Letters for your application (for 24 hours)

Hello. Most of the time I manage development projects shopium.ua and zakaz.ua but the engineer inside of me periodically requires entertainment. Not having free time to hackathons, the garage, startup sauna etc., I came up with his own format "pokodit what you want":
the

the
• need me
the
• time to market MVP — up to 24 hours in the amount
the
• budget — under $100
the
• commercial potential

In our projects we send users emails. We send users newsletters, and copes with it MailChimp, but niche sending transactional emails (confirmation, notification, etc.) until recently was relatively empty.

In most projects I know, transactional emails directly in the code generated from the email template (if it is in a separate file, not sewn close to in the code), and sent to a local SMTP server. And at the same time:
the

the
• to change the text messages can only programmers (it's slow and expensive, and it cannot be delegated to work with the texts content Manager, and for any changes to the text letters need redeploy system)
the
• not track the opening of emails and clicks on links (no data for improving the text of the letter)
the
• are not processed bounce (you can always send emails to nonexistent addresses, and this affects the indicator of "shamnesty" address, which slutsa letters)
the
• only implemented some signed emails using DKIM (also reduces the chances for delivery of the message in the inbox)

I decided for 24 hours to make the service, which will securely send beautiful emails quickly change their text, and track statistics. Meet Notifout.

What is Notifout?

Notifout.com is the service to send transactional messages to your users, and it works:
the

the
• you Notifout declare a list of template letters which you want to send
the
• when you need to send an email you from your app, make an HTTP POST request, passing the ID of the template, and any additional data as JSON
the
• Notifout using your template, and the transmitted data will generate HTML and plain-text version of the letter, put it in one letter, put down tokens to track open, will register in the link code to track clicks, insert the correct header for Return-Path, and List-Unsubscribe sign email using a DKIM key and send it to the recipient.

All the information about the interaction of the recipient with a letter


If the recipient is not available — Notifout will function correctly bounce, and will reflect this in the status letters.

On time and resources

The development was mainly carried out in between trips and meetings in the evening with your favorite TV series. In the planned format was able to fit almost completely. The first version took 23:30 (including localization of the EN/en and PayPal/LiqPay), all sent, received and otherwise worked, but to fit in with the timing of it had to exclude the implementation of DKIM/SPF. After release add SPF+DKIM took about 4 hours.

Financial expenses:

the

the
• Ginger tea and Burkepile Vienna Rolls $4.4
the
• Domain — $10.87
the
• Hosting from Linode — $28.21
the
• Black tea and a donut in the Vienna Rolls — $4
the
• SSL certificate free of charge, from StartSSL
the
• Personal time — priceless

Left: $52,52
The plan was to not let the standard bitstream eyes buy cute theme for https://wrapbootstrap.com/, but so far all quite nice and so.

Acknowledgement

Of course such a result in 24 hours would not have been possible without the wonderful FOSS software, and great services:
the

the
• Python
the
• Flask
the
• SQLAlchemy
the
• Jinja2
the
• gevent
the
• Inbox.py
the
• Postfix
the
• Twitter Bootstrap
the
• Linode (just got on Linode Birthday Giveaway)
the
• Mailtrap.io

Result

We are already using it in their projects, but I want to share it with others, so for all polzovteley Habra to 01.08.12 special offer:
Sign up for http://notifout.comand write on serg@notifout.com code phrase "I c Habra", with reference to your profile on habré, and the address under which you registered in Notifout and I will increase you free limit up to 10,000 messages per month.

And for dessert — video 24-hours of creating Notifout compressed to 11 minutes, while listening to great psy-trance Etnica — Full on:


UPD1: by the Way, everyone who is interested in the subject I recommend reading a great article from MailChimp Email Delivery For IT Professionals

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru