How do I build an ESP (email service provider) tool like Mailchimp? | Hacker News Reader

How do I build an ESP (email service provider) tool like Mailchimp?

6 pointshronis7 comments

I'm curious how do email marketing tools get off the ground building, what are the steps?

Get a ton of IP space while it was cheap and available several decades ago (mailchimp has multiple /17s and is old enough to drink).

Mailgun was a Rackspace product and had access to basically infinite amounts of Rackspace IPs.

Mailjet and Mailgun are both owned by a marketing company.

Other than that it's just a message queue exercise.

It's a front-end application around a SMTP mail server. https://datacadamia.com/marketing/email/server You take your favorite language and you build your own. That's hard ... ip control (they may be blacklisted), high availability, bounce and other features requires a lot of work. The easy way is to create your application around a transactional email service. You pay for the email but not for the application :)

Do you know of any articles or information in general, how these hard things (ip control, bounce, ...) are done?

Bounce is an email send by the server when it can deliver an email. You just need to parse it.

Ip control is generally done via the dmarc report that you also get as email from email provider. https://datacadamia.com/marketing/email/dmarc

Email is very complex. The simple answer is if you have to ask you’re in over your head.

This is the worst answer I have read in a year. You should be gratefull someone taught you to wipe your butt. I think what you really meant to say was "I have no idea how email works either but I'm going to make you think you shouldn't try to figure it out because then you might become better than me."

I think what you really meant to say was “I’ve never built an ESP, scaled one, or maintained one but I’m going to criticize instead of giving any type of reasoned rebuttal to make you think I’m better than you without having to say anything of any substance.”

Congrats, outside of pure prejudice, this is the worst comment reply I’ve received on HN.

When you get your “5 Easy Steps for Building ESPs (#4 Will Shock You!)” blog post up I can’t wait to read it.

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