Show HN: Maildown – super simple email API | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Maildown – super simple email API

maildown.dev

40 pointschris14095721 comments

Hi, I just launched Maildown.

As a serial hacker, I've built a lot of small applications over the years and have always found email setup (whether transactional or marketing) to be a bit of a chore. I don't like the WYSIWYG editors or the process of manually uploading CSV contact lists that all the big email providers seem to use.

I've created Maildown to simplify this process - its just a single REST API that accepts emails in markdown syntax, and allows you to generate and send beautiful emails simply and quickly

Thanks for looking Chris

Cool! Do you handle updating users’ email addresses? That’s a challenge we’ve had with sendgrid. A user updates their email address and now they’re no longer unsubscribed if they unsubscribed previously.

We currently don't support that either - but give me one day and I'll come up with a solution for this...

What works in other systems (intercom, for example) is allowing callers to pass a user ID with every call. Then you can match on that and unsubscribe the user rather than the email itself.

We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection

I'm curious as to how you are sending the emails under the hood to make the best effort that the emails don't get flagged as spam.

Emails are all sent by AWS. When you first sign up, you're sent a verification email from AWS to confirm your ownership of that address. I'm also hoping to improve this further in the near future by adding DKIM verification also.

Most of the complexity in building this app has been around preventing abuse of the service for the purpose of sending spam emails by closely monitoring what's being sent via AWS SNS.

Love the idea. I had a similar idea but using some type of WYSIWYG templating, but never started. I was afraid of finding a sustainable marketing channel. There is a lot of competition and any type of paid ads for those keywords are extremely high. I hope you'll figure it out!

Thanks, this is actually my second attempt at launching this - I tried and gave up fairly quickly a year or so ago. But actually I've built a few side projects in total and I've always thought this sort of service would add more value to myself then any of the other things I've built.

I think the right way to build this up is to target a niche, rather than attempt to compete with the big players, so that's what I'm hoping to do eventually

For me one of the pain points I had as a beginner was setting the DNS records. I couldn't figure out what I was doing and the propagation time was making me anxious because I never knew if I implemented it right. Also, I think SNS has a limit of 10000 domains, do you know what to do after that?

Your branding is pointing to a tailwind CSS starter page.

Thanks for the heads up, I'll get that updated ASAP

your style sheet is being blocked for me:

Refused to apply style from 'https://maildown.dev/' because its MIME type ('text/html') is not a supported stylesheet MIME type, and strict MIME checking is enabled.

just noticed this on Safari on iOS - checking now...

it's going to happen in all browsers, you're not linking to a CSS file

`<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maildown.dev">`

Yep, turns out a small tweak I made to the headers was to blame. It's fixed now

typo: "way to end beautiful"

Also, I'd get rid of the image or make it darker.

Good luck!

Thanks, updated the typo now, and will have a think about the image

What does this mean - "Start Free Now" Where is the pricing page and why is it hidden ?

I've changed the copy on this button now - I agree it wasn't great. The pricing page was previously only visible to logged in users (purely because it highlights the current plan, and because its the starting point of the checkout process) but I've edited this now too to make it visible from the landing page.

Typo I presume?:

> Markdown syntax

> Maildown supports mrkdown syntax

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