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Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

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71–80 of 277 posts

Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#71
> Poor observability: Most tools keep you in the dark without knowing what really happened after you sent an email. Resend exposes all the events associated with your email via webhooks.

Isn’t this what DMARC is for? I have this setup (along with SPF) with my domain with a strict “reject” policy and a dedicated inbox to receive delivery reports.

I do like that you are tracking whether the recipient opened the email or not. But most email clients are no longer loading images (including the “tracking pixel”) by default so this nice feature/metric can be misleading.

> More recently, as a VP of Developer Experience at WorkOS, I once again had to deal with emails landing in the spam folder

This usually means DMARC is configured incorrectly or just too many of your recipients are marking the emails as spam.

Besides the ability to write templates using react syntax, I don’t see why developers would use yet another centralized service in production.

Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#73
Watch your free tier very closely. An unfortunate part of being in the email business is that spammers and phishers are always looking for free ways to send their emails on ips with a good reputation. It quickly becomes a game of cat and mouse which detracts from the business, so make sure you have a effective strategy to prevent misuse when allowing customizable emails with a generous free tier.

Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#75
post #16

Help me understand the React selling point. Existing email sending software supports text and HTML because that's what email is . No email client out there supports JavaScript, virtual DOMs, event loops, SSR or any such fancy web technology. Instead of hand-crafting an HTML template with etc I'm supposed to use your custom React components ( ...) which you will promptly compile down to the tags I mentioned above. So.…

I was in a meeting a while back where a team that was tasked with standing up a few dozen completely static websites was discussing what React components to use. I asked why they were using any front-end JS framework at all and not just creating static html sites, maybe using a generator like Hugo or Eleventy if they wanted to templatize. The answer was that they didn't know how to create plain html sites without JS. That was moderately shocking to me. I offered to work with them to create the static html solution and they declined, saying they could be more productive with React.

Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#76

You mention that you have a Java SDK but I can’t find it on your website. Can you please share a direct link to the Java SDK?

Not the OP. It’s not listed in the “quick start” section of the docs but their SDKs are available on GH. This is their Java SDK

https://github.com/resendlabs/resend-java

Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#77
post #75
post #16

Help me understand the React selling point. Existing email sending software supports text and HTML because that's what email is . No email client out there supports JavaScript, virtual DOMs, event loops, SSR or any such fancy web technology. Instead of hand-crafting an HTML template with etc I'm supposed to use your custom React components ( ...) which you will promptly compile down to the tags I mentioned above. So.…

I was in a meeting a while back where a team that was tasked with standing up a few dozen completely static websites was discussing what React components to use. I asked why they were using any front-end JS framework at all and not just creating static html sites, maybe using a generator like Hugo or Eleventy if they wanted to templatize. The answer was that they didn't know how to create plain html sites without JS.…

It sadly no longer shocks me, I've seen many "front-end" engineers rely on React as a sort of crutch for building UIs. Even for non-interactive UI. :(

Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#78
post #75
post #16

Help me understand the React selling point. Existing email sending software supports text and HTML because that's what email is . No email client out there supports JavaScript, virtual DOMs, event loops, SSR or any such fancy web technology. Instead of hand-crafting an HTML template with etc I'm supposed to use your custom React components ( ...) which you will promptly compile down to the tags I mentioned above. So.…

I was in a meeting a while back where a team that was tasked with standing up a few dozen completely static websites was discussing what React components to use. I asked why they were using any front-end JS framework at all and not just creating static html sites, maybe using a generator like Hugo or Eleventy if they wanted to templatize. The answer was that they didn't know how to create plain html sites without JS.…

they declined, saying they could be more productive with React

As much as it pains me to say so, they're probably right. If they don't know how to make a static site, and they're familiar with something like Next, then they probably can go faster and just let the framework take care of building the assets.

I wish people still made static sites using boring tech but times have moved on, but honestly there isn't much difference in complexity between a NextJS static site and a Hugo or an 11ty static site.

Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#79
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's just us getting old. Newcomers to the filed don't really understand HTML and CSS. It's just "React components" to them, and they aren't looking deeper than that.

I'm getting the feeling that a lot of old timers also don't understand HTML and CSS in emails, from the responses I'm seeing here. There are a lot of reasons to have abstractions over HTML/CSS in emails, for all but the trivial cases. It is notoriously difficult to get right, since there are some features lacking and standards in the email client space moves way slower than browser. A regular marketing HTML email wou…

As long as you stick to only HTML that was available in the year 2000, and use zero CSS, your mails will come out the same in pretty much every client.
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