Which service do you use to send emails to your newly signed-up user?
Hello folks,
I'm looking for advice on how to send emails when a new user signs up and when I add new web development challenges to my website.
I don't have any idea how to do that, so I've been doing some research and found that we need to make an API call to the mail service (i.e., Mailgun) when a new user signs up.
Here are some questions for you:
- Do I need to buy an email address on my custom domain? I already have a custom domain.
2 Which service should I use for this? Meantime, I want to stay away from paying for the email service right now as I have less number of signed-up users.
I bought a domain from name .com
Tech Stack: ReactJs, Firebase
Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks
If you absolutely need a free plan, go with Sendgrid or Mailgun.
Otherwise, I'd go with Postmark. That's what I use for Weightless.so.
Also, be sure to educate yourself a bit on transactional vs marketing email. Welcome email on signup is a transactional email and notifying users when you add a new challenge is a marketing email.
Usually there are different API endpoints, and different requirements for sending these two types of email. For example, you must have an opt-out link in a marketing email, while you don't need that for a transactional one.
Thanks for sharing this.
One question: Do I need to buy a custom email for my custom domain to send emails? Let's say I want to send an email using hello@MY_CUSTOM_DOMAIN_NAME. Do I need to buy this email address?
You must own the domain name. Then it's up to you what email addresses you set up for it.
If you have employees and want each of them to have their own address on your domain, you will likely need to pay Google (or whatever vendor you use) per user, but when using something like Sendgrid via API, you don't need to pay extra for having multiple addresses.
Yes, I have a domain name.
So, I think I can use any email address like hello@MY_DOMAIN_NAME to send emails using service like mailgun. I don't need to buy it along with a domain.
Amazon SES has a generous free tier and is quite cheap when you exceed the free tier.
Free plan @ Mailgun for transactional emails.
I use mailchimp... Pretty old yeah?
I am using Sendgrid and AWS SES
Since you use firebase already, how about this?
https://firebase.google.com/products/extensions/firebase-firestore-send-email
From where did you bought your domain name?
You can create email alias on your domain in cloudflare and it will forward any mail to your actual email address so you don't need to buy anything.
If you are using gmail you can configure it so that you can send email from the alias that you created here.
There are two types of email transactional mail used for registering users and restting passwords and mails that you send to likely prospects who may or may not use your product. Which one are you looking to send? if you don't want to automate since you have very few users you can send emails from your gmail account as well either manually or with some scripting.
You can use free tiers of sendgrid/mailjet etc. and use them to send mail. For this you have to make changes to your dns settings it would be provided by the vendor i.e. sendgrid/mailjet etc.
Last but not the least don't use your primary gmail account for sending mails if you go on this route if your account gets banned you will loose everything.This is just for initial traction for getting your mvp out eventually you should use one of the vendors.
Thanks for the very detailed answer!
I bought a domain from name[.]com.
One thing I understood from your answer is we don't need to buy an email address like hello@MY_CUSTOM_DOMAIN to send emails. We can create an email alias like hello@MY_CUSTOM_DOMAIN on our domain and can send emails.
But I have one doubt. Can we create an email alias from any domain name provider (in my case, its name .com)?
I want to send two types of emails:
When the user signup for the first time on my website, I want to send a welcome email. (I think it comes under the transactional mail).
When I add a new web development challenge to my website, I want to send emails to all the users who signed up on my website. ( I think this comes under marketing email)
I have no idea about this service provider "name.com" so i can't comment on it.
Check these two links on how to forward mails from your domain see if it solves your problem
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing/
https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/email-forwarding
if your domain provider does not provides service than you can transfer your domain to cloudflare.
Both the use cases would come under verified emails categary that is you are sending mails to people who have already opted for it so they are unlikely to mark your mail as spam so it is low risk.
If your product is mostly content heavy and all you want to do is send the newsletters than may be check substack.
One more question, When a user signs up, Does it means they're giving me permission to send marketing emails like a new challenge launch email? I'm using firebase GitHub authentication to authenticate users.
this is not a technical question but more of a policy question. So you decide what policy you want to adopt. You should ask users if they want to opt in for "new challenge" feature and you should send mails only to the users who have opted in.
If your app didn't have this functionality earlier and this is the first time you are launching it i think its ok to inform the users that this feature is available and they can opt in for it but that is just my opinion. When in doubt I use this principle "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
Thanks for sharing the valuable information.
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Since you sound non-technical to me I'd suggest you take a good look at https://userlist.com/ (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/userlist-io on IH). Userlist was specifically build for what you are asking.
If you want to stay no-code, I would suggest you check a service like Zapier and how that, combined with your mail account, could help automate things for you.
Their "basic" plan is $149/month 😅
Right, sorry, forgot that they do not offer anything free anymore :-/
For Loggify I do all emails on transactional emails using Sendgrid.
I use their dynamic templating, so I only have to send easy JSON to an api endpoint and all HTML of the email is done in Sendgrid.
Works very elegant for me.
Mailgun. Pretty easy setup.
I'm also planning to use mailgun. Did you buy an email address to send emails?
Thanks!
What do you mean by "did I buy an email address"?
I meant, to send emails, did you buy any email address like hello@YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME? or mailgun let you use any email address?
I have this confusion like we need to buy an email address and a custom domain to send emails using mailgun api.
Ah, you mean if I bought the domain. Yes, I did.
There are ways to send emails from domains you don't own (probably not with mailgun as they ask you to add a TXT record to your DNS config). Is this what you're trying to do?
But if you spoof emails like this, most email clients will mark those emails as spam/phishing attempts.
No, my question was, did you buy an EMAIL ADDRESS like hello@YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME? Or you just verified your domain name on mailgun and they let you send email from an email address like hello@YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME?
verified domain and you can send email with whatever@yourdomain.com
In order to RECEIVE emails with that address in an email inbox, if you want free, look at zoho mail.
Thanks!
Postmark is the best I've come across. Set up is really easy but does require records on your DNS. They have really good guides. There are SDKs but their API is really easy to work with. Can't recommend them enough.
Postmark looks promising, but I think they don't provide a free plan.
There is, but it's capped at a few thousand reqs per month, I believe.
I also started using Postmark and it is only 100 emails per month, basically only for testing.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago