

Ask HN: Difficulties of a web app that sends out emails? - emoray13

Hey all,<p>I'm looking at creating a web app similar to http://doodle.com/ that -<p>- Sends out an email to a customer
- Customer replies or clicks link and chooses date from a selection of potential dates
- Original sender sees the choosen date and it's added to the calendar<p>However, after doing a little investigation it seems like there could be massive issues with emails being caught by spam filters etc.<p>Has anyone worked on a startup or project that sends out lots of emails and is there anything you can do to get round this?<p>Thanks all.
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kiallmacinnes
My suggestion would be to use one of the many email APIs.

Sending email reliably is hard. Really hard.

One of the bigger problems will be your server(s) IP(s) ending up on
blacklists. You'll need to constantly monitor them and either get yourself
removed, or switch to a new IP.

Without the process of detecting you've been blacklisted, and switching to
another IP being automated. Some of your emails will not get through - and
your service will be viewed as unreliable.

Good luck!

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dholowiski
Yup. Postmark, Sendgrid, SES, they were built to solve this problem. Most have
some kind of a free tier for testing.

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emoray13
Cheers guys, that looks perfect.

Being non technical (I outsource my coding), is this a simple thing to
implement?

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jameswyse
Yup, pretty easy! They have easy to use APIs and probably libraries for most
major languages, so it should only be a couple of lines of code to actually
send an email.

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chadwick37
I would absolutely use an API for your transactional emails. I started out
with our app sending the emails from our server and it was a constant
headache. I now use Postmark (<http://postmarkapp.com/>) and I have no
problems. I believe Mailchimp also has an api for transactional emails not
too. Sending emails this way is very inexpensive, especially compared to the
headaches of managing it yourself.

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skyhook_mockups
Yes deliverability is always going to be an issue. Sending mail from your own
domain is really hard. For example, after jumping through all the required
hoops to establish trust for my domain I still was going straight to spam for
any hotmail address :|

I overcame this by routing all mail through google servers. They have a limit
of about 2000 messages per day which may be enough to get you going.

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xackpot
I use Sendgrid API for transactional emails and Mailchip Api for newsletters.
If you mean to send transactional API, I would suggest Sendgrid. It offers
easy to implement APIs and gives you an option to categorize your
transactional emails which can help you a lot in analytics.

