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

3 points by emoray13 14y ago

Hey all, I'm looking at creating a web app similar to http://doodle.com/ that - - 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 However, after doing a little investigation it seems like there could be massive issues with emails being caught by spam filters etc. 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? Thanks all.

kiallmacinnes 14y ago
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!
- dholowiski 14y ago
  Yup. Postmark, Sendgrid, SES, they were built to solve this problem. Most have some kind of a free tier for testing.
  - emoray13 14y ago
    Cheers guys, that looks perfect. Being non technical (I outsource my coding), is this a simple thing to implement?
    - jameswyse 14y ago
      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.
chadwick37 14y ago
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/ 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.
xackpot 14y ago
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.
skyhook_mockups 14y ago
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.