5 ms·

Show HN: Email Templating API

38 points by nbrempel 13y ago

mrmch 13y ago
I wanted to highlight our (open source) API clients, covering most languages: https://github.com/sendwithus https://github.com/sendwithus Here's all the code required to send an email with our Python client: api.send(email_id='YOUR-EMAIL-ID', recipient={'address': 'us@sendwithus.com'}) There are more complex examples covering unique senders, cc/bcc, dynamic data, and attachments, but it's good to get a sense of how much complexity this can remove from your codebase.
fraserharris 13y ago
I take it the point of this to remove templates from your code base? Can you have custom IDs for the email templates (ex: "welcome_email")?
- mrmch 13y ago
  Allowing email id's to be specified is something we've considered, but for now static id's we auto generate are simple enough. We encourage our customers to use a static "mapping", with constants set to each template id. IE WELCOME_EMAIL = '12345'
_kulte 13y ago
I'd use this if I could use it with [Amazon SES](http://aws.amazon.com/ses/ http://aws.amazon.com/ses/).
- mrmch 13y ago
  Hi Kulte, we support SES for delivery right now!
gesman 13y ago
What means "active users?" (in pricing plans)
- mrmch 13y ago
  An active user is someone you've sent an email to in a given month, regardless of volume. So you could send 10,000 emails to 1,000 unique email addresses and you're billed for 1,000 customers. Any suggestions on how to better describe that?
  - etler 13y ago
    "Unique users per month"?
  - nacs 13y ago
    Perhaps "subscribers" instead of "users"?
    - mrmch 13y ago
      That may be confusing because we focus on transactional email, not campaign email (which subscriber would suggest)
      - frankdenbow 13y ago
        Personally would rather have it be based on number of emails. Make more sense. I'll probably give this a try though!
        mrmch 13y ago
        Thanks Frank! The reason we tier on customers is that we sit on top of an esp like Mailgun, which already bill per transaction.
  - rtanaka 13y ago
    I'd describe it as an unlimited number of emails that you can send with a limit of 1000 unique email addresses that you can send to.
    - 13y ago
securingsincity 13y ago
I think this is idea is the perfect middle ground product between what mail gun offers and what something like constant contact would offer. Developers and marketers get a ton of features and customization without sacrificing a ton of development time. Also the "CEO's direct phone number" for the top tier plan made giggle.
- mrmch 13y ago
  Thanks! Complex products like exact target or constant contact really hinder development; our hope is to make everyone's lives easier.
truebosko 13y ago
Love this! I actually wrote a pluggable Django app for work that is basically doing what this service offers. Been meaning to open source it! This is motivation to do so :)
- mrmch 13y ago
  Cool Bart, look forward to seeing it! In our experience internal systems can't compare with the product a dedicated team can build. I've had many conversations with companies moving away from a poor internal solution. That being said, huge fan of open source and there's plenty of room for products and tools in this space :)
  - truebosko 13y ago
    Of course! I totally agree. Kudos to your team for releasing an actual product. I didn't mean to say my tool was just as comparable. It merely gives me some greedy validation that hey, the tool I built might be useful to others!
DenisM 13y ago
In related news, if you're using ASP.NET MVC, there is a way to use the familiar Razor templating engine to template your emails (or anything else, really). To do that you just need to install RazorEngine ( http://razorengine.codeplex.com/ http://razorengine.codeplex.com/ ) - it exposes Razor in a way that it can be used for things other than rendering pages. Here's how I use it right now: string templateFile = HttpContext.Current.Server .MapPath("~/App_Data/InviteUser.cshtml"); string template = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(templateFile); var model = new { inviterName = "A user", inviterEmail = inviterEmail, manufacturerName = inviterMfr, UserId = person.PrimaryEmail, UserPassword = person.GeneratedPassword, }; var bodyHtml = RazorEngine.Razor.Parse(template, model); And the template: <html> <body> @Model.inviterName (@Model.inviterEmail) @if (Model.manufacturerName != null) { on behalf of @Model.manufacturerName } is inviting you to explore Mercury Catalog by AmpTab - the best furniture catalog app for the iPad: [SNIP-SNIP]
- mrmch 13y ago
 That's pretty cool Denis. We don't have an official .Net client yet, but we do have some solid code samples for our REST API. In our experience email templates are a little different from regular HTML templates; things like built-in css inlining, A/B testing, and giving access to non-technical folks.
 - DenisM 13y ago
 I see. The linked page pigeonholes you as a competitor to Razor (or other similar templating libraries) - none of the other benefits are even mentioned there. I think it's going to be a problem for you - people jump to conclusions based on what they see.
 - mrmch 13y ago
 You're correct Denis, our developer page purely speaks to the "get templates out of source code" value prop -- maybe a mistake, but it was something we were testing today :)
christiangenco 13y ago
I don't mean to trigger a bout of programming depression[1], but I don't see the value in this. Is the idea that you can have nontechnical people write the templates, and your app... gets a list of the templates they've made and sends them out? What's the benefit of using this over just, you know, writing an erb template? Or is the value for environment that don't have ActiveMail? 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7228491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7228491
- mrmch 13y ago
  Hey Christian, valid feedback. As a product/business scales, small problems of modifying templates (and AB testing, etc) get magnified, and in house solutions don't scale.
  - christiangenco 13y ago
    Gotcha gotcha - that makes more sense. I can see the need for this if there was a marketing department that needed separate CRUD for emails.
- zaius 13y ago
  I imagine if your marketing team can write an ERB template, you don't need this. My current flow - marketing guy sends me an email saying "what does the 1 week follow up email say right now?". I send back the email. He sends back edits. I commit them and deploy.
  - mrmch 13y ago
    Yep, that's the exact workflow we're replacing! Think of the experience for the marketing guy -- after those changes are committed, how can he measure what affect they had?
nubela 13y ago
I don't get what sendwithus does. Ok, you do A/B testing, ok, you also do drip campaigns, but what's the end-goal for this? I know if I want to send newsletters I use mailchimp. If I'm a developer and I want to send bulk emails, I will use Mailgun. What does SendWithUs do?
- mrmch 13y ago
  Sendwithus is for your transactional/triggered email you're sending through Mailgun; a signup or notification email. At a basic level, get your product email out of your source code, and get the benefits of a dedicated templating product.
niftylettuce 13y ago
Free: https://github.com/niftylettuce/node-email-templates https://github.com/niftylettuce/node-email-templates
jbrooksuk 13y ago
I implemented something similar at the company I work for. It started off with a dashboard that would allow us to send the Top 20 Hotels each week via email. Then we started templating a lot of emails. Now I just have a server setup which accepts all the data and sends you back the generated HTML. It's much simpler for us that way.
- mrmch 13y ago
  That's pretty impressive! When you really look at it, every company needs this at some point. It's just a question of if you want to spend the resources/time building it internally, or if you want to focus on your core product :)
  - jbrooksuk 13y ago
    Thanks! It's definitely been worth the time for us. A lot of the code on our API is from the original project, but setup to allow new templates to be created etc.
zaius 13y ago
This is awesome. I have been half assed building an identical product for a while now, but I just can't stand dealing with html email templates. You will definitely have me as a customer for my next project. A couple thoughts: 1. The "with" in your logo is the same color as your links. Since your links aren't underlined, it makes the "with" look like a link. You should change the color of one of them. 2. The error message when I click 'execute command' without changing my email isn't obvious enough. 3. I want to see the editor. What is the interface the marketing team will see? Maybe put the template you are going to send next to that curl box. 4. Do you have decent html and responsive templates? If so, this is a selling point on its own.
- mrmch 13y ago
  Thanks for the feedback, and woo +1 future customer :) Our developers page is really new, so there's definite room for improvement. 1+2 definitely need a look tonight. 3. The UI here could use work; the template is actually in the horizontal section ABOVE the curl box ... You can signup (no cc required) and check the editor out, or just watch our getting started video (which we need to make more public): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQhLeBU9wrs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQhLeBU9wrs 4. Yup, responsive emails included out of the box. We'll be adding more templates shortly (a lot of requests for this lately!)
JazCE 13y ago
Missing out on Dotmailer http://www.dotmailer.co.uk http://www.dotmailer.co.uk integration which would stop me from using it.
jrpt 13y ago
As a customer, SendWithUs has great customer service. I signed up for SendWithUs and had a problem integrating it with my email sender. They helped me fix the issue and were really fast to respond. I'd recommend every startup try out SendWithUs. I haven't used it for that long yet, so I can't really review the product itself, but so far it's great.

38 points by nbrempel 13y ago

mrmch 13y ago

I wanted to highlight our (open source) API clients, covering most languages: https://github.com/sendwithus https://github.com/sendwithus Here's all the code required to send an email with our Python client: api.send(email_id='YOUR-EMAIL-ID', recipient={'address': 'us@sendwithus.com'}) There are more complex examples covering unique senders, cc/bcc, dynamic data, and attachments, but it's good to get a sense of how much complexity this can remove from your codebase.

fraserharris 13y ago

I take it the point of this to remove templates from your code base? Can you have custom IDs for the email templates (ex: "welcome_email")?

mrmch 13y ago
Allowing email id's to be specified is something we've considered, but for now static id's we auto generate are simple enough. We encourage our customers to use a static "mapping", with constants set to each template id. IE WELCOME_EMAIL = '12345'

_kulte 13y ago

I'd use this if I could use it with [Amazon SES](http://aws.amazon.com/ses/ http://aws.amazon.com/ses/).

mrmch 13y ago
Hi Kulte, we support SES for delivery right now!

gesman 13y ago

What means "active users?" (in pricing plans)

mrmch 13y ago
An active user is someone you've sent an email to in a given month, regardless of volume. So you could send 10,000 emails to 1,000 unique email addresses and you're billed for 1,000 customers. Any suggestions on how to better describe that?
- etler 13y ago
  "Unique users per month"?
- nacs 13y ago
  Perhaps "subscribers" instead of "users"?
  - mrmch 13y ago
    That may be confusing because we focus on transactional email, not campaign email (which subscriber would suggest)
    - frankdenbow 13y ago
      Personally would rather have it be based on number of emails. Make more sense. I'll probably give this a try though!
      - mrmch 13y ago
        Thanks Frank! The reason we tier on customers is that we sit on top of an esp like Mailgun, which already bill per transaction.
- rtanaka 13y ago
  I'd describe it as an unlimited number of emails that you can send with a limit of 1000 unique email addresses that you can send to.
  - 13y ago

securingsincity 13y ago

I think this is idea is the perfect middle ground product between what mail gun offers and what something like constant contact would offer. Developers and marketers get a ton of features and customization without sacrificing a ton of development time. Also the "CEO's direct phone number" for the top tier plan made giggle.

mrmch 13y ago
Thanks! Complex products like exact target or constant contact really hinder development; our hope is to make everyone's lives easier.

truebosko 13y ago

Love this! I actually wrote a pluggable Django app for work that is basically doing what this service offers. Been meaning to open source it! This is motivation to do so :)

mrmch 13y ago
Cool Bart, look forward to seeing it! In our experience internal systems can't compare with the product a dedicated team can build. I've had many conversations with companies moving away from a poor internal solution. That being said, huge fan of open source and there's plenty of room for products and tools in this space :)
- truebosko 13y ago
  Of course! I totally agree. Kudos to your team for releasing an actual product. I didn't mean to say my tool was just as comparable. It merely gives me some greedy validation that hey, the tool I built might be useful to others!

DenisM 13y ago

In related news, if you're using ASP.NET MVC, there is a way to use the familiar Razor templating engine to template your emails (or anything else, really). To do that you just need to install RazorEngine ( http://razorengine.codeplex.com/ http://razorengine.codeplex.com/ ) - it exposes Razor in a way that it can be used for things other than rendering pages. Here's how I use it right now: string templateFile = HttpContext.Current.Server .MapPath("~/App_Data/InviteUser.cshtml"); string template = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(templateFile); var model = new { inviterName = "A user", inviterEmail = inviterEmail, manufacturerName = inviterMfr, UserId = person.PrimaryEmail, UserPassword = person.GeneratedPassword, }; var bodyHtml = RazorEngine.Razor.Parse(template, model); And the template: <html> <body> @Model.inviterName (@Model.inviterEmail) @if (Model.manufacturerName != null) { on behalf of @Model.manufacturerName } is inviting you to explore Mercury Catalog by AmpTab - the best furniture catalog app for the iPad: [SNIP-SNIP]

mrmch 13y ago
That's pretty cool Denis. We don't have an official .Net client yet, but we do have some solid code samples for our REST API. In our experience email templates are a little different from regular HTML templates; things like built-in css inlining, A/B testing, and giving access to non-technical folks.
- DenisM 13y ago
  I see. The linked page pigeonholes you as a competitor to Razor (or other similar templating libraries) - none of the other benefits are even mentioned there. I think it's going to be a problem for you - people jump to conclusions based on what they see.
  - mrmch 13y ago
    You're correct Denis, our developer page purely speaks to the "get templates out of source code" value prop -- maybe a mistake, but it was something we were testing today :)

christiangenco 13y ago

I don't mean to trigger a bout of programming depression[1], but I don't see the value in this. Is the idea that you can have nontechnical people write the templates, and your app... gets a list of the templates they've made and sends them out? What's the benefit of using this over just, you know, writing an erb template? Or is the value for environment that don't have ActiveMail? 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7228491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7228491

mrmch 13y ago
Hey Christian, valid feedback. As a product/business scales, small problems of modifying templates (and AB testing, etc) get magnified, and in house solutions don't scale.
- christiangenco 13y ago
  Gotcha gotcha - that makes more sense. I can see the need for this if there was a marketing department that needed separate CRUD for emails.
zaius 13y ago
I imagine if your marketing team can write an ERB template, you don't need this. My current flow - marketing guy sends me an email saying "what does the 1 week follow up email say right now?". I send back the email. He sends back edits. I commit them and deploy.
- mrmch 13y ago
  Yep, that's the exact workflow we're replacing! Think of the experience for the marketing guy -- after those changes are committed, how can he measure what affect they had?

nubela 13y ago

I don't get what sendwithus does. Ok, you do A/B testing, ok, you also do drip campaigns, but what's the end-goal for this? I know if I want to send newsletters I use mailchimp. If I'm a developer and I want to send bulk emails, I will use Mailgun. What does SendWithUs do?

mrmch 13y ago
Sendwithus is for your transactional/triggered email you're sending through Mailgun; a signup or notification email. At a basic level, get your product email out of your source code, and get the benefits of a dedicated templating product.

niftylettuce 13y ago

Free: https://github.com/niftylettuce/node-email-templates https://github.com/niftylettuce/node-email-templates

jbrooksuk 13y ago

I implemented something similar at the company I work for. It started off with a dashboard that would allow us to send the Top 20 Hotels each week via email. Then we started templating a lot of emails. Now I just have a server setup which accepts all the data and sends you back the generated HTML. It's much simpler for us that way.

mrmch 13y ago
That's pretty impressive! When you really look at it, every company needs this at some point. It's just a question of if you want to spend the resources/time building it internally, or if you want to focus on your core product :)
- jbrooksuk 13y ago
  Thanks! It's definitely been worth the time for us. A lot of the code on our API is from the original project, but setup to allow new templates to be created etc.

zaius 13y ago

This is awesome. I have been half assed building an identical product for a while now, but I just can't stand dealing with html email templates. You will definitely have me as a customer for my next project. A couple thoughts: 1. The "with" in your logo is the same color as your links. Since your links aren't underlined, it makes the "with" look like a link. You should change the color of one of them. 2. The error message when I click 'execute command' without changing my email isn't obvious enough. 3. I want to see the editor. What is the interface the marketing team will see? Maybe put the template you are going to send next to that curl box. 4. Do you have decent html and responsive templates? If so, this is a selling point on its own.

mrmch 13y ago
Thanks for the feedback, and woo +1 future customer :) Our developers page is really new, so there's definite room for improvement. 1+2 definitely need a look tonight. 3. The UI here could use work; the template is actually in the horizontal section ABOVE the curl box ... You can signup (no cc required) and check the editor out, or just watch our getting started video (which we need to make more public): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQhLeBU9wrs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQhLeBU9wrs 4. Yup, responsive emails included out of the box. We'll be adding more templates shortly (a lot of requests for this lately!)

JazCE 13y ago

Missing out on Dotmailer http://www.dotmailer.co.uk http://www.dotmailer.co.uk integration which would stop me from using it.

jrpt 13y ago

As a customer, SendWithUs has great customer service. I signed up for SendWithUs and had a problem integrating it with my email sender. They helped me fix the issue and were really fast to respond. I'd recommend every startup try out SendWithUs. I haven't used it for that long yet, so I can't really review the product itself, but so far it's great.