What are ways people are sending emails on fly? Im thinking things like noreply application emails like email confirmations and password resets. I’m not interested in receiving email on fly.
I know it’s easy to connect to paid 3rd party services and do this, but are there any weird issues that you run into do doing this on fly?
I’m especially curious about solutions that can work on fly directly (maybe docker images that make this particularly easy).
I use AWS SES Amazon Simple Email Service | Cloud Email Service | Amazon Web Services It’s $0.10/1000 so really cheap. Just install the AWS SDK for your language, and use the relevant call to provide the email address, subject and body. Super easy and no, haven’t run into any issues doing that. It’s cheaper to call it from their own compute, EC2, (naturally) but you don’t have to.
There may be DIY options, as you say. However the potential problem with doing it yourself is that yes you’ll be able to send emails but they may be more likely to be flagged as spam and so your clients don’t get them. As they are being sent from an unknown IP. And then you have to deal with clients complaining they never got the email. Perhaps someone has tried and has some data/stats about that, but that’s been my experience in the past.
You can also check out Twilio SendGrid and Mailgun. SendGrid has a useful free tier and provides an SMTP gateway, so you don’t even need special libraries to send mail.
We use SES with Lamba (in prod), but MailChannels with Workers has been a breeze to implement, too (though, it doesn’t support DKIM, and hence only used in test envs).