Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bambax 426 days ago
Mailgun (and I'm sure many other services like it) can accept emails and POST their content to an url of your choice.

I use that for journaling: I made a little system that sends me an email every day; I respond to it and the response is then sent to a page that stores it into a db.
3 comments
zackmorris 426 days ago
+1 for Mailgun. My only gripe with it is that they detect and block bot activity on their frontend. So if you have end to end (e2e) integration tests built with something like Puppeteer, you can't have them log into Mailgun and check the inbox table's HTML to see that an email was sent. So you have to write some sort of plugin manually - perhaps as a testing endpoint on your website that only appears in debug mode - that interacts with their API.

This might not seem like much of a big deal. But as we transition to more of these #nocode automated tools, the idea of having to know how programming works in order to interact with an API will start to seem archaic. I'd compare it to how esoteric the terminal looked after someone saw a GUI like the one used by Apple's Macintosh back in the 1980s.

I looked forward to this day back in the early 2000s when APIs started arriving, but felt even then that something was fishy. I would have preferred that sites had a style-free request format that returned XML or even JSON generated from HTML, rather than having to use a separate API. I have this sense that the way we do it today with a split backend/frontend, distributed state, duplicated validation, etc has been a monumental waste of time.

link
dogline 426 days ago
> I use that for journaling: I made a little system that sends me an email every day; I respond to it and the response is then sent to a page that stores it into a db.

Yes. I know note taking and journaling posts are frequent on HN, but I've thought that this is the best way to go, is universal from any client, and very expandable. It's just not generically scaleable for all users, but for the HN reader-types, it'd be perfect.

link
kevinsync 426 days ago
CloudMailin [0] is also great for parsing incoming email and doing stuff with it (ex. forward to a webhook / POST target, outbound capabilities, etc)

I've found it to be very reliable with a detailed dashboard to track individual transactions, plus they give you 10,000 emails a month for free.

Not an employee, just a big fan!

[0] https://www.cloudmailin.com

link