One of the most basic product tasks is sending emails. No matter the interface or device; it can be a web product, a mobile product, TV product, wearable, API, etc.
So your product will send an email to register new users, to restore passwords, shipping notifications, or any message that you need to send to users triggered by internal or external events. It’s very very common for a product send emails. In the market exists some alternatives to send emails that maybe your development team want to know.
In the following 2-3 minutes I will mention the 3 main transactional email services to keep in mind. All of them are handled by their API and several software libraries to integrate with specific software languages.
Ok, here we go:
#1: Mailgun
Mailgun is my favorite transactional email service because of their simplicity to setup and integrate.
In Mailgun you can create sub-accounts, so you can use each sub-account for each domain with separate lists of email. There’s batch sending features to personalize emails, detailed analytics, and logs, and a powerful parsing engine to turn incoming emails into JSON and route it where you want.
curl -s --user 'api:ENTER_API_KEY_HERE' \
https://api.mailgun.net/v3/samples.mailgun.org/messages \
-F from='Excited User <excited@samples.mailgun.org>' \
-F to=‘Meow Gun <meow.gun@mailgun.com>’ \
-F subject='Hello Meow Gun’ \
-F template='action' \
-F h:X-Mailgun-Variables='{"test": "test"}'Mailgun is very easy to use,
#2: Amazon AWS SES
Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a cloud-based email sending service designed to help digital marketers and application developers send marketing, notification, and transactional emails. You can use the SMTP interface or one of the AWS SDKs to integrate Amazon SES directly into your existing applications.
With Amazon’s email offering, you’ll handle everything on your own. And it’s priced accordingly. There’s no plans to pick from, no tiered feature levels: just a flat fee of $0.10 per thousand emails you send, plus another $0.12 per GB of email attachments sent (up to a max of 10Mb per email message).
If you send from an application hosted in Amazon EC2, the first 62,000 emails you send every month are free.
Read more about this service in their website and learn how to integrate it with your product, examples codes and so.
#3: Sendgrid
Sendgrid is one of the most popular email service that recently has been acquired by Twilio.
Similar to Mailgun and AWS SES, you can use Sendgrid to send transactional email via SMTP or via API. Their API documentation is very complete.
Sendgrid includes an user interface to let user compose, send and track marketing emails (and all in between). It includes to add contacts, create segments, create and send campaigns, and view your stats.
Want to learn more? Check it out here.
Ok. Hope you can find pure value on this post and you can keep in mind these email transactional services to use into your product… it’s useful to send shipping notifications, password recovery, and almost every stage you want to communicate to your users.
About 4Geeks
Founded in 2012, 4Geeks is a global software engineering and revenue growth consulting firm for Fortune 500, Global 2000 and fast-growing SMBs. Provides top solutions to multiple industries including Retail, Healthcare, Banking & Financial Services, B2B SaaS, Manufacturing and Education. HQ in the USA, and delivery centers across Latin America.
