Email itches that aren't scratched
I am a Professional Mail Admin. A Postmaster if you will. I spend all day everyday dealing with email, email, email. Surprisingly, I have grown to love it(maybe I have a screw loose). Anyways, I have lately become interested in making my professional experience with managing large scale email services useful to the kind of people who seem to frequent this community(people I find exciting). My main question... For all of you out there that use Mailgun, SendGrid, MailChimp, etc. Is there anything in particular that you find lacking in these services? Anything that you feel is missing that for whatever reason just isn't possible with these SaaS solutions?
Mainly I ask because I would like to cut right to the chase and not try to reinvent the wheel. I only want to create a mail service that can scratch an itch that has been left unattended, maybe one that the aforementioned SaaS services can't get to because their darn hands are just to big to get at. I figured there was no better place to ask then here. Maybe there is nothing and everyone is completely satisfied with the big guys, but I figured it was worth an ask.
Thanks for any contributions!
I've been thinking about the same thing this week, but deemed it unworthy to pursue myself due to the amount of time I'd sink into it.
So there's a mix of several things. First of all, when starting a company I would want to host my email. Preferably with as many addresses possible and as cheap as possible. Currently I'm using a docker image running a mail server for that.
After that I want to be able to communicate using these addresses, hence I'm setting up my clients on all devices. Sometimes I'd wish there would be a good web mail client I'd be able to use.
When that's done I start writing code, most certainly for the landing page. I want to have a tool where I can copy some IFrame or whatever, apply some styles and drop it on my landing page to collect some email addresses, and send newsletters from here. Shouldn't really be too difficult imho.
After that comes even more code, probably written for some background services, from which I want to send even more mail.
This combination would satisfy my needs for now. It would require a subtle mix of functionality, and maybe such thing already exists. For now I do have to run all this functionality with a set of different services such as docker-mailserver and listmonk.
Very interesting, thank you for your input! In regards to webmail options, I use roundcube and it has been very solid. Others have suggested rainloop as well but I haven't had any issues with roundcube that have caused me to want to convert or try something new. I am surprised one of them isn't thrown in by default with docker-mailserver.
Also I have surprisingly never heard of listmonk and it is a very interesting little project thank you for making me aware of it.
I wonder if you are in the minority here in this community in regards to your desire to host your own mail server. I know in the sysadmin world it is something that is constantly advised against due to a stigma mail systems management has for being an incredible pain.
This stigma is picked apart beautifully in this blog post if anyone is ever interested.(post title is sarcastic)
https://poolp.org/posts/2019-08-30/you-should-not-run-your-mail-server-because-mail-is-hard/
Nice article! Interesting point about proof of work (and I didn't even properly deal with rDNS ':)) Maybe I should write an article about setting up docker-mailserver, including certs and SPF/DKIM records in under 5 minutes.
Also, mail delivery isn't necessarily bad. Delivery easily happens within 10 seconds. The pricing itself is quite good. Assuming a single mail takes a second to send, I can scale to millions of messages each month for only ten euros. Before that I'll definitely hit other scaling limits :)
I've had some frustrations with ConvertKit, though I had more with MailChimp previously.
What I would love to see is an email service aimed at developers, something fully usable via API supported by technical docs that don't assume users all want to use your HTML or JS snippet.
I know how to build and style a form and I want to render it from my server, not force the user to wait for another round trip request to a third party that sends back form layout and styling!
Another must is full support for custom fields, for the reasons I laid out here.
Enjoyed your blog post, a very informative and interesting read! Earned yourself a list subscriber.
Thank you very much for your input. I have some homework to do as I have never used an email service for marketing etc., only built and managed them at the ISP level. I plan to spend a night researching these different solutions(will add ConvertKit to the list) to try and get a better feel for what aspects they all have in common(like the tagging you wrote about) and what, if anything, is unique about each one.
I will keep the developer focused concept in the forefront of my mind as I think you are dead on about that being the future of these types of services if it isn't being fulfilled by the existing solutions.
P.S.
I only mention this because I would want someone to tell me, there is a little typo in your blog where you wrote:
'but it's worth it to have clean, reliable subscriber data that does rely on a brittle system of removing conflicting tags when a new one is applied.'
But I assume you meant to write doesn't instead of does.
Thanks again for the input and the knowledge!
Glad you found it helpful and I really appreciate the heads up on the typo!