Mailgun
Wednesday, January 4th, 2017 | Tech
Mailgun is an email sending service made by Rackspace. Specifically, it is designed to be used as an API for sending automated emails.
This is different from a mailing list manager such as MailChimp or Infusionsoft. These allow you to build up a mailing list and send out newsletters. Mailgun is designed to be used by web applications looking to send emails behind the scenes. For example, I use it in my IT contracting course to send out welcome emails when someone registers.
Setup is relatively straightforward. You register, enter your domain name, and then Mailgun gives you a whole host of DNS entries you need to add to your domain. You are then given an API key that your scripts can use to send messages out from. They have a PHP library you can bring in via Composer (and libraries for all the other languages too), so it was just a case of wrapping that in my own code.
Best of all, they have a free tier: you do not pay anything for your first 10,000 emails.
Of course, the real test of success is delivery rates. Time will tell whether that is successful or not. However, my old solution was setting up a gMail account and sending email through their SMTP servers is unreliable (Google occasionally thought I was being hacked and locked my scripts out) and meant the email was coming from an @gmail.com account, which is not very professional. So, this promises to be a big improvement even if delivery rates are only just as good.
Mailgun is an email sending service made by Rackspace. Specifically, it is designed to be used as an API for sending automated emails.
This is different from a mailing list manager such as MailChimp or Infusionsoft. These allow you to build up a mailing list and send out newsletters. Mailgun is designed to be used by web applications looking to send emails behind the scenes. For example, I use it in my IT contracting course to send out welcome emails when someone registers.
Setup is relatively straightforward. You register, enter your domain name, and then Mailgun gives you a whole host of DNS entries you need to add to your domain. You are then given an API key that your scripts can use to send messages out from. They have a PHP library you can bring in via Composer (and libraries for all the other languages too), so it was just a case of wrapping that in my own code.
Best of all, they have a free tier: you do not pay anything for your first 10,000 emails.
Of course, the real test of success is delivery rates. Time will tell whether that is successful or not. However, my old solution was setting up a gMail account and sending email through their SMTP servers is unreliable (Google occasionally thought I was being hacked and locked my scripts out) and meant the email was coming from an @gmail.com account, which is not very professional. So, this promises to be a big improvement even if delivery rates are only just as good.