Mailgun API 2.0: forget MIME

[randomtask]

Seems to me like this has the potential to be something I'd pay for, but confusingly the article focuses on MIME, when the real problem you seem to be solving is providing a more usable abstraction over the complexity of sending email in general.

Having wanted a service to send emails to customers recently, I hit upon a distinct lack (or apparent lack at least) of services that allowed me to do this. While this should sound ridiculous, sending email reliably is a hard thing to do these days.

[twakefield]

Yes, this blog post was meant to be the first in a series that described the new features of the new API release. Best way to see all of the capabilities is to look through the user manual and API reference.

[rorrr]

Lack of services to send emails? Seriously?

Mailchimp

SilverPop

CampaignMonitor

SendGrid

YMLP

MadMimi

JangoMail

TinyLetter (free)

[pdenya]

Love the changes. Whether or not there's a lack of a good mime library in any given language it's always good to go from something that focuses on a standard based file not everyone is familiar with to a simple list of parameters.

It's also always great to work with companies with such nice api documentation. It's so easy to do the facebook thing and have incomplete, unclear documentation and no real way of getting answers about it.

[tow21]

Feature request: multipart/related attachments please, not just multipart/alternative.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Related

Makes for much nicer display of email attachments in some clients.

[old-gregg]

That's on our radar, thank you for the suggestion.

[bestes]

I love the idea of using an HTTP POST to send email. I guess I'm the guy who has no idea how to use MIME, but find HTTP painless.

Plus, whenever I try and configure mail on a new system, especially an EC2 instance (or whatever) there are always lots of issues.

[mark242]

From reading this blog post, it appears that you have successfully attached the RESTEasy framework to the Apache Commons Email framework with one POJO. Uh, congratulations?

[latortuga]

There are no rules stating that a business has to run on complicated software that does a thousand things.

[jswinghammer]

I'm a little confused about the need for this service. What languages don't have decent email support at this point? I guess I've never run into this before.

[old-gregg]

You mean the support for MIME in stdlib, right? Based on the questions our customer support gets, quite a lot: just like we explained in the blog post. And based on the number of malformed and broken MIME we get via SMTP, even those that do aren't easy to understand for many.

Based on the calls/emails I personally had to answer, things like encoding, or making sure that HTML and text parts are specified in a certain order, or the aforementioned "Bcc mystery" bite quite a lot of people.

EDIT: forgot to add something: check out the "test mode" feature, you'd be amazed at how many people call us to flush up their email queue because they ran their unit tests on the production database! :)

[lubos]

Mailgun also allows to receive emails, it will make http post request at your end-point. very neat stuff actually.

[ramidarigaz]

It's nice having official servers to send email from. I had a simple little app a while back that sent email via Python's SMTP module, but most of the emails I was sending were getting caught by Gmail's spam trap. Using Mailgun to send those emails worked just fine, plus their api is nice.

[swanson]

You guys should consider a Heroku add-on with a small free plan (if you aren't already). SendGrid has one (200/day free) and they would be the first place I'd go if I needed a mail API because I have used them seamlessly for small projects (~10 emails/day) already.

[twakefield]

This should be out soon (w/in a few days, hopefully).

[swombat]

So basically, if I get this right, Mailgun is an abstraction for SMTP? Sounds quite useful, actually. I'm tired of setting up SMTP servers...

[bprater]

Hey guys -- add a link back to your main site from your blog. I literally had to type the URL in because I couldn't find it anywhere. You should be showcasing your main site via the blog, not hiding it!

[MrMike]

Didn't see this before I complained/wrote a PSA: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3127588

[epoxyhockey]

For me, the biggest issue w/ these email services is that the devliverability of email varies widely from service to service. The API is almost secondary in importance to me now.

One service can email certain domains successfully while another service results in randomly bounced emails to the same domains.

[orenmazor]

Hey, I actually work for one of the competitors of the above, and I'm wondering if you had a bit more info about this?

feel free to email me, if you'd rather take this offline :) [email protected]

[becomevocal]

For someone that is currently using SendGrid, what are the key points to make me move over?

[twakefield]

Probably best to have this conversation elsewhere. Feel free to email [email protected].

[TheTarquin]

Cool! This will be awesome for implementing feature on cross-platform devices. I can definitely see a use case for standardizing mailing across, e.g., several different mobile platforms. Just keep the POST request object across all of them and send the request however is convenient.

Great idea.

[th0ma5]

obligatory xkcd http://xkcd.com/927/ ... i fear email will mostly broken forever, i think xmpp has a strong argument, and i'm not entirely sure throwing out mime will be possible for some time.

[dedward]

Is this hosted only or can we run our own servers? Seems to raise legal and privacy issues

[bigtech]

One thing I hope you can fix -- I can't read the orange on dark grey example boxes.

[kylek]

Mailgun, SMTP gone postal

[MikeGrace]

Awesome!!! Love that Mailgun specializes and focuses on making email easy for me. This means that I get to focus on what I do well and let someone else worry about the details of email stuff.

[guan]

I want this for snailmail.

[twakefield]

made me think of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3031118