

Mailgun API 2.0: forget MIME - old-gregg
http://blog.mailgun.net/post/11622797058/mailgun-api-2-0-forget-mime

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randomtask
Seems to me like this has the potential to be something I'd pay for, but
confusingly the article focuses on MIME, when the real problem you seem to be
solving is providing a more usable abstraction over the complexity of sending
email in general.

Having wanted a service to send emails to customers recently, I hit upon a
distinct lack (or apparent lack at least) of services that allowed me to do
this. While this should sound ridiculous, sending email reliably is a hard
thing to do these days.

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rorrr
Lack of services to send emails? Seriously?

Mailchimp

SilverPop

CampaignMonitor

SendGrid

YMLP

MadMimi

JangoMail

TinyLetter (free)

~~~
bprater
Sure, but how many offer a simple API for flinging email programmatically?

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MrMike
That's the only thing Sendgrid does. And, they do it quite well.

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pdenya
Love the changes. Whether or not there's a lack of a good mime library in any
given language it's always good to go from something that focuses on a
standard based file not everyone is familiar with to a simple list of
parameters.

It's also always great to work with companies with such nice api
documentation. It's so easy to do the facebook thing and have incomplete,
unclear documentation and no real way of getting answers about it.

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tow21
Feature request: multipart/related attachments please, not just
multipart/alternative.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Related>

Makes for much nicer display of email attachments in some clients.

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old-gregg
That's on our radar, thank you for the suggestion.

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bestes
I love the idea of using an HTTP POST to send email. I guess I'm the guy who
has no idea how to use MIME, but find HTTP painless.

Plus, whenever I try and configure mail on a new system, especially an EC2
instance (or whatever) there are _always_ lots of issues.

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mark242
From reading this blog post, it appears that you have successfully attached
the RESTEasy framework to the Apache Commons Email framework with one POJO.
Uh, congratulations?

~~~
latortuga
There are no rules stating that a business has to run on complicated software
that does a thousand things.

~~~
mark242
You're right, but for a successful business, you need to provide a service
that would normally take more than half a day of development time, or have a
wider breadth of functionality than your competitors (Mailchimp, Bluehornet),
or -- worst case scenario -- compete on price. This appears to do none of
those three.

~~~
teaspoon
Half a day of development costs at least a few hundred dollars in the US, so I
don't see why a business can't make money by saving you that time.

And some argue that there are other ways to compete than on features and
price:

<http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Build_Less.php>

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jswinghammer
I'm a little confused about the need for this service. What languages don't
have decent email support at this point? I guess I've never run into this
before.

~~~
old-gregg
You mean the support for MIME in stdlib, right? Based on the questions our
customer support gets, quite a lot: just like we explained in the blog post.
And based on the number of malformed and broken MIME we get via SMTP, even
those that do aren't easy to understand for many.

Based on the calls/emails I personally had to answer, things like encoding, or
making sure that HTML and text parts are specified in a certain order, or the
aforementioned "Bcc mystery" bite quite a lot of people.

EDIT: forgot to add something: check out the "test mode" feature, you'd be
amazed at how many people call us to flush up their email queue because they
ran their unit tests on the production database! :)

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jstedfast
It's pretty trivial to bind MIME C-libraries like GMime for use in any
language on any platform.

<http://spruce.sourceforge.net/gmime/>

It's a high-level library (unlike most other MIME libraries) which makes
constructing and parsing MIME trivial.

~~~
defen
You're like the people who said Dropbox wouldn't succeed, because they had no
need for it, because they could just setup rsync. Fact of the matter is that
mailgun seems to have empirical proof that a lot of programmers have no clue
what they're doing, and would be willing to pay for something that makes their
lives easier. That's like lesson #0 of hacker news: people will pay for things
that make their lives easier.

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swanson
You guys should consider a Heroku add-on with a small free plan (if you aren't
already). SendGrid has one (200/day free) and they would be the first place
I'd go if I needed a mail API because I have used them seamlessly for small
projects (~10 emails/day) already.

~~~
twakefield
This should be out soon (w/in a few days, hopefully).

~~~
glenngillen
That's great. Get in touch if you have any problems integrating it. We've
tried to make the technical requirements for becoming an add-on provider
pretty light.

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swombat
So basically, if I get this right, Mailgun is an abstraction for SMTP? Sounds
quite useful, actually. I'm tired of setting up SMTP servers...

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bprater
Hey guys -- add a link back to your main site from your blog. I literally had
to type the URL in because I couldn't find it anywhere. You should be
showcasing your main site via the blog, not hiding it!

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MrMike
Didn't see this before I complained/wrote a PSA:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3127588>

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epoxyhockey
For me, the biggest issue w/ these email services is that the devliverability
of email varies widely from service to service. The API is almost secondary in
importance to me now.

One service can email certain domains successfully while another service
results in randomly bounced emails to the same domains.

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orenmazor
Hey, I actually work for one of the competitors of the above, and I'm
wondering if you had a bit more info about this?

feel free to email me, if you'd rather take this offline :)
oren.mazor@gmail.com

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becomevocal
For someone that is currently using SendGrid, what are the key points to make
me move over?

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twakefield
Probably best to have this conversation elsewhere. Feel free to email
sales@mailgunhq.com.

~~~
gommm
I'm also a sendgrid customer and would definitely want to see arguments for
mailgun compared to sendgrid...

But I'm not bought yet into mailgun to actually spend time contacting your
sales...

~~~
twakefield
I think from a sending/tracking perspective most of the services listed here
are somewhat comparable. All of us realize that delivering to inbox is a high
priority and we do many of the same things to make sure your infrastructure is
optimized to achieve that. In addition, most services have analytics that
track your emails. Of course, I am biased on which is best.

From a broader perspective, Mailgun's focus is being a complete mail platform
(sending, receiving and storing messages) and integrating email with your
application vs. a sending/delivery service. A quick glance at the front pages
of the websites reveals that.

I would encourage you to review the documentation of all of the services in
order to make the decision of what is right for you.

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TheTarquin
Cool! This will be awesome for implementing feature on cross-platform devices.
I can definitely see a use case for standardizing mailing across, e.g.,
several different mobile platforms. Just keep the POST request object across
all of them and send the request however is convenient.

Great idea.

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th0ma5
obligatory xkcd <http://xkcd.com/927/> ... i fear email will mostly broken
forever, i think xmpp has a strong argument, and i'm not entirely sure
throwing out mime will be possible for some time.

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dedward
Is this hosted only or can we run our own servers? Seems to raise legal and
privacy issues

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bigtech
One thing I hope you can fix -- I can't read the orange on dark grey example
boxes.

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kylek
Mailgun, SMTP gone postal

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MikeGrace
Awesome!!! Love that Mailgun specializes and focuses on making email easy for
me. This means that I get to focus on what I do well and let someone else
worry about the details of email stuff.

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guan
I want this for snailmail.

~~~
twakefield
made me think of: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3031118>

