Mailjet's company blog covers its email delivery service, API guides, email templates, and product announcements such as its acquisition by Mailgun.
HN links it for email deliverability explainers, its MJML templating language, its open API documentation process, and the inbound email parsing feature.
Most clients seem to respect the Reply-To header, but they're not required to [1], and some popular MS ones in particular seem to ignore it, at least in some cases [2, 3].
There are a bunch of arguments for avoiding "noreply" addresses in the first place [4, 5]. We started using our customer service email as the from/reply-to for password resets and other service emails, with good results.
But that's not a good option for messages you're sending on behalf of particular users... the replies are probably intended specifically for those users. I'm running into something similar with emailed invitations from my site, and have been thinking about ways to get the replies back to the user doing the inviting.
You could try something like:
From: "John Smith via ExampleCo" <replies+encoded-user-id@example.com>
where "encoded-user-id" is a signed and timestamped identifier that lets you identify your "John Smith" user, so you can forward the reply to them (or insert it in their newsfeed in your product, or whatever makes sense). You'd have to be very careful to validate incoming replies, to avoid creating an open mail relay or a vector for spammers to reach your users. (Services that implement anonymous/private replies, like Craigslist, use an approach like this.)
Does anyone know of any well-tested packages that safely provide this sort of reply forwarding? Or transactional ESPs that offer it directly?
[1]:…
From their history[0]:
> At the end of May 2010, Julien Tartarin and Wilfried Durand meet...
> We pull all-nighters and the product takes shape. A bêta version is launched after Le Web 2010. The first version goes live in February 2011. One year after, Mailjet gathers more thant 15 collaborators and sends tens of millions each week!
Also, check their job offers page [1]
I'd say they're already on cruise mode, and gathering people and funds to grow. Here investments of such scale are reserved to low risk, well established start-ups.
[0] http://www.mailjet.com/About-us.htm
[1] http://www.mailjet.com/jobs
Never thought of using a third-party relay SMTP server. That's a great idea.
Gmail has a relay [0][1], but I'm not sure if it's still free now that the G Suite free tier is gone.
Amazon SES [2] has competitive pricing, or it's free (first 62,000 emails per month) if you're using EC2 for sending email.
Then there's a bunch of marketing oriented SMTP providers that have free tiers. E.g. mailjet [3].
[0] https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/free-smtp-server/
[1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/2956491?hl=en
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/
[3] https://www.mailjet.com/pricing/
If sending emails is 100% free, but you still have to worry about your sender reputation. [1] Sending a large amount of mail to invalid emails will start getting your emails put in people's spam folders. That's the reason email validation services exist, to prevent sending to invalid emails. [2]
Also, humans make mistakes. You should detect spelling errors and typos then suggest corrections. [3]
[1] https://www.mailjet.com/blog/news/3-factors-that-impact-your-ip-reputation/]
[2] https://www.mailgun.com/email-validation/
[3] https://www.npmjs.com/package/mailcheck
Have you checked out Mailjet[1]?
They created MJML[2], an email templating language that I've used quite a bit. The WYSIWYG editor for Mailjet leverages it, and creates pretty slick looking and compatible email templates if you don't want to use MJML directly.
[1] https://www.mailjet.com/
[2] https://mjml.io/
Yes, I'm not happy with this article's title. Basically I thought that Mailjet made a brilliant choice in open sourcing the process of crafting their API documentation[1], and Best Buy has decided to follow suit.
[1] https://www.mailjet.com/blog/introducing-new-mailjet-api-guides/