Mailgun's company blog covers email delivery, HTML email templates, infrastructure security, and open source tools such as a Go debugger.
HN commenters link it for transactional email templates, security guides, and the Go debugger announcement, and call the template post a great resource.
> Sorry to break it to you, but there are things you got wrong.
I would have been surprised if this was different!
> The first thing I opened, "IT operations", and the very top item is false.
You seem to be talking about the SMTP ports, right? What do you suggest instead? Port 465 with SSL/TLS and only as a secondary solution 587 with STARTTLS?
The current statement was based on [1] which recommends not to use port 465 but instead only 587 with STARTTLS. Granted, with STARTTLS, you have some additional attack vectors.
[1] http://blog.mailgun.com/25-465-587-what-port-should-i-use/
For the record, both of the people who have praised Swiftype in this thread are actual Swiftype customers, and both of them have written about Swiftype on their own sites (without prompting from us).
http://canadian-fury.com/2012/05/19/presenting-swiftype-integration-and-an-explanation-of-how-to-do-it/
http://blog.mailgun.com/post/weekly-product-update-mailgun-default-smtp-config-for-rackspace-managed-cloud-plus-better-search-on-docs/
One may find the following resources useful for measures on how to secure one's infrastructure:
- Security Guide: How to Protect Your Infrastructure Against the Basic Attacker [0]
- 7 Security Measures to Protect Your Servers [1]
[0] http://blog.mailgun.com/security-guide-basic-infrastructure-security/
[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/7-security-measures-to-protect-your-servers
Yep. I'd like to add that some ESPs have their own additional restrictions on mailbox names, plus it's usually helpful to verify the existence of the domain part (DNS) because people make mistakes all the time.
We (Mailgun) have a free service which does all of these things:
http://blog.mailgun.com/post/free-email-validation-api-for-web-forms/
The subset of HTML that is actually supported by most email clients is very small (and inconsistent). If you look at the well-formatted emails from AirBnB and Uber, you'll see tables and inline CSS, along with conditionals for the Outlook email client.[1]
[1] http://blog.mailgun.com/transactional-html-email-templates/
Agreed, these are very expensive if all they are is responsive email templates. ThemeForest offers similar quality for about $12, and there are lots of free ones available as well:
Zurb - http://foundation.zurb.com/emails.html
Mailgun - http://blog.mailgun.com/transactional-html-email-templates/