> 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. I can't think of a single email platform I've used as an email marketer/crm marketer for a decade that didn't expose a full event stream for all emails.
SendGrid exposes it for like 14 days I believe. I tried like hell to get data from before that and support told me you're required to store that yourself. So not super helpful until you realize you needed it in the first place.
Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React
131–140 of 277 posts
Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React
#132> 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 o…
Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React
#133> Email API for Developers Using React But what if I'm just a regular developer who doesn't use react? /s
Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simpler websites often don't need a backend anymore (beyond automated, managed hosting). Many of them can just e a frontend package that can be deployed anywhere as static output files (CDN, any file host, Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Workers, S3, etc.) In such a system, sending an email is traditionally a pain (well, email is always a pain, but even more so when you don't have a dedicated backend). Being able to fan…
This makes sense, but what if you're using a message queue to send transactional emails? Why would you put that logic on the browser?
That part of the logic wouldn't be in the browser (unless you're purposefully trying to emulate SMTP on the client for some reason). In Resend, for example, a 200 just acknowledges that their API successfully received your request and will attempt delivery soon. It doesn't necessarily mean the email was either sent from their SMTP servers or received by the recipient's server client. You can check delivery status later on in the dashboard: https://resend.com/docs/dashboard/emails/introduction#unders...
(And then optionally receive that as a webhook later on, if you want to notify the user of success: https://resend.com/docs/dashboard/webhooks/event-types#email...)
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Edit: In case it wasn't clear, the value of something like Resend or (SES or SendGrid or whatever) is that you don't HAVE to write logic to handle the tricky parts of email delivery. You just send an API call to someone else's transactional email service and let them worry about all that.
Bigger companies with dedicated staff/teams might want to inhouse a lot of that stuff, but there are a lot of smaller companies (or non tech companies) that still need to do transactional emails but don't necessarily want to maintain it in-house.
In a resource-constrained team/org, it's the difference between a full-stack dev who has to split time between making the website and maintaining the backend(s) and infra, vs a cheaper frontend Javascript dev who can focus solely on the frontend UX/marketing/branding/etc.. The latter can matter more for direct-to-consumer companies who don't necessarily care about the backend as long as it works and isn't too expensive... those 3rd party services are usually much cheaper than hiring even a junior dev/sysadmin.
Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React
#135Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For a major brand, CSS and pretty design is a requirement for all branded emails.
Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
Edit: And OP mentioned he suggested Hugo or some other solution which is miles behind tools in JS/TS world. Not to mention it is Python based and this team knew React
Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, if you are spending a lot of effort to track the data in HubSpot, why not try to send emails directly in HubSpot?
Because that would make sense. Or the slightly longer version of how HubSpot is sort of our CRM system but also a front end for our on-prem Sharepoint and our Microsoft CRM and a couple of other things. It can send some emails, but not all emails, and when it does send emails someone wants them tracked not just by HubSpot but also by SendGrid because that’s how we track mails in parts of the business. Why do we have…
Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React
#139Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React
#140The visibility into what emails have been sent, to who, and what the content was is also incredibly helpful when we are talking about transactional emails. Double bonus for being able to share that email as well.