SendGrid Integration

[Joshua Smith]

Dunno how I missed this, but given the train wreck of GAE's email delivery, this is very promising:

https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/sendgrid

-Joshua

[Dan Holevoet]

Hi Joshua,

It was just announced this morning. More details here: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2013/07/sendgrid-gives-app-engine-developers.html

Thanks,

Dan

-Joshua

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Dan Holevoet

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[pdknsk]

Hmm is this a sign that Google will soon remove the email functionality (at least for new applications)? I've been wondering how email will work when Google removes the Google Apps requirement for domains.

[pdknsk]

Hmm to get feature parity (plus some extra features to be fair), you need to subscribe to the $80/month package. In particular "DKIM customization", to setup DKIM records for your domain. This is available at no extra charge when you setup App Engine with a custom domain through Google Apps.

http://sendgrid.com/pricing

[Vinny P]

On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 9:29 PM, pdknsk <pdk...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hmm to get feature parity (plus some extra features to be fair), you need to subscribe to the $80/month package. In particular "DKIM customization", to setup DKIM records for your domain. This is available at no extra charge when you setup App Engine with a custom domain through Google Apps.

http://sendgrid.com/pricing

 

 

+1.

 

I hope GAE's mail service isn't going anywhere - SendGrid is expensive when it comes to certain services.

 

 

 

-----------------

-Vinny P

Technology & Media Advisor

Chicago, IL

App Engine Code Samples: http://www.learntogoogleit.com

 

 

[Jay]

Joshua, what issues are you referring to? If I rely on GAE for bulk email, am I getting myself in trouble?

[Joshua Smith]

Mail has never worked very well in GAE.

- Sending messages will sometimes fail for no reason, so you have to put the code to send any important messages into a task so it can retry

  (Note that since URLFetch also fails for no reason, with alarming regularity, I suspect sending email via SendGrid will need the same protections)

- The headers GAE put into the message are awful, and scary, and convince users that they are looking at spam. For example, gmail shows this one:

Return-Path: <3INEmUQgJB-sXNba-YbTTZNVY.P...@m3kw2wvrgufz5godrsrytgd7.apphosting.bounces.google.com>

- Despite DKIM, SPF and friends, a lot of GAE-sourced email gets blocked by corporate spam filters

- Quotas are really tight when first getting started, and never get all that loose

- The "from" address of any email you send MUST be either an admin or a user logged in via google oauth

- Google's #1 priority with outbound email is that GAE not become a spam platform, and this colors every technical decision they make around email

And yes, if you rely on GAE for bulk email, you are definitely getting yourself into trouble.

[Jeff Schnitzer]

FWIW, we recently switched to elasticemail.com after reviewing over a dozen options. So far so good, and they're pretty cheap. The biggest problem with the GAE mail system (for us) is that you can't have divergent Sender and From headers, and thus can't send email on behalf of users:

https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=9516

We send our admin alerts out through GAE mail - that way if something goes wrong with our prod email system we will get notified.

It's good practice to use the task queue for anything that is by nature async, like sending mail. *Especially* something that requires an external connection. There's no point in making a user wait.

Jeff

[Joshua Smith]

On Aug 8, 2013, at 11:23 AM, Jeff Schnitzer <je...@infohazard.org> wrote:

It's good practice to use the task queue for anything that is by nature async, like sending mail. *Especially* something that requires an external connection. There's no point in making a user wait.

That's true. But in my case, these emails are typically sent by cron jobs, so having to stick a task in the middle just to get retries is a PITA.

-Joshua

[Vinny P]

On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Joshua Smith <Joshua...@charter.net> wrote:

Mail has never worked very well in GAE.

- Sending messages will sometimes fail for no reason, so you have to put the code to send any important messages into a task so it can retry

  (Note that since URLFetch also fails for no reason, with alarming regularity, I suspect sending email via SendGrid will need the same protections)

- The headers GAE put into the message are awful, and scary, and convince users that they are looking at spam. For example, gmail shows this one:

Return-Path: <3INEmUQgJB-sXNba-YbTTZNVY.PbZfhccbegXNba.PbZ@m3kw2wvrgufz5godrsrytgd7.apphosting.bounces.google.com>

 

 

+1 to the above.

 

Sending mail to external, non-admin accounts has always been difficult at best with GAE's mail system. Microsoft-owned email services (Outlook.com for example) in particular have high reject rates for GAE email.