I am talking with Matthew Clemente about "send.Better() - Giving ColdFusion Email a REST" in this episode of CF Alive Podcast. 

Your application sends emails; they might be alerts, confirmations, reports, surveys, newsletters, support-related, or invoices. The process of setting up, maintaining, and troubleshooting these emails generally alternates between boring and frustrating; developers are happy to move on to richer, more modern portions of their applications.

It really doesn't have to be like this. AWS SES might be the best known of the transactional email services, but that doesn't mean it's the best. Mailgun, Sendgrid, Postmark, and Sparkpost all provide compelling email-as-a-service offerings, built around developer-focused REST APIs.

The offerings and features varying slightly from one provider to the next; which is the best for you? As usual, the answer is that it depends, but I'll help you find out. We're going to cover:

The benefits provided by using a transactional email service

A pragmatic, use-driven comparison of the major players in the space

Pitfalls, considerations, and tips when configuring your DNS records and integrating a transactional email service with your application

Interacting with the actual APIs, and showing how easy they are to use with ColdFusion

So let's dive in and see easy it is to send better emails, get detailed reporting, access logging that doesn't make you want to pull your hair out, and take advantage of advanced features, such as webhooks, transactional templates, and inbound email rules.

Show notes

But isn’t email dead?

Open, accessible, resilient

Slack, messaging

Email as in interface for your application (it’s neglected)

Transactional emails

Use cases

Purchase confirm

Mini surveys with links for options

Account creation

Email verification

Password reset

Receipts

Requested updates

Comment notifications

Weekly digests or report

Where Speed and deliverability matter

CFMAIL + SMTP settings

TLS on encrypted send

Set in your Application.cfc rather than hardcoding in each CFMAIL tag

Dev → stage → live

Mailtrap.io ← fake smtp server for mocking

Why emails on Dev servers matter and how to do them right

Send Plain text and HTML emails

Why transactional email services?

Separate from your marketing and other emails → better deliverability and speed

Lots more data on your emails is available

Which email services do you like?

Which is best (trick question, they all have specific use cases that make sense)

AWS SES - low cost, less features, harder to set up $5/50k emails

Postmark - pure transactional emails, highest deliverability, speed, great features, more expensive $50/50k emails

Spartpost - developer friendly, free tier to 10k/mo, more marketing focused $9/50k emails

Sendgrid - does both transactional and marketing emails $20/50k emails

mailGun - developer friendly, free tier to 15k/mo, detailed developer features and logging, good inbound email handling, $20/50k emails

Who NOT to use and why?

MailChimp

GetResponse

ConstantContact

Deliverability

SPF

DKIM

DMARC

Dmarc.postmarkapp.com - friendly reporting

How to test your deliverability (Mail-tester.com)

How to set a transactional email service

Use a subdomain for config but can send from your main domain

REST API or SMTP

Start with SMTP

If you need more features move to REST

Also faster

CFML wrappers exist for these

Using Web hooks in email processing

Inbound

Bounce processing

Link processing and verification

Email open processing

Zapier integration

The future of ColdFusion email

Why are you proud to use CF?

Easy to create

Community that helps out esp slack channel

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

CF slack channel

CF Alive podcast

Help with Github projects