Ask HN: How do you send emails from your backend?

1 points by u8 3 years ago | 2 comments

I run/co-develop a small community website and we’ve just added accounts. We’re almost ready to launch but I need to finish up our email backend. I’m expecting between 500-1,500 sends a month and we’ll probably never exceed 5,000.

I’ve tried SendGrid, but their dashboard is unreliable. MailGun/Jet is too pricey for our scale. And AWS SES is overtly complicated with limited documentation.

I’m asking how you handle emails for your applications? Is there some hidden SAS platform that can be a silver bullet or will this be a problem that costs more time than it’s worth?

In addition, we use Go for our backend so any services that offer a Go package would be very helpful.

Thanks in advance!

e1g 3 years ago |

We use https://postmarkapp.com and https://www.mailgun.com - both work great for us. I also like https://mailtrap.io for testing purposes.

gregjor 3 years ago |

I have used both Mailgun and SendGrid on projects with similar numbers of outbound emails and both work as expected. I had slightly less trouble working with SendGrid. I have never seen any problems with their dashboard. You can use their API libraries, or just send a direct HTTP request, or have sendmail on the server configured to relay through SendGrid.

You can also relay through a GMail account if you already use GMail for inbound emails on your domain.

Having done this a few times with various web sites I can say it takes less than an hour to integrate MailGun or SendGrid and get it working. You probably don't want to implement and manage an email server and bounce/unsubscribe handling yourself.