Developers this is the new idea call apart from developing AI and the latest trending tools, devs still need a lot of emailing and notification-based tools.
This week means yesterday on Monday, 17 June 2024, as usual, I was writing an email for newsletter subscribers, (it’s FREE so feel free to subscribe) between writing and sending emails I’ve to follow the following process
- Write email in a rich text editor, sometimes google doc or Notion or medium editor
- Convert Email into HTML format
- Add HTML to my backend email design tool, currently using courier.com
- Trigger API to send bulk emails using courier SDK
Of course, I can use alternatives like Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Twilio, Sendbird and so on.
Here is the extensive list of email supporters for developers
- Sendgrid
- Twilio
- Mailchimp
- Courier
- Resend
- Sendbird
- Gmail API
- AWS API
- Mailgun
- Outlook
Top 30+ Email API collection for developers
Top 35 Email APIs/Services for Developers
Collection of Email APIs for developers
Let’s start the picture, we have an extensive list of email providers and supporters.
One can easily integrate and start creating emails, and notifications but that’s not the real problem.
Ice under the water
Every website needs emailing services for the following reasons
- Newsletter emails
- Product emails
- Notifications emails
- Weekly subscription emails
Every product may need a lot of different kinds of emails per week or sometimes twice a day.
Most of the above tools either provide a way to craft and design emails within the platform itself or allow developers to send emails directly via an HTML file.
The process is simplified in 2 ways
- Send email via HTML
- Craft HTML template and send the template
But this seems to have one bottlenecks
- One need to craft email everytime manually
- One need to use platform to manage subscribers or users
Sending Bulk Emails to subscribers
Let me explain how, we run a newsletter business for iHateReading. Send newsletter to our 1k+ subscribers once a week.
- I’ve to craft email HTML manually on courier.app because that is the platform I was using
- Then I’ve to save this HTML and publish it
- Once the HTML is published as the template on courier app, I get the template Id
- Using courier SDK in Node.js server I send the email to my subscribers by passing template Id as well
- Courier SDK then send the template to my list users or subscribers
Now, even If I use Mailchimp, Sendgrid or Twilio all of them allow me to almost do the same process, create HTML manually and send emails to bulk users.
Existing Problem
Most of the tools doesn’t simply allow to send bulk emails, they first want to store the bulk user data such as email address followed by sending bulk emails.
The problem with existing ones are
- Not everytime I want to share my subscribers with these platforms
- Why to craft and create HTML manually
- HTML creating process should be handled dynamically instead
- Bulk email and subscriber management should be done programmatically and securely
Resend at Rescue
I don’t want to go into pros and cons, A vs B.
Sendgrid, Twilio, Mailchimp, AWS SES and Gmail API are the top most used notification tools in the world.
But as I’ve explained the problem we have faced with them for our product and resend helps us to somehow solve it.
Here’s how
- Resend allow you to craft emails programmatically
- Resend provide SDK to send bulk emails directly as HTML without
- Resend allows to add/manage subscribers as audiences
- Resend provides a react-email npm module to create emails using React components such as Button, Inputs, Cards
check the example below
Using react components developers can easily create an email template and convert it into HTML format to send as an HTML.
The resend package provides built-in components to support various component types.
We need more tools like Resend and npm modules for emailing and notification services.
Another problem we are encountering is debouncing emails and invalid email addresses, validating emails.
One tool should help developers validate email, create HTML, and create audiences dynamically or using SDK.
Sample Solution
- At iHateReading, we are using editors to write a newsletter
- Then we convert the editor content into HTML format
- Followed by sending this HTML as an email using resend SDK
- Add subscribers to the audience via resend SDK to subscribers
If we need to send another newly released email or product email we can do it but we can’t edit the HTML file and editing the HTML file and components look is what we want to add in future.
I hope you have understood the problem and how are currently solving it.
Resend sounds pretty close to what we want to achieve, our main target is to completely automate the process.
Conclusion
An extensive list of the emailing and notifications API, more than 30+ tools are available.
But still, most or all of them don’t provide a way to craft emails dynamically as well manage subscribers and send HTML, take care of email validation, alter the process of resending debounced emails and so on.
We at iHateReading, ended up creating our custom tool to solve this problem of simply writing an editor to craft HTML and send this to our bulk users or audience
Sooner or later we will bring another feature to even edit the HTML file interface using drag and drop, CSS styling editors and so on.
That’s it for today, see you in the next one
Shrey
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