HN Explorer

Ask HN: Developers, how do you automate your email workflows?

23 points by tusharsoni ↗ HN
I am working on a project that involves me sending emails to check-in with the users to make sure they have everything they need. This is in addition to sending engagement emails few times a year. To make life a little bit easier, I have been researching email automation tools like Drip, Mailchimp etc. While these tools are great, they are fairly expensive for my usage and have way too many features.

For now, I was able to solve my problem by writing a custom solution that sends bulk emails using AWS SES. However, this got me wondering what a productized email automation tool for developers would look like?

So, if you are a developer working on small projects, what are your email automation needs? How do you solve them today?

20 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 61.0 ms ] thread
jmercouris
You can use GNUs and Emacs to easily automate your emailing solutions without needing to write much at all.
xyzwave
As an Emacs user looking to do this, can you expand on the workflows you’ve built?
jmercouris
Basically you can sort things in GNUS based on some rules. You can also perform any arbitrary lisp based on some rules. So you simply add some regex, check the body of the message, and then perform whatever actions you want by either depositing the messages in a queue, or just directly doing those operations.

Sorry if that was vague, there isn't much to really say about it. I'm afraid I have no helpful pointers/tips to give.

jimmyvalmer
Gnus is a thin veneer over raw elisp -- it's a framework like any other with mail objects and "best practices" ways of manipulating them. You'd need to be a green belt in elisp to "Gnus" a workflow. It's only a few steps away from building it from scratch in perl or python.
jmercouris
You are mostly correct. Elisp does however provide many functions for dealing with/sorting text not available on other platforms.
ecesena
Check out Sendy: https://sendy.co
tusharsoni
I saw Sendy and the product seems solid, although a little dated. I wonder if a more modern, hosted competitor to Sendy would be appealing to enough users.

I especially like their non-subscription based pricing model. I would opt for something on the lines of per-campaign pricing.

JonoBB
https://sendportal.io is a more modern alternative to Sendy.

(Disclaimer: I'm part of the dev team).

topicseed
Interesting product. Does your product handle follow-up email series (e.g. Woodpecker/Mailshake)? And drip campaigns?
JonoBB
Drip campaigns are coming soon!
toomuchtodo
What’s your business model/monetization strategy? Looks beautiful, but curious if it’s sustainable.
JonoBB
We'll be releasing a paid pro package with additional features (drip campaigns, advanced segmentation, etc).
toomuchtodo
I can't wait to pay for it. Thanks for taking the time to answer my question.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
vincent_s
Any chance drip campaigns will be part of the Open Source version?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
robk
Cloudmailin for all incoming then a fairly sophisticated parser app I wrote just using expressjs to put things into crm or tickets or forward as needed to the right folks.
tvbuzz
Just recently found Cloudmailin - love their product
soared
I’ve used Zapier for a lot of my low-volume email automation needs. You can have your email list on google sheets with dates for triggering a message, have a google doc email template with variables filled by the data in your sheet.

Probably doesn’t scale super well and mildly prone to breaking, but free and straightforward. Also easy to combine with google forms as well.

TheFullstackGuy
A lot of developers love to “build over buy”, but I think HubSpot would be a great solution to this use case. All of the features you want are available under the free tier