I have an e-commerce website that needs to send emails to my clients to confirm shipping… Do you have any free software to advise to send emails with a rest API? Thanks

  • @[email protected]English
    6•1 year ago

    Eh, I wouldn’t go about ‘the self-hosted admins didn’t do anything!’. There never really was a time when the majority (or even a meaningiful minority) of users hosted their own email.

    In the beginning, you got your email address from your school or your ISP, and it changed whenever you left/changed providers, so the initial “free” email came from the likes of Hotmail (which rapidly became Microsoft), Yahoo (which was uh, Yahoo), and offerings from the big ISPs of the era, like AOL and whatnot.

    You still had school and ISP email, but it just rapidly fell out of fashion because your Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL email never changed regardless of what ISP you used or whatever, so it was legitimately a better solution.

    And then Google came along with Gmail and it was so much better than every other offering that they effectively ate the whole damn market by default because all the people who were providing the free webmail at that time didn’t do a damn thing to improve until after Google had already “won”.

    So if you want to be mad, this is firmly Microsoft and Yahoo’s fault for being lazy fucks.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 year ago

      I agree that is sucks but my advice is purely practical. I try to be principled where I can but email is a lost cause in my opinion. I have hosted my own Mailserver. I encountered providers that only have allow lists and needed me to manually apply to allow my mail in. You have to build a reputation to not be marked as spam. Someone can just submit your domain to a block list and you have to find out how to get removed. It is a mess.

      The cold hard truth is that if you want your mail delivered reliably, don’t host yourself.

    • Dablin
      1•1 year ago

      You could be right. I am sure the entire situation was a lot more nuanced then I portrayed it in my previous post. And I am sure many of the email admins for companies had a lot more localised pressing technical issues to deal with for the companies they worked with then having the time to ponder on the implications of email centralisation from other businesses.

      I will always promote technological independence though. And despite the hurdles that come with running any technological service locally/privately whether it be an email server or otherwise it is ultimately worth it for those who need/desire the full control and privacy of ones own data. At-least that is my 2-cents.