mailgun’s employees have all been signed up by Rackspace, and will soon be moving their gear to the company’s main SOMA office in San Francisco.