[Feature]: Email Notifications

[calebbourg]

Suggestion / Feature Request

Implement email notifications.

• First notification to implemented is TBD
• Find email notification provider that will integrate well with our Rust BE

[calebbourg]

I did some research on a number of different email services this morning. My criteria was based on:

• Cost structure
• Customization:
  • Being able to build templates within a provider's own UI as opposed to having to send HTML as part of API requests.
  • Being able to use our own domain as part of a lower tiered plan

The two that stood out were:

Resend

• They have a rust SDK available which I thought was really cool.
  The main drawback is that they don't support building templates, applying CSS within their platform. We'd have send the HTML from our BE.

From their examples:

  let email = CreateEmailBaseOptions::new(from, to, subject)
    .with_html("<strong>It works!</strong>");

I have very little experience building email templates this way, but in the past I've witnessed my team members struggling to get the CSS, and other assets to render correctly across different mail clients. Similar to having to support various browsers except that the code would be coming from our BE and as such would not have access to a lot of the bells and whistles that something like React has or Webpack.

So I hope to avoid that situation unless someone is more of an expert at it than I or things have changed since I last worked with this stuff.

mailersend

• My top pick at the moment.
• It allows for us to build templates within their UI using pre-build components that they provide, OR with raw HTML and they have a preview mechanism that allows us to know how the HTML will render.
• Once we build a template we can inject dynamic content using tags like {{user_name}} or {{reset_password_url}} etc. the values of which are sent as JSON key values via their API when we trigger an email from our BE.
• This is a paradigm I'm used to and happy with and gives us a lot of flexibility
• The pricing structure is reasonable with a free tier that gives us 3000 emails (I think altogether) and then $1 per 1000 emails after that which, I think, is great for our beta testing phase. the next tier is $28/mo and gives us 50,000 emails/mo as well as 100 SMS/mo

There are a many others out there with similar features, but this one stood out for features vs pricing.
Let me know what ya'll think. Happy to chat more about it as well.

[calebbourg]

We decided in discussion to go with mailersend.

cc: @jhodapp @lmcdonough