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Comment by jswinghammer | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little confused about the need for this service. What languages don't have decent email support at this point? I guess I've never run into this before.

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You mean the support for MIME in stdlib, right? Based on the questions our customer support gets, quite a lot: just like we explained in the blog post. And based on the number of malformed and broken MIME we get via SMTP, even those that do aren't easy to understand for many.

Based on the calls/emails I personally had to answer, things like encoding, or making sure that HTML and text parts are specified in a certain order, or the aforementioned "Bcc mystery" bite quite a lot of people.

EDIT: forgot to add something: check out the "test mode" feature, you'd be amazed at how many people call us to flush up their email queue because they ran their unit tests on the production database! :)

It's pretty trivial to bind MIME C-libraries like GMime for use in any language on any platform.

http://spruce.sourceforge.net/gmime/

It's a high-level library (unlike most other MIME libraries) which makes constructing and parsing MIME trivial.

You're like the people who said Dropbox wouldn't succeed, because they had no need for it, because they could just setup rsync. Fact of the matter is that mailgun seems to have empirical proof that a lot of programmers have no clue what they're doing, and would be willing to pay for something that makes their lives easier. That's like lesson #0 of hacker news: people will pay for things that make their lives easier.

I'd love to see the actual question answered.

JavaScript and PHP immediately come to mind. Ruby has a few MIME libs of a poor quality. Perl and Python have excellent MIME facilities but, as I said above, many developers simply aren't interested in learning MIME to begin with. We eliminated MIME on the receiving end earlier (see our "email routing" API) and now we've taken the next logical step: we have eliminated MIME on the other end.

Besides, email is huge. In includes at least 4 non-trivial network protocols, several storage formats and a sea of proprietary ESP-specific extensions is error codes. There is no such thing as an "email support" in any language, only bits and pieces of uneven quality, therefore the most honest and shortest answer would be "all of them".

Mailgun also allows to receive emails, it will make http post request at your end-point. very neat stuff actually.

That's a very compelling feature. When having to read mail comes up it's usually out of the ordinary from whatever I'm doing but if I could just make a page to process what's in it then that would be interesting.

It's nice having official servers to send email from. I had a simple little app a while back that sent email via Python's SMTP module, but most of the emails I was sending were getting caught by Gmail's spam trap. Using Mailgun to send those emails worked just fine, plus their api is nice.

> most of the emails I was sending were getting caught by Gmail's spam trap

The solution I came up with was to simply use GMail. With their business suite, you'll be able to use your own domain and get access to their SMTP servers.

This won't work if you're sending thousands of emails per day, but a few hundred should be ok.

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