Plunk: The open source email platform • Hacker News Board

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#51

Post by crote » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 9:34 PM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #28

v3ss0n wrote: post #5

Why on top of SES? why not SMTP?

Because delivery rates through self-hosted SMTP are lower than through commercial e-mail delivery services; the latter being close to unity[1] and the former ranging from near-zero to about 7/8 depending on how much work and time you put into doing things. 1: My "close to unity" number comes from my experience with the mailgun APIs, I assume that SES is similar.

I absolutely hate how it feels like the e-mail delivery services and Google/Microsoft/whatever are working together to form a protection racket: sure would be a shame if your email were to get lost, better pay us to guarantee it makes it to its destination...

Imagine the outrage if your national snail mail carrier were to shred 50% of all mail which didn't have a Premium Protection stamp. Why do we let the big cloud hosters get away with it?

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#52

Post by layer8 » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 9:51 PM UTC

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #48

layer8 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s misleading to call it an “email platform” you can self-host though.

It confused you. That doesn’t make it misleading.

It didn't confuse me, it mislead me.

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#53

Post by dandigangi » Wed, Aug 07, 2024, 2:40 AM UTC

bgentry wrote: post #24

Having recently adopted Resend and skimmed a bunch of different email APIs, I'm still waiting to find a single provider whose API supports Stripe-style idempotency [1] so that I can guarantee I don't send the same email through their API multiple times. I'd like to confidently avoid accidentally spamming a user if i.e. a background job retries multiple times due to an unrelated error, or merely from failing to receiv…

Hi. I recently took over engineering at Postmark. Noted! Thanks for the feedback.

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#54

Post by dandigangi » Wed, Aug 07, 2024, 2:41 AM UTC

johtso wrote: post #33

bgentry wrote: post #24

Having recently adopted Resend and skimmed a bunch of different email APIs, I'm still waiting to find a single provider whose API supports Stripe-style idempotency [1] so that I can guarantee I don't send the same email through their API multiple times. I'd like to confidently avoid accidentally spamming a user if i.e. a background job retries multiple times due to an unrelated error, or merely from failing to receiv…

This is exactly what I've been wrestling with recently.. it's so disappointingly absent in all the offerings out there. The solution I ended up with was to build my own pseudo-idempotency around Postmark. It helps that Postmark at least has proper persistence so you can query their API to check if you've already sent a certain email. I had to move away from Mailchimp because, if an email gets queued for some reason,…

Hi. Thanks for the feedback. Recently took over Postmark's engineering and interested in seeing where we can do better as we keep building.

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#55

Post by Sytten » Wed, Aug 07, 2024, 3:42 AM UTC

dandigangi wrote: post #53

bgentry wrote: post #24

Having recently adopted Resend and skimmed a bunch of different email APIs, I'm still waiting to find a single provider whose API supports Stripe-style idempotency [1] so that I can guarantee I don't send the same email through their API multiple times. I'd like to confidently avoid accidentally spamming a user if i.e. a background job retries multiple times due to an unrelated error, or merely from failing to receiv…

Hi. I recently took over engineering at Postmark. Noted! Thanks for the feedback.

While you are here, I have been asking for years to have better access control on API keys so they can only use assigned servers. So my staging cant send prod emails...

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#56

Post by prmoustache » Wed, Aug 07, 2024, 6:24 AM UTC

mervz wrote: post #47

prmoustache wrote: post #7

> built on top of AWS SES. [...] can be considered as a self-hosted alternative to services Someone doesn't really understand self-hosting.

So if an application uses a 3rd party provider for authentication (Google, Github, etc) is this no longer considered "self-hosted", despite it running on user's hardware? I'm curious to know where you draw your imaginary line.

It depends if that 3rd party provider is mandatory or not or if you have the option of having local auth / your own keycloak server, whatever.

Once you have an external requirement and not option, it is no longer a self-hostable software.

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#57

Post by prmoustache » Wed, Aug 07, 2024, 6:25 AM UTC

nucleardog wrote: post #40

teddyh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is literallly what it means.

Where's the line, then? You're always going to have external dependencies, so in your usage it seems like an unattainable ideal more-so than a useful phrase anyone could use to convey ideas. In my utility room I've got a box running TrueNAS with a pile of hard-drives serving data over SMB and NFS. I've got a bunch of tiny business desktop PCs all set up in a k3s cluster hosting a variety of services for myself, famil…

> Where's the line, then? You're always going to have external dependencies

uh no. Only if you choose to.

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#58

Post by prmoustache » Wed, Aug 07, 2024, 7:38 AM UTC

weego wrote: post #29

teddyh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is literallly what it means.

This is self hosted. I think we'd all accept that a "self hosted Stripe" that obviously had to offload payment processing to a third party gateway could still be self hosted because the platform is, not every dependency. Volume email is not something you should be looking to 'self host' and would leave the product dead on arrival if it did. It feels like pedantry to critique that aspect so heavily over spirit v lette…

This is one thing to have a self hostable platform you can plug to any email infrastructure of you choice, another one to have it dependent on one specific vendor.

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#59

Post by driaug » Wed, Aug 07, 2024, 8:13 AM UTC

egamirorrim wrote: post #49

Looks kind of cool. When sending a transactional email can I pass loads of custom parameters to be substituted in to placeholders in the template? I can't see anything in the docs about it.

You can!

https://docs.useplunk.com/working-with-contacts/metadata

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#60

Post by driaug » Wed, Aug 07, 2024, 8:17 AM UTC

All,

Founder of Plunk here. Yes, Plunk is designed to work with AWS SES. I was not the one that made it hard for folks to self-host their own email infrastructure. SES is simply the cheapest and most reliable option out there. Reminder, we are not talking about a private "let's send 10 emails a day" solution. This needs to deliver marketing emails at scale.

Does that mean you have to use SES, no. The code is open-source, swap it out for another provider if you truly believe that you can do it better. I'm open for contributions.

That's the beauty of open-source.