[Solution] Bubble Email Sending Issues

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Hey :wave:

As many of you know and countless threads have popped up bubbles sendgrid shared
server is having an issue. Below I’m going to walk you through your options to not see down time in your app as well as some of my favorite email recommendations :muscle:

Firstly I’d like to acknowledge a few things:

1: Bubble itself has little control over this situation and has to rely on sendgrid to get back to them. Unfortunately an “emergency fix” isn’t in their hands.

2: Bubble gives us the flexibility so that we don’t HAVE to rely on their sending server, however many times companies that manage sending like this do have multiple backup servers which it appears bubble does not. (May want to look into this).

Onto to remedy this

1: Setup your own Send grid server and use your API keys or utilize another sending service.

My personal preference is typically postmark, they have some of the best deliverability and are quite easy to work with. My follow up preference is mailgun. If you’re already at scale and need to send large volume of emails the Amazon SES.

Sendgrid is notorious for having delivery issues to Hotmail/outlook however are still viable due to the ease of integration into bubble.

2: Ensuring delivery once moved to your own server via api key with sendgrid, mailgun, postmark, or any other provider.

I’ve seen many complaints of people saying they have an API key and still not delivering.

This has nothing to do with bubble, rather your own setup. In February 2024 Google and Yahoo made massive changes to how emails deliver to their inboxes. If you do not follow what they say to a T you will not deliver as intended.

Below is a link on what changes were made, although I’m linking a postmark article this issue is not postmark specific, it applies to ANYONE delivering to Google/Yahoo and other email providers are quickly adapting.

Simplified version from postmark:

Full Google requirements:

3: If you choose to go with postmark, Mailgun, SES or another provider over sendgrid you will need to change how password resets are sent through your app.

Rather than just using “send password reset” option you’ll need to check the box in the action that says generate a password reset token but don’t send email. It is important this is done in a backend workflow as this action does not work on the client side front end.

From there you will use your email sending action for postmark, mailgun, etc to use “results from step one reset token”

If you choose to setup sendgrid and input your API key for your own account the above will not be necessary.

Most importantly you need to ensure you follow the requirements posted above in the postmark and Google links. You will hit spam or not deliver at all if you do not.

If you do use an alternative provider than sendgrid your standard “send email” action will not work, you will need a plugin for your provider with its own email actions.

Below I’ve attached my Ultimate bubble email plug-in that supports sendgrid, postmark, and mailgun both HTML and plain text + an in app easy to implement Drag and drop email builder allowing you to build emails from your app🙌

If anyone is still having issues with delivering feel free to reach out to me directly or reply with your questions below.

Ps: this post was created on mobile, when I get to a computer I’ll update this with images to help you through password resets with alternative providers.

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Random thought:

The above is why we love bubble, The simplicity of things even down to email where we didn’t NEED your own sending servers & API keys you could just connect your domain and go. However we have the flexibility to go custom if we want.

This is where bubble has came in and bridged the gap for beginners by handling things like email for auth, network/hosting, versioning environments, backend & frontend working together as one, etc, etc.

When bubble starts complicating the usage of the platform with things like WU, their own team barley understand all the different places we can be charged, not publicly disclosing some of the areas we get charged, and consistent down time from things that are in bubbles control.
This all remove the simplicity of app creation for their users which is why we are all here and why many users get frustrated.

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As a programmer, one thing I love about Bubble is that I know and appreciate all the tedious crap they are doing for me, including sending email. I can picture the code they are generating for me to do perform the workflow steps.

I even enjoy figuring out the “Bubble way” of solving some problems that would be obviously easier in a popular JavaScript framework (e.g.: arbitrary objects and list iteration).

But then, as you say, they make some things opaque and other things incomplete (e.g.: logging).

Random half-baked thought:

Bubble is great at getting non-technical people started prototyping their idea.

But then they post something on the forum about their database getting hacked. They didn’t know they were exposed and they blamed Bubble. Or they get a massive bill and are punished for getting traction and then complain about Bubble.

I’d like a way where you could easily get your app certified via audit. Maybe you are prompted when you try to deploy to production. I haven’t thought the mechanics through.

The purpose of getting your app certified (i.e.: audited) is that someone who is a real expert at Bubble and offers these sorts of services (like yourself) can look at things before they become a problem…that is, before something awful happens and people post in the forum which Google indexes.

I think I’m good at Bubble but I’d use the service too. There’s stuff I miss and am ignorant about. I just want it easy to do. Maybe there’s a price calculator that is calculated based on change complexity or something. “Your app has never been audited. Click here to get your app audited for $____.”.

And once a founder has their app growing a bit, then they already have a relationship with an agency that they can hand off to.

On the surface, it seems win for Bubble as they get less public catastrophe and support requests/win for agencies as they get more work/win for founders as they get peace of mind.

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It will always be the case that the real experts as Bubble developers do not work at Bubble, but are either employees/owners of a development agency or freelancers. Bubble should stay focused on doing what they need to do, which is build new reliable features that extend the platforms ability, while the large community of true expert Bubble developers, working independent of Bubble, provide the type of services the community might want.

There are already numerous expert Bubble developers that are offering app audits, of course that comes at a price, and I’d say that if Bubble were to offer that type of a service for ‘free’ to every app created and deployed to live, then the costs passed onto all users is not something we should all pay for. There is no free lunch, and Bubble can not subsidize the costs of auditing an app to ensure it is optimally built, nor should all Bubble users have to subsidize the cost of Bubble provided app audits for those users who would need an audit.

That is a good idea, but it should not be handled by Bubble, it should be handled by 3rd party providers, and the button should be a link to a list of app audit service providers, again independent of Bubble.

I’d prefer Bubble to spend their time ensuring the platform is reliable, stable, that new features released work, have resources available to tweak new features based on community feedback in a ‘real time’ manner. Everything else, Bubble should just let the free market handle it, as 3rd party providers can provide those types of services, and likely as they niche themselves for it, provide a better service than Bubble could.

@chris.williamson1996 thanks for posting this. Very helpful information. Kind of surprised Bubble has not already had somebody at Bubble put something like this together.

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How about the providers are all gold tier agencies, as these always produce the best quality, most secure apps?

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You should use emojis, otherwise people might think you are serious

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Totally agree to both. And to clarify, I meant connecting to 3rd party auditors. Not Bubble.

I don’t know how the list would be vetted and that in itself might be why it’s a nonstarter.

And it might be an unsolvable problem as every single industry has the issue of ensuring quality.

Right now I just want my editor to stop timing out like it has been for the last week!

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Any thoughts on Loops vs Postmark?

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I have not used loops personally

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Loops is by far the most easy and effective platform I’ve used for my emails. If I need more than one email, I’ll just make another account.

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Thanks for the feedback @GH5T. That’s encouraging to hear!

Re: more than 1 email
Does that mean you can only ever send from 1 email address?

By multiple accounts, meaning you have to create a new API connection for each one?

If so, how does that work with Bubble’s Loops plugin?

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USe their official one and you’re good to go. Never had any issues with it. I’ve never used Bubble’s built in version.

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Mmm depends for the usage. I personally use Loops or Customer.io for marketing emails. But for transactional emails, I simply just stay with Postmark because they have more experience in that and just have all the features I’d want for transactional email.

Somethings Postmark has that Loops transactional emails doesn’t off the top of my head include:

  • Inbound Emails
  • Ability to host multiple domains on one account — even able to host your clients domains without having to create a new account
  • Webhooks

I do have to say, building emails in Loops is very nice. With Postmark, you’d have to use another tool like Tabular email to build your email template, then export it as HTML code, then import it into Postmark as a template.

Those are my thoughts :slight_smile:

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spits out the morning coffee :joy:

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Great post, it’s a good idea to be proactive and provide some solution after the “Send Email”/ sendgrid issue.

I got the same issue as everyone, and moved everything to loops, EXCEPT my emails with attachement

To send an attachement, the doc says I have to encode the file in base64…
quiet a tedious task compared to… just attaching the file in the native “Send Email” aciton.

Any thought on that ?

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Yea, it really depends on what is being sent and to what audience, for which purpose, and at what volume.

It can be both a positive and a negative vary depending on circumstances, warming up email domains takes time as do the dedicated IPs.

On one hand if you happen to diminish your main loops IP you have a backup that’s already started. On the other hand managing two can get tedious and depending on attachment type and open rates can take more work.

I’ll give you a scenario where I’d actually recommend keeping them separate below.

Let’s say your main loops email is for marketing drip emails that potentially has a higher possibility of being reported as spam bc of volume but your attachment emails are all transactional. In this case it would 100% make sense to keep separate for longevity.

A case where you’d not want to separate them in my opinion is when they are all transactional emails and expected to have a low spam rate/high open rate.

Either way just make sure your authentication DNS records (DMARC, DMIK, SPF) are setup correctly for both servers.

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Hi @matthieu.bouilde,

Check out this thread, same concept but for Postmark: Postmark API response using Rich Postmark Email - #4 by johnny

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