What is the best way to send and receive transactional email?

5 points by grease 15y ago ↗ HN

I run a web-app where I would like receive facebook style transactional emails. For example, send an outgoing mail with a dynamic reply-to address of the form reply+2a3b4b2a34@domain.com (2a3b4b2a34 is dynamically generated hash)

This is in order that people can respond to notifications by replying to notifying email itself (rather than coming to the app). Now this poses multiple potential problems

1) Currently, I collect all incoming email to update@domain.com using google-apps. I then pull it to my server using IMAP, and then parse the response. I am a little uncomfortable doing this because I wonder if google really wants to use its email service in this manner. Or if they might have an issue with me receiving thousands of emails on this address.

2) What is a good way to remove quoted text in the incoming email (so that I can only use the actually reply)

Ideally, I would like to use an external service that takes care of such transactional emails, and use my server only for things that directly pertain to my app.

3 comments

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grease 15y ago ↗

EDIT: Just found this ... http://blog.sendgrid.com/why-you-should-not-use-noreplydomai...

JonLim 15y ago ↗

Are you looking for something like what Tender App (http://www.tenderapp.com) has, where every time someone creates a ticket or responds to your response, they send you an email with the content of the ticket, and you can respond directly to the email to post a response?

For outbound transactional mail, you should consider PostageApp (http://www.postageapp.com) to help design, send, and manage the reporting for your emails. I'm the Product Manager there, so I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.

As for the receiving and parsing of the emails, that's something a little outside of my expertise. However, if you do find an answer, I'd love to hear it!

Good luck.

Thanks, but I already use another service to handle sending transactional email. The ability to receive emails is what I'm looking for. I think sendgrid does it.