How to pick a transactional email provider for your Bubble app

The Importance of Transactional Email Providers

This is a video about the importance of picking a good and reliable transactional email provider. Transactional emails are a different group of emails to say a provider like Mailchimp that is bulk or mass email. That's where you're sending the same email to multiple people. Whereas a transactional email is an email that is often a direct result of an action that a user has taken and is only sent to that user. For example, like a password reset email or a welcome email.

Setting Up Transactional Emails in Bubble

When you're building your Bubble app, Bubble provides you with some helpful workflows. Let's just set one up here just so I can demonstrate it. When the button is clicked, we send an email. When you are in the email tab here, that is referring to the provider that you have set up through the domain and email tab here. Bubble built into their settings panel, you've got the ability to integrate in with a provider called SendGrid.

Why Transactional Email Providers are Crucial

One of the reasons why it's so important to have a transactional email provider set up is that without one, emails are sent from this email address here. Which means that you can't reliably monitor the emails and also they're not sent from your identity. Because it's a pooled address, these are much more likely to end up in spam because if someone was to receive an email from this address here and mark it as spam, again it doesn't clearly identify as you, it doesn't differentiate you from any other Bubble app builder. You need a transactional email provider set up to reliably send transactional emails through your Bubble app.

Setting Up SendGrid in Bubble

The built-in one, if we go back to it, is SendGrid. Once you've connected up your domain, you then be able to sign up for a SendGrid account and enter the relevant API details in here. Something that's in common with all of the transactional email providers is they will provide you with a list of instructions for additions to the DNS records of your domain name. And this is to verify you as the sender to say that this email was legitimately sent on behalf of your brand's identity of your domain name.

The Battle Against Spam Folders

And these are all things that you can do in your battle against the spam folder. You don't want your users to be frustrated because the forgotten password email or their welcome email ends up in spam. So yeah, really important that you set up a transaction email provider.

Limitations of Bubble's SendGrid Integration

Let's have a look at, okay, back to SendGrid. So yeah, Bubble provides in the settings panel a way to set up SendGrid. But if we look through the Bubble documentation, we'll see that it's a little bit out of date. Bubble currently allows you to replace the body of the email with a template style only for legacy SendGrid templates. So the integration that Bubble provides through the settings panel is one that is a little bit out of date and SendGrid have moved on, but they've provided what they term legacy templates.

Exploring Alternative Providers

So if you want much more flexibility, then I'd recommend looking at other providers. One that I used for a long time was Mailgun. Mailgun offers quite a generous starting package here, so you can do plenty of testing. No reflection on Mailgun, but I would say a word of warning that if a transactional email provider offers anything for free, then they are opening themselves up to the potential that their service is abused.

The Challenge of Email Deliverability

There's a lot of people around the globe who want to send a lot of emails and they're all very spammy. They will degrade the reputation of the IP addresses of the servers that that provider uses. So the provider, whether it's SendGrid or Mailgun, they're in a constant struggle to provide a quality service to their customers by blocking the bad actors from using their services because that will degrade the deliverability for everyone who uses their service.

Integrating SendGrid with Bubble

So SendGrid, I've integrated that in with the API connector on Bubble, and I can say that that works well. I've used it in the past.

Recommending Postmark as a Transactional Email Provider

My current favorite, and the one that I'm directing people towards, is Postmark. Postmark doesn't have a free tip, but the pricing begins at just, I think it's $10. Yeah, $10 for 10,000 emails. So if you can cover that cost, I'd really recommend just go with Postmark from the start because they have a really clear API documentation. I've used their support. Their support is quick and very helpful. They have a clear domain DNS, editions, instructions, how to create that verification between your domain name and you, and the emails that you send.

Postmark's Templates and Integration with Bubble

And also they have some fantastic templates for common users such as welcome emails and password reset that you can customize and you can integrate in with your Bubble app in really under 30 minutes. So I will expect in the future we will do a whole video about the API connector in Bubble and Postmark.

Conclusion and Future Content

But I wanted just to produce this video as an overview of why you need to be thinking about transactional email providers as a Bubble builder and the different options that are available. And then just to point forward into why, when I build a Bubble app now, I'm not using the email settings tab here. I'm not using the email actions here. When I create an API integration with like Postmark, then it appears as here, plugins, and if I've set it to an action, it appears here. And so that's how I would go about sending emails. But yeah, we'll do a whole video on that in the future, you know, setting up the domain name and setting up the API connector.