Looks good from a first look at it, congrats on launching it!
Just checked if you mention bounces and saw that you track bounces; how does your app show / keep track of the bounces and more importantly of the bounce rate in general?
I'm mentioning this since Amazon SES will place your account under review if your bounce rate is 5% or greater; you can find a few useful links on this comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21955614
Best of luck with your app!
Disclaimer: I was responsible for the implementation of an e-mail notification system using Amazon SES.
You can subscribe to post backs from SES. These post back tell you message-by-message if a message was delivered/bounced.. so "simple" process of storing the results. Need to track the unique message ID, some you might get multiple responses for the same message (e.g. delivered, then marked spam)
There might also be a CLI call to get summary stats.
Exactly, that's what we did with our solution, too; we maintaned our own bounce list with a TTL that we kept up-to-date by subscribing to SNS notifications generated by SES.
My question was aimed towards the bounces feature presented on the app homepage [0]; if you ignore (or don't realize the importance of) the bounce rate you might shoot yourself in the foot.
No, this is not the way to handle this. Please read up on how you must treat bounces on AWS SES or you face an account stop/closure. E.g. you MUST remove addresses from future sending once they permanently bounce.
Offering a software solution without offering a feature for correct bounce handling is just naive.
Your features list is a bit misleading, then. On your app's homepage you specifically mention the tracking of bounces as part of the app's features.
I'm all for launching early and so on, but I have a feeling that this is a rather important feature to simply be omitted in the beginning, especially in regard to Amazon SES and their handling of exceeding bounce rates.
My two cents - I personally get put off by business models that include a lifetime access one time purchase option.
From my personal experience (as a prolific SaaS early adopter) it typically indicates that either; the software is a get rich quick scheme (e.g. spin up/spin down VPNs), or the founders haven’t accounted for scaling/recurring organisational costs in their business model.
If your product is good and it continues to provide value, people will continue to pay to access that value. There is no need to short change your business model with an infinite customer commitment ;)
its just for the first few customers, i am good dev but not too good at marketing i have some good distribution channel for LTD customers to whom i sold blurweb.app to 1000 customers the ltd revenue will fuel and accelarate the growth
What wording is similar? Interfaces also look different and their homepages look completely different. Using your logic, Mailmeteor looks as much like YAMM as this one does to Mailmeteor. Like I said, they all kinda look similar and do the same thing.
With MailMeteor you are limited by gmail limit of sending while sendsimple you can use SMTP's like Amazon SES and sendgrid to send unlimited mail every day.
We have text messaging in road map too with twillio overall my plan is to make sending simple
as a human we can see face in bread with two tomato slices and some ketchup, yes they have similarity in ux but no they are not same check landing page demo video please
are you joking? you copied everything from their website to the interface. I've been using MM for 3 years now and can say this is a very lame attempt at copying a great product.
sorry i should not joke, professional answer: i will request to give sendsimple.app a try i have made it free to try no card or anything and see yourself the difference please
- an email like template with input fields (to, cc, bcc, from, body, etc).
- a table where the user can specify the column headers and add a list of values. The headers are considered keys. The keys can then be referenced in mustache quotes anywhere in the template.
I also added attachment functionality since it was for a very specific use-case.
The tool would then create 1 email per entry in the user table, filling in all wildcards. As you can imagine, it doesn't use SES or Sendgrid .. it uses Outlook for the sending :) Good times! the business loved it, but coding in VBA is a bit of a PITA.
You may want to take a look at https://sendportal.io, which integrates with SES, Postmark, Sendgrid, Mailgun and shows full info on opens, clicks, bounces, etc.
Been using it with mailjet. Since it's open source I just have a job in it that pulls my clients/subscribers from my main app and segments them automatically. I also define some number goals and can send out deals, updates automatically and just check in when I want. Really good tool, I also updated the template previewer so it's more realtime without the preview click.
i am using convertkit for one of my product blurweb app now i am crossing 1000 soon
i. just send product updates so their pricing can get so expensive when i don't even have a much need for automations and other hence using sendsimple its simple and affordable
It looks nice, but not really sure who the target market for it is?
It's pretty easy for a dev to send emails from Google Sheets using Apps Script. If you want to send bulk, custom emails, then something like MailChimp can do this for free/cheap.
If you're looking to send thousands of emails, then you likely have a large customer base or a big marketing budget and can afford a proper tool.
I mainly use Sheets to automate internal processes, linking to Google Forms. Plus there's free tools out there, for example AutoCrat[0] that can do a similar thing, albeit without the SendGrid/SES link. But then again, if you're aware of SES you're probably technically minded.
I may be wrong though, good luck with it either way. If it doesn't gain traction, open sourcing it with a tip jar may be a nice touch and help keep it alive.
i think cold emails is a good usecase, with gmail if send 100s of email at a time or have bounce rate more than 5% you will get blocked so SMTP's can be really helpful
this is the Version 1 i have a lot planned to be added and improve
If you have a 5% bounce rate or more, you're already doing something wrong - i.e. your emailing addresses no longer existing. Make sure you have permission to email a recipient.
No offense but this is a very naive perspective on certain types of emails. For example for one-on-one cold sales emails you don't need their permission to email them. And there is an entire industry built around that.
Don't think so. Doesn't seem like SG would be in business very long if that was the case.
We use sendgrid in production. Once in 2 years, we got the report that our shared IP had spam come from it, but was handled automatically by SendGrid once reported.
We have four dedicated IPs with them and have found there are a variety of providers (such as Comcast and, oddly, a lot of French ISPs) who use systems (such as Mimecast or Symantec) which basically mark down the entirety of Sendgrid's IP address space. So we now have Postmark as a "fall back" for failed deliveries which is working quite well.
Yeah, there's been a lot of talk about mail admins simply dropping all packets from Sendgrid's range. At least one of my customers assign a higher spam score to mails simply because they're from Sendgrid.
Is there a pay-as-you-go pricing (OK to be a higher than monthly) too? I'm looking for something like this but am willing to pay when I need but won't use it regularly.
we just launched yesterday, will be completing them all
We have plan to be not just "mail" merge i am trying to make sending simple so will be adding text messaging with twillio and even discussing partnership with some whatsapp api to send whatsapp message from google sheets
Have you spoken with a lawyer yet? You may be facilitating CAN-SPAM violations in the USA, and possibly violations of similar protective legislation elsewhere, if you don’t take proper precautions immediately. If you’re worried, I would suspend operations until you can get a sign off on what you’re doing.
Just checked if you mention bounces and saw that you track bounces; how does your app show / keep track of the bounces and more importantly of the bounce rate in general?
I'm mentioning this since Amazon SES will place your account under review if your bounce rate is 5% or greater; you can find a few useful links on this comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21955614
Best of luck with your app!
Disclaimer: I was responsible for the implementation of an e-mail notification system using Amazon SES.