What is best practice for emails in Bubble? (Loops.so / Sendgrid / Mailgun)

Need help APIs
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Hi,
What do people use to send emails? For a small simple software the build in Sendgrid function works fine.

Im working with multiple softwares where we will send notifications by email. (Both transactional and marketing). What do people use, and why?

I can see that Loops.so suggest that you design the email inside their software for best result. But for some software i have a lot of custom fields, and if i design the emails inside Loops, i will have multiple datavariables to send for each call.

Ive been thinking of some solutions:

  1. Design and create emails in Bubble, and send them with an API to an external service
  2. Send emails with API call, and add one API Call for each template, where you can specify dynamic data
  3. Create an option set where you add all templates, and create an backend workflow where you can send template + dynamic data, and handle all dynamic data there with one simple API call to external service

I havent found any good guides / best practices for this, so im curious about what the community thinks about this topic. :slight_smile:

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I like Resend now for transactional. Just works. Easy to set up domains and send emails.

Loops is okay for marketing emails, Postmark too. Which service is best depends on whether you want to manage the list through your database, or you want the email provider to manage it through their database and API.

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Postmark. It just works, and I have yet to find a better service for transactional email. I don’t use their marketing capabilities, but I know they have them. You can also design templates and select them via the API calls.

As far as implementing it - I’d have multiple APIs defined and mapped to hard coded template names, since if you change the template name in future, you might otherwise have a hard time finding and updating it in all the places it is used. It’s much easier if you can simple search for the main API. It also helps in tracking down excessive WU, since you would know which templates are being hit the most by the name alone. You could then run the API against a list of values, which would allow you to handle a bulk mail send.

I tried Sendgrid initially, and after a horrendous time even setting up an account (they originally marked my newly-registered company as a scam, thus blocked access to my account, then required that I contact them through the account that I wasn’t allowed to access!?!) - once I did get it working (on a different email, since I never worked out how to fix the issue), I had poor delivery rates, so I just gave up on the service and switched to Postmark. Postmark has a bit of an entry criteria you need to meet before they “unlock” the restrictions on new accounts, so you need to explain to them how you will use the service and what you are doing to help maintain their sender reputation, since Postmark has a very good delivery rate that they are keen to maintain.

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My recommendations are

  1. Postmark
  2. Postmark
  3. Anything but Sendgrid
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What is bad about Sendgrid?

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My pain points with Sendgrid:

  • Getting verified
  • Getting support

These were enough to drive me away.

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Postmark deactivated my account without notice and without explanation, yet continued to bill me $60 per month. No reply to two support requests. My website simply helps people recover lost items.

Noticed that other transactional email services have a process for de-activating companies that starts with a warning, then has three additional steps (with time for each) until de-activation.

Postmark could have allowed me even one week to switch providers. Wouldn’t recommend Postmark or ActiveCampaign (its owner) to anyone.

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