Comment by pfooti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pfooti | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting to see in this article two features that I find are pretty rad that mandrill supports: inbound email processing and api-side templating.

Specifically, we have some webhooks set up so whenever someone emails blah@example.com, mandrill posts that data to a known URL on my webapp (processing inbound email events like replies and so on).

Mandrill also "supports" a handlebars language on their end, so I can have a handlebars outbound template and pass in a big data structure (with repeats and conditional rendering).

I caveat supports, because their API doesn't support nested arrays (an array of objects which in turn contain an array property, for example) and their API silently ignores any camelCased variables. There's a couple of other weirdnesses to mandrill's handlebars, but on balance it's handy to allow my designers to change the layouts to some outbound emails without having to push those template changes to the web application itself (previously, we used handlebars to render a big HTML blob on the server side which got pushed into to the email).

I can live without a rich view template language, but not really without inbound webhooks. I know Amazon SES can be made to handle this with their Lambda service or via Amazon SNS (my webapp doesn't run on EC2, so it is a tad more complicated), and I had been working through a lot of the other providers to see who supports what, because woah is mandrill going to be a lot more expensive now.

Mailgun has a great inbound api [1]. You can set up routing rules to let them post the email as json (or just forward it) to a specified url. The json also includes fields for the extracted quoted parts and signature. The latter is based on some machine learning, which other providers don't have afaik.

[1] https://documentation.mailgun.com/quickstart-receiving.html

Ooooh, that would be pretty handy. I've been relying on good old "please reply above this line" to parse inbound emails, precisely because I didn't want to muck around with ML to infer user intent (I reeeeally wish quotes, the reply-date separator, and signature blocks were standardized somehow). If there's a reliable improvement to this functionality provided by my email service, that's 100% a feature I'm willing to pay for. Thanks.

I would second Mailgun for inbound email. Granted, my use-case is very low-volume, but it works great and the email parsing seems to be pretty good.

I've previously used Mandrill for inbound, which has a lot of problems that I'd rather not enumerate. But that was at a much higher scale, so many of those problems I wouldn't have seen yet even if Mailgun has them.

(I'm an engineer on Sendgrid's Events & Stats team, but don't speak for my team or Sendgrid)

Sendgrid supports all of these features, and we work really hard to make inbound event webhooks a first class feature (some of our customers base their entire business models on our inbound webhooks and stats). I hate sales pitches in HN comments so if you'd like to learn more or have any questions my email is under my profile.

Sendgrid and Mailgun have very good inbound processing. I know that Postmark does also but I haven't used it personally.

Sendgrid's is also, I think, just included at no extra charge.

Thanks for the suggestion; I did some quick research and added dedicated-ip, templates and inbound-email to the comparison.

> It would be interesting to see in this article two features that I find are pretty rad that mandrill supports: inbound email processing and api-side templating.

I use Mailgun and it supports this.

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