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

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

#241
post #62
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.…

"Instead of hand-crafting an HTML template with etc" You forgot a whole lot of , all the inline CSS and all the IE11 comment hacks. Oh, and also OfficeHTML or whatever abomination that is called, because Microsoft Word 2003 also remains alive inside Outlook. Most people doing anything of medium complexity is already using some abstraction layer, such as MJML [1]. Also remember you gotta either test on multiple client…

Please stop the insanity.

HTML is not designed to work over email and is not capable of describing an email thread, a conversation. Aside from that HTML over email is ridiculously trivial. Super trivial. It isn't the HTML that is challenging but the CSS over email that is challenging. It takes some practice to figure out, but if you are even remotely competent you DO NOT need table insanity. Tables are for tabular data only.

These are screenshots of actual emails I created back in 2006 for a company that no longer exists. It's a bit easier now than it was back then.

https://prettydiff.com/email/

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

#242
post #232
post #147

Why limit it to 100 emails a day for the free plan? Makes the 3000 limit feel like a false advertisement unless you have 100 users signing up every day.

> false advertisement No, very clear, quite literally right below " Up to 3,000 emails / mo 100 emails / day "

I mean it makes the 3000 number meaningless if you are not sending 100 emails every day.

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

#243
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked at a couple companies (medium-scale) with home grown email solutions. The server-side rendered templating grew into being used for HTML email as well. It helped the backend devs as the tech that rendered the webpages also rendered the emails (all server side rendering), and the frontend devs needed less training to go from just frontend to frontend + emails. It was sort of a path of least resistance thing…

> It was sort of a path of least resistance thing and it did have its drawbacks. This makes sense, but ya aren't there serious scaling implications to this?

Not really? The system worked as designed for the years I was there and sent _many_ emails. Rendering a template was never so taxing as to not scale. From a workflow perspective, each email was a template file, so if you had a ton of emails it was easy to parallelize the work across frontend devs

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

#244
post #167
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They announced extended retention as well recently, up to a year.

Yes, 'paid' add-on. Don’t store content - Requirements 7 days - $5 per month 28 days - $5 per month 45 days (Default) - Free 90 days - $5 per month 180 days - $8 per month 365 days - $12 per month

$12/mo is not a meaningful sum of money if you care about this, at all.

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

#245
post #5

Your competitors have been acquired but you are funded by YC… so there is a high chance this will happen to you as well. There isn’t much innovation happening since email is stable. I don’t want to design my emails in React, but I am probably not the target group since I am still running my own mail servers. Edit: What I meant by "email is stable" is basically the way email is being sent and not email itself and the…

That's a valid point. The web is also pretty stable, but when you look at the past 10-15 years, there's been so much evolution around it. Doing things like rounded borders or dark mode is still very difficult, especially when you take into consideration all the different email clients like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Superhuman, and HEY. The web evolved, and now we don't hear too many complaints about having to desig…

The web is not stable at all. Everything about it except TCP/IP change rapidly.

Emails are still sent, received, and rendered similarly to the way they were 5-10 years ago.

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

#246
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he may have wondered how would, say a Python backend using Resend Python SDK, render a React Email template and send it. Their API docs [1] for "Send Email" has an option for specifying a 'react' component to render the message but it's only available on the NodeJS SDK. Otherwise you pass HTML and/or Text. Personally, I was expecting the api to optionally accept a React Template, along with the Data, where up…

Exactly this. Said differently - how many devs out there are screaming "I really need to send transactional email via React", when most apps are sending it via Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, and (back-end) JS.

Er, you can send the emails via whatever backend service you want. React merely acts as a templating language and when compiled down to HTML, you can then send the resultant file with Python, NodeJS, etc.

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

#247
post #240
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, but show what this will look like to the marketing team and they will, probably rightly, tell you that times have changed. For a major brand, CSS and pretty design is a requirement for all branded emails.

You can do all of that without CSS though. It’s just harder. For that having a React wrapper that makes the hard parts easy makes total sense.

How would you make branded emails without CSS?

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

#248
post #236
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this work if we don't need to validate domain?

We have a lot of anti-spam capabilities in the platform and if you abuse the service to send actual spam, your account may be rate limited or blocked. But if what you are sending is good email and we don't see signals to indicate it is abusive, then there aren't any limits on how much you can send.

This is quite cool than - will give that a try!

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

#249
> Slow performance: Current solutions only offer a single region for email sending, even when all your end users are located in another part of the world. We allow you to choose what region your emails should be sent from (US, Europe, or LATAM), which minimizes latency and improves time-to-inbox.

Why does this matter? Does the difference ever realistically exceed even one second?

(Assumptions: being transactional email, messages are generally small enough to play well with typical TCP window sizes; and you can send a message within about three round trips, which I could easily be wrong about—I suppose you’ve got TLS handshake, SMTP handshake, then data, not actually certain how much blocking happens in each of these steps. Maybe two seconds is a more realistic maximum realistic difference?)

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