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I don't entirely agree with this.

I don't use my own mailer currently. I DO, however, use postfix to queue and relay email to rackspace, who actually sends my email.

I don't think the API method is appropriate because then you need to run some other queue system so your app has an instant response time for the user. Their action would create a queue entry (with whatever data) that will eventually be fired off as an API call to whoever you're using to send email via an API.

Or, you just set up an SMTP relay and use sendmail/postfix/whatever locally to handle that part of it.

I often see these startups using the API calls as part of the customer facing flow (website or otherwise) and the increased latency waiting on that API call to return really, really sucks.



Just wondering: would it work if your app provider supported email submission via Job queue (e.g. Amazon SQS/Iron MQ) ?


Yes, it would. In that case you are also punting on the job queue responsibilities and using a third party for both email and queueing jobs. That's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing - it's just a thing.

You'll want to queue those API calls so your queue mechanism returns to the user very quickly, and then the emails can fire out .5-5 second later.


Every email service I've seen offers an API and SMTP. For many applications, SMTP will work just fine.




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