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Mailgun API 2.0: forget MIME
- jswinghammer 15y agoI'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.
- ramidarigaz 15y agoIt's nice having official servers to send email from. I had a simple little app a while back that sent email via Python's SMTP module, but most of the emails I was sending were getting caught by Gmail's spam trap. Using Mailgun to send those emails worked just fine, plus their api is nice.
- maratd 15y ago> most of the emails I was sending were getting caught by Gmail's spam trap The solution I came up with was to simply use GMail. With their business suite, you'll be able to use your own domain and get access to their SMTP servers. This won't work if you're sending thousands of emails per day, but a few hundred should be ok.
- lubos 15y agoMailgun also allows to receive emails, it will make http post request at your end-point. very neat stuff actually.
- jswinghammer 15y agoThat's a very compelling feature. When having to read mail comes up it's usually out of the ordinary from whatever I'm doing but if I could just make a page to process what's in it then that would be interesting.
- old-gregg 15y agoYou 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! :)
- stephen_mcd 15y agoI'd love to see the actual question answered.
- old-gregg 15y agoJavaScript and PHP immediately come to mind. Ruby has a few MIME libs of a poor quality. Perl and Python have excellent MIME facilities but, as I said above, many developers simply aren't interested in learning MIME to begin with. We eliminated MIME on the receiving end earlier (see our "email routing" API) and now we've taken the next logical step: we have eliminated MIME on the other end. Besides, email is huge. In includes at least 4 non-trivial network protocols, several storage formats and a sea of proprietary ESP-specific extensions is error codes. There is no such thing as an "email support" in any language, only bits and pieces of uneven quality, therefore the most honest and shortest answer would be "all of them".
- jstedfast 15y agoIt's pretty trivial to bind MIME C-libraries like GMime for use in any language on any platform. http://spruce.sourceforge.net/gmime/ http://spruce.sourceforge.net/gmime/ It's a high-level library (unlike most other MIME libraries) which makes constructing and parsing MIME trivial.
- defen 15y ago
- bestes 15y agoI 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.
- MikeGrace 15y agoAwesome!!! 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.
- swombat 15y agoSo basically, if I get this right, Mailgun is an abstraction for SMTP? Sounds quite useful, actually. I'm tired of setting up SMTP servers...
- TheTarquin 15y agoCool! 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.
- guan 15y agoI want this for snailmail.
- twakefield 15y agomade me think of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3031118 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3031118
- randomtask 15y agoSeems 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.
- twakefield 15y agoYes, this blog post was meant to be the first in a series that described the new features of the new API release. Best way to see all of the capabilities is to look through the user manual and API reference.
- rorrr 15y agoLack of services to send emails? Seriously? Mailchimp SilverPop CampaignMonitor SendGrid YMLP MadMimi JangoMail TinyLetter (free)
- bprater 15y agoSure, but how many offer a simple API for flinging email programmatically?
- MrMike 15y agoThat's the only thing Sendgrid does. And, they do it quite well.
- vailripper 15y agoSendGrid, Postmarkapp, amazon email service....all of them do.
- rorrr 15y agoI think almost all of them.
- 15y ago
- bigtech 15y agoOne thing I hope you can fix -- I can't read the orange on dark grey example boxes.
- mark242 15y agoFrom 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 15y agoThere are no rules stating that a business has to run on complicated software that does a thousand things.
- mark242 15y agoYou'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 15y agoHalf 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 http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Build_Less.php
- tow21 15y agoFeature request: multipart/related attachments please, not just multipart/alternative. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Related http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Related Makes for much nicer display of email attachments in some clients.
- old-gregg 15y agoThat's on our radar, thank you for the suggestion.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- becomevocal 15y agoFor someone that is currently using SendGrid, what are the key points to make me move over?
- twakefield 15y agoProbably best to have this conversation elsewhere. Feel free to email sales@mailgunhq.com.
- DanielRibeiro 15y agoYou really should consider making this public. It is the why part of your Unique Value Proposition[1]. In fact, I'd urge you to make this as obvious as possible on your landing page. And good luck on your enterprise. [1] http://www.furld.com/2011/lean-canvas-unique-proposition-solution/ http://www.furld.com/2011/lean-canvas-unique-proposition-sol...
- gommm 15y agoI'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 15y agoI 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.
- swanson 15y agoYou 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 15y agoThis should be out soon (w/in a few days, hopefully).
- glenngillen 15y agoThat'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.
- bprater 15y agoHey 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!
- MrMike 15y agoDidn't see this before I complained/wrote a PSA: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3127588 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3127588
- epoxyhockey 15y agoFor 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.
- orenmazor 15y agoHey, 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
- pdenya 15y agoLove 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.
- dedward 15y agoIs this hosted only or can we run our own servers? Seems to raise legal and privacy issues
- th0ma5 15y agoobligatory xkcd http://xkcd.com/927/ 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.
- kylek 15y agoMailgun, SMTP gone postal