Can I rely on a Gmail account to send daily newsletters?
I'm working on an automated daily newsletter about domain names.
This newsletter will be paid so I'm not expecting anyone to throw money at me. In the best-case scenario, there will be 10 recipients. Then I can integrate an established solution.
So just to test the waters, I wonder if it's possible to send daily e-mails programmatically through a regular Gmail account.
Have you tried it before, what could go wrong?
Trending on Indie Hackers
I wouldn't. Google has limitations on how many emails you can send, and they are monitoring traffic to prevent spam. I would use a dedicated service, like amazon SES instead (and whatever Google equivalent is SES is). Don't be afraid to jump through hoops now, these services will ask you to tell them how you will get user email addresses, and how many emails you will send BUT it's worth doing it now, instead of later.
Interesting. This time I was following the advice "Sell then build". I want to keep it simple but still reliable. I'd move to another solution before hitting Google's limitations.
I'd assume doing it earlier is better for the domain or IP's reputation. Is there anything else am I missing? Like is the transition from one provider to another painful
Yes, you can, but I don't think you should. Just use the mail providers like sendinblue or mailchimp, easy to integrate.
I've checked both and more. For now, I'm going to try Elasticemail as it seems to have the most straightforward API.
Technically you can but with a lot of limitations. Why not just use a proper email sender services? They usually have free tiers, and they are quite generous in terms of limits.
I thought this would be a quicker solution. Instead of signing up for a service, verifying yourself, and your domain, setting up spf, dkim etc. Test the service to see if it's good or not. Go through their documentation...
In theory, it should be 10 lines of code to simply send out emails, it's no longer the case. Gmail for example had an option to allow "Less secure app access". They don't anymore :)
I'm looking for those services now and the first thing they ask is a business address to include in emails for the spam act and I don't have it.
Usually any large service has a library, so it should be quite easy. I integrated Mailjet really fast.
Why not just use something like Substack btw?
I'll take a look at Mailjet too, thanks. Substack AFAIK doesn't have an API, I need to send these emails programmatically. There won't be written content but curated data if it makes sense.
You can only send ~500 emails a day afaik.
You also want to be careful not to trash your domain rating.
500 is more than what I need. If it hits 10 paid subs, I'd move on to an established solution. For now, I want to be able to send emails without complicating it.
Does domain rating a thing for regular gmail accounts, like [email protected]?
Yes, you can
Yes!! Gmail has certain sending limits to prevent abuse. These limits can vary but generally, there are restrictions on the number of recipients and the number of emails that can be sent per day. Exceeding these limits may result in temporary or permanent restrictions on your account.
Inorder to avoid this, just you can make small variations in the content, subject lines, and sender information to make the emails appear more personalized and less repetitive.
I see. I think it will take time for me to reach those limitations. In the best case, I'd send 10 emails to 10 recipients per day. After that, I'd move to another solution. My worry is since these emails will be generated programmatically, they'll be very lookalike. I wonder if this will trigger their spam filters.
Yes you can with apps script from a google sheet. Here I email myself but you can email anyone: https://blog.bettersheets.co/simply-email-yourself-from-a-google-sheet/
Useful article. I try to keep things simple for this project to avoid complexity. But if I knew this before I'd definitely leverage it in my previous projects, especially for the info-products that I sold as a sheet. 👍
Thanks, Andrew!
use appscript. you can have chatgpt4 write the code. that's what i always do. explodingideas.co started using that framework.