Postmark is awesome

We have been struggling with Sendgrid the last couple of years with black listed ip-addresses, mails ending up in spam and mails blocked by mailservers. We only do transactional mails to our customers but still Sendgrid can not deliver good enough. We have been in contact with support, tweaking the settings but still the same problems.

So we decided to try Postmark. After a couple of weeks testing it works like a a dream - all our mails are suddenly delivered. Everyday and all the time.

The plugin for Postmark in Bubble just supports plain text so we just created our own api-connection with the api-connector. Very easy and straight forward.

If you are used to Sendgrid it takes a while before you understand the logic in Postmark. In Postmark you can create servers for every project, website or customers. With server you have everything separated like templates, activity logs, settings etc.

Just wanted to share this with the community because it saved me a lot of time and headache.

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Did you figure out how to use broadcasts? Some of my transactional emails (group chat or event notifications) need to be sent to 10s or 100s of users. PostMark told me to use Broadcasts, but haven’t been able to figure it out yet.

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Love Postmark :slight_smile:

One of the greate things about it is the way it will generate cURL and you can import straight into Bubblee’s API connector.

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Ouf, just realized I had made my Postmark plugin Live and people have been using it - not sure it was ready for the big stage! Will need to get around to improving it soon.

I am also a BIG Postmark supporter. Fast, dependable emails and they provide great customer support. I was apart of their Beta for Broadcasts and am currently using it no problems. It can be a little annoying to set things up and there is a limit of 500 emails in an API call, but overall it’s been pretty great.

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Hi @Greeboss,

Thanks for the info. How did you stop using Sendgrid and start using Postmark? Did you simply remove the settings in Bubble Email settings and then install the Postmark plugin? Or did you progressively move from one to the other?

Could you show some screen shots of the api-connector using Postmark. I’m interested to understand how you set this up. Does that mean you create the emails in Postmark, not in Bubble? Is it like Stripe, where you have to create customers inside Postmark and they have to be in Sync with Bubble?

Sorry, so many questions…

Thanks

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I’m interested in using Twilio for SMS, but I know they also have the Email service. Does anyone have any experience with Twilio and Emails? Not sure if to use Twilio for both Email and SMS or Twilio for SMS and Postmark for Emails.

Anyone who has any experience, would very much appreciate it.

Thanks

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Hi Mangooly,

First you need to set upp a connection to Postmark with API-connector. See our settings in attached pictures. There are probably different ways to do this but we just followed the API documentation from Postmark.

You can of course use the plugin from @gf_wolfer but wanted to use the template function to be able to send not just plain text. At Postmark you can set up the templates with HTML or CSS. Here you will need som basic HTML och CSS coding skills. Sendgrid has an editor which makes this step easier but at the end of the day I think I prefer to have control of every single line of code.

One you set up the connection and built some templates you can start sending mails. You can create static or dynamic templates at Postmark. If you are sending a static onboarding mail to all your customers your can set this up at Postmark. If you need to change the mail content in the future you need to change the code at Postmark. You can also set up dynamic templates to be able to send variables in the mail like order number, price etc.

For implementation you just change the workflow steps. One you set up the api-connection you will find the Postmark steps under Plugins. So if you are using the built in send mail workflow step today just insert the new Postmark step after the old one and just copy the settings. Test it and once it is working you can delete to old workflow step.

Twilio acquired Sendgrid 2018 so i think it is more or less the same company.

Good luck!!

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I am using Sendgrid for emails and Twilio for SMS and Voice calls. Twilio can be a bit expensive but it works well. Also use https://mailboxlayer.com/ for email address validation which help prevent blacklist etc. For Sendgrid use my own plugin so that we can pass through parameter for categories to segregate customers and campaigns to get delivery stats

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Hi guys, really basic question here - when setting up a service like Postmark you need to specify and verify a signature email address before starting. Does this need to be @yourdomain.com? What about if you just have a test app?

Thanks
Rob

Hi Rob,

You can choose between a single address or your own domain. A single email address is the easy approach and you just have to confirm the address with a link. See documentation for more info.

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Anyone used the other Postmark plugin by @vini_brito. I think this does allow you to use images or formatted text.

Regards

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I used it and it works well

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Cannot agree more with this post title. Just made the switch over to Postmark from Sendgrid this week in one of my apps.

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I’ve also been a Sendgrid user and my mails got blocked today, apparently the IP shared address was listed on the Spamhaus Block List, very disappointing indeed.

:triangular_flag_on_post: Just read this on Stackoverflow, "Starting on 2020-08-17, Sendgrid IP addresses were listed on Spamhaus for sending phishing emails."

Thank you all for the recommendation of Postmark! One question, does anyone know if the Postmark plugin supports sending emails with files (PDF) directly from Bubble? Or they would need to be decoded with another plugin?

Thank you for your time.

I know you’ve seen the other thread, but in case you still have a doubt on this specific point:

My free plugin (Rich Postmark emails) decode the files for you already, all you have to do is just place the file(s) at the field.
Like in “Current user’s file”. No special processing, no nothing. Just pass a “file” field type value and you’re green (:

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@vini_brito Thank for for responding.
That is AWESOME! Thank you so much for the clarification and hard work. I will install Rich Postmark emails right way. I appreciate it :100:

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Hi @NigelG!

We are ready to take the next step to send broadcast mails with Postmark. I am trying to send batch mails with template but do not really get it.

The documentation is clear but of course not adapted to Bubble logic.

Do you mind sharing how you have solved this? Can not imagine a great man like you haven’t already solved this. :wink:

Have a great weekend!

Ooo, that will be fun !

OK, so first off, don’t try to do it all in the API connector. You will need to add a new field to your data to store some formatted JSON.

 "Messages": [
        {
            "From": "sender@example.com",
            "To": "receiver1@example.com",
            "TemplateID": 12345,
            "TemplateModel": {
                "fizz": "buzz"
            }
        },
        {
            "From": "sender@example.com",
            "To": "receiver2@example.com",
            "TemplateAlias": "welcome-notification",
            "TemplateModel": {
                "fizz": "buzz"
            }
        }

What you need to do is format up a text field on your database that does the …

{
“From”: “sender@example.com”,
“To”: “receiver1@example.com”,
“TemplateID”: 12345,
“TemplateModel”: {
“fizz”: “buzz”
}
}

…part. So you are going to have a field that contains all that, but replaces “fizz” and buzz" (and the to email) with your data. You need the curly brackets!

The pass the list of those fields :separated by , to get it all into a JSON array.

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Hi @NigelG,

Thanks a lot for the solution. Work like a charm. :partying_face: Really appreciate all your energy you are spending on the forum. It is amazing. :pray:

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hey @NigelG assuming you are using Postmark from UK, it looks like they are in your opinion GDPR compliant/pretty safe to use in the EU?

What I’ve been getting from the docs is this: “look at this, this is all we’ve done for you, it’s all good - but “assess” your own risk before you make the move, and for the best sign this e-doc just to be sure”.