Frustrations with transactional emails providers - your thoughts?
every product I've built always had an integration with either Sendgrid or Mailgun - generally they're good, but there have always some pain points, namely:
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poor templating, nothing like what you get in jinja2 or any other templating frameworks. i can't have a layout file, and a separate template for content (ie partial templates), filter functions, etc..
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when testing, our dev environments always sent every email out to a hardcoded dev inbox eg. [email protected]. surely if Stripe can have dev/prod keys why can't i do this with email?! for example send email to an internal test inbox when using the test api key.
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an outbox, so i can see the content of emails i'm sending to users. super important when it's invoices, or password resets... etc. I used to bcc myself into these types of emails, but it's not ideal.
anyway, cut the long story short, i've been toying with building something to address these pain points. i'd love to know if you've had similar experiences.
I used to use Sendgrid and had those issues and others. I now use Postmark and it's awesome. I'd be wary of using an up-and-coming service because of deliverability concerns.
I also use Mailtrap on dev/test environments to avoid sending out real emails; free plan is good enough for my needs.
Postmark!
Hey everyone, I’m building out https://mailsponge.com as I’ve had these same kind of frustrations (#2 and #3 mostly) during my development career.
Right now, the site is just a landing page (still working on site and product). If you guys want to beta test, please drop me a DM/PM and I can hook you up with a god fathered, generous limits plan in exchange for feedback.
I use Postmark https://postmarkapp.com/ for two projects for a couple of years now. Nothing to complain about, they are great in every way.
I use https://www.emailarchitect.net/ for sending transactional emails to customers. I built the templates in my app. They have great API for dot net developers (which I use primarily).
Most of these providers support sending directly over SMTP, not just through it's API, where you use an API key. It would be cool if there is some mechanism to define routing rules, which you can tie to different postmaster accounts.
For dev, I used mailcatcher, and letter_opener, and possibly another one that I can't recall. Works well enough, but yeah I do think that there might be an opportunity to do something for the staging environment.
I found this though, looks pretty extensive:
https://mailtrap.io/