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Comment by sssaini | Hacker News Reader

I build indie side projects all the time and having an email automation is always an afterthought. Plus MailChimp automation is too expensive and to clunky.

So I decided to spend my Christmas holidays building an open source package called Candymail.

Candymail makes it easy to trigger and send multi-step email sequences in Node.js using a single JSON file.

Looking for some feedback, does it sound useful? Thank you And happy holidays :)

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How do you handle unsubscribing?

Easy: say its name into a mirror tree times to unsubscribe

No unsubscribe options as of now. For now, its left to the dev's discretion to not send annoying emails.

Though this sounds like a feature of a more managed solution. I know MailChimp has this out of the box (and possibly other providers).

Since this library is supposed to provide email automation capability, I'm not sure options like Unsubscribe should be part of the library.

What do you think? Definitely open to ideas.

Please do be aware, an unsubscribe button or instructions on how to is a legal requirement in many areas

Unsubscribe should definitely be part of this. Or at least a way to stop the emails from sending after a user has unsubbed, otherwise we enter dodgy GDPR complaint territory. Maybe a dealbreaker even. Cool product otherwise! Will keep an eye out for a chance to try it.

Overwhelming support for Unsubscribe. Moved higher in the issue backlog!

Unsub has to be there. It's literally illegal to use it in the UE.

This is a great way to get your domain added to blacklists for spam. I'd at least call it out in the Readme.

I'm in the US, so it would be illegal for me to deploy this without unsubscribe functionality.

I can't think of a quick and easy way to do it in your lib right now, but this kind of thing is pretty much why I use MailChimp/Sendgrid/etc. for even tiny projects.

There's no reason your app has to manage unsubscribes internally, this can be left up to the developer using your package to implement themselves. But it would be good to call it out in your docs that it's something they need to do.

If you have to manage unsubscribes yourself, you might as well use MailChimp or something similar. You'd probably lose a lot of dev time if you use this lib and then add onto it vs. something that works out of the box.

Added in 1.0.8. There's an in-memory list we keep of unsubscribed users. Anyone on that list will stop receiving all communications immediately.

Which email providers are available?

Currently only gmail since it was the easiest to implement. I would love to add more providers for better deliverability and overall not-going-to spaminess (not ideal to send bulk emails from personal gmails). What providers would you like to see?

I don't understand. Would it not be easiest to use smtp so you could use any provider? There's a reason we have open protocols.

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