Show HN: Maildown – Super Simple Email API | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Maildown – Super Simple Email API

github.com

98 pointschris14095721 comments

I'm planning to add support for other email backends. For me, AWS makes the most sense as it's basically free for 99.9% of the population with its 62k free monthly email limit

Do you know whether the "62k free monthly emails limit" of the free-tier is available to existing AWS accounts, or a new AWS account must be created to enjoy free-tier billing?

Thanks!

EDIT: BTW, nice project!

I believe its 62k free monthly emails for anyone, regardless of how long you've had your AWS account

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/

Do you have to do your own queueing to make sure you're not sending too many emails all at once and they get marked as spam? Or does SES handle that for you? And if it doesn't, is there any service that will do this?

AWS handles that stuff for you. You can use SNS to monitor stuff like deliverability

Wow! That's amazing! What's the purpose of having your own dedicated IP then?

Sounds like new and existing accounts, but only if the email originates within AWS EC2:

> When you call Amazon SES from an application hosted in Amazon EC2, you can send 62,000 messages per month at no charge. This Free Usage Tier benefit does not expire.

https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/

Nice project! Can I offer a suggestion? Add support for goold old sendmail. Every email provider (Mailgun, Sendgrid, SES and others) have SMTP support and sendmail instructions. All of my home servers are already configured with it, so adding markdown to this setup would be sick.

Sure, I'm already planning to add other backends as an alternative to AWS. Feel free to add a note to issue #7 and I'll get on the case

It seems like the benefit is in sending markdown email from cli.

I'd actually love to be able to do this now that I think about it (I'm sure there's ways to do this already)

What is a markdown email? Is it a mail body written in markdown, using the unprocessed markdown for the text/plain part, and generating a html part from the same?

Pretty sure you could to that with pandoc and heirloom mailx or something similar.

That's pretty much it. Maildown reduces this process to a one liner, however

Hi I'm really grateful for your open sourcing this just because I get to ogle at how you write your python to interact with AWS SES

Thanks!

Except for the Markdown part, this command line looks very similar to the most minimal old Unix email interface. (Anti-spam measures effectively ended that, and now we need to pay service providers.)

I expected infinite recursion in the screenshot :)

Sadly, since I fixed a typo in the readme it doesn't match at all

sadly just a wrapper around Amazon AWS SES

Why is it "sadly"? I would say that it is happily a wrapped around SES. There are use case for using mkdown in email and this tool helps address those use cases.

Good job OP!

I feel this unnecessarily complicates things. If you want to send emails via SES, why not just use something like https://www.sendwithses.com or https://moonmail.io/

Neither of these services is free. Not sure how this complicates things any more - it's a one liner to send an email

Seems the tool mentioned in this post is more for transactional email. But I wanted to comment on moonmail. Looks like that is for newsletters. I think https://sendy.co is sort of the same offering but much cheaper (you do have to host it yourself).

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