Send emails by Bubble or external (e.g. Sendgrid)?

Question
1

Is it better to send emails by Bubble or external (e.g. Sendgrid).

A user registration confirmation email can be done with Bubble I guess. But how about notification emails for user actions. At what point would it be better to use external services?

I don’t know how to decide on this. What would be parameters for decision-making?

2

The main reasons in my opinion to use Sendgrid or Postmark (or any other external mail services) are;

  • You can have mail sent with a from address that is from your domain (not coming from bubbleapps.io)
  • You have some reporting view of mail deliverability with these services (FWIW people report better delivery rates with Postmark over Sendgrid)
  • These services offer templating capabilities (ie make nice looking emails) that you would otherwise have to implement in Bubble (many plugins to help but still takes time and you still have to maintain the feature ongoing)
  • Other features like capturing and measuring bounces, unsubscribe links etc, are useful and you otherwise have to implement in Bubble

The reasons to use Bubble’s built in email service is; the cost is built into Bubble, and it is a built-in action that is easy to grasp and takes seconds to implement when you are getting started.

For me, the reason I use Postmark, is that I really have more pressing things to do with my Bubble development time than re-implement 3rd party services in Bubble that cost $10/month :slight_smile:

Good luck!

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3

:point_up_2:

Exactly this. Nice to separate out email like this.

HTML templates can be built for free and implemented in Postmark.

Postmark also allows you to format “tables” and pass repeating data in.

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4

Great feedback, guys! Thanks a lot!

Do you use an external service for all emails in your Bubble app or are there exceptions where you use the built-in system?

5

I pretty much just use Postmark. There are benefits to having it all in one place, and having consistent branding. If one email is an ugly plain text email … inevitably the customer will ask why is X email so ugly and the others look nice :slight_smile:

6

How does that work for SaaS apps where you want to send emails from the end-customer’s domain and email rather than from the static domain of the vendor eg me?

7

This is the perfect use case for services like Postmark. You can set up multiple sender addresses (eg one for each of your Saas clients) - In Postmark https://postmarkapp.com/developer/user-guide/managing-your-account/managing-sender-signatures (the same concept applies in Sendgrid also)

I know @exception-rambler dynamically provisions the Saas client address as new Clients onboard with the Postmark API. :brain: :brain: :brain:

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8

Thanks for that. I was just gonna ask if you can call an API to set-up a new sender address for a new end-customer to automate it as well. Much appreciated.