HACKER Q&A
📣 tusharsoni

Developers, how do you automate your email workflows?


I am working on a project that involves me sending emails to check-in with the users to make sure they have everything they need. This is in addition to sending engagement emails few times a year. To make life a little bit easier, I have been researching email automation tools like Drip, Mailchimp etc. While these tools are great, they are fairly expensive for my usage and have way too many features.

For now, I was able to solve my problem by writing a custom solution that sends bulk emails using AWS SES. However, this got me wondering what a productized email automation tool for developers would look like?

So, if you are a developer working on small projects, what are your email automation needs? How do you solve them today?

  👤 soared Accepted Answer ✓
I’ve used Zapier for a lot of my low-volume email automation needs. You can have your email list on google sheets with dates for triggering a message, have a google doc email template with variables filled by the data in your sheet.

Probably doesn’t scale super well and mildly prone to breaking, but free and straightforward. Also easy to combine with google forms as well.

👤 robk
Cloudmailin for all incoming then a fairly sophisticated parser app I wrote just using expressjs to put things into crm or tickets or forward as needed to the right folks.
👤 TheFullstackGuy
A lot of developers love to “build over buy”, but I think HubSpot would be a great solution to this use case. All of the features you want are available under the free tier
👤 jmercouris
You can use GNUs and Emacs to easily automate your emailing solutions without needing to write much at all.
👤 ecesena
Check out Sendy: https://sendy.co