Show HN: Flute – my attempt at a better email API
Hey HN, founder here. I’ve been working on Flute for just over a year now. I got this idea after being utterly fed up with deliverability problems and lack of easily searchable logs on Mailgun, SendGrid, Amazon SES, etc…which one do you use? However, these established providers have been doing email for almost a decade, so I can’t hope to beat them at the delivery game. SMTP&#x2F;delivery magic is an ancient protocol with so many pitfalls and unwritten rules - it left me aghast. So instead of trying to build another SMTP relay, I tried to solve the problem by decoupling your email API from from the underlying servers and providers. I call these decoupled APIs &quot;flutes&quot;: think of the air blowing in as your firehose of API requests, and the fingers of the flutist routing your email harmoniously through different servers.  I propose these &quot;virtual flutes&quot; as a better way to manage transactional email in a load-balanced, provider-agnostic, failover-native, hot-swappable, exportable-logs fashion with full-text Elasticsearch for your data. The primary goal of Flute Mail is better deliverability - our secret sauce is making it easier to do proper segmentation and have more control over your email routing.<p>&quot;Configurable routing&quot; means your API can be configured to route your emails through a different provider or FROM address on-the-fly (or even load-balance them to save money by using multiple free-tier offerings). I’m super conscious about reliability, so Flute was designed from the ground up to handle all sorts of failure modes [1], from MTA spam bounces [2], mistaken IP&#x2F;domain blocks, server downtime, queuing delays, and other sporadic problems that happen surprisingly often with email delivery APIs. I call this configurable multi-provider setup &quot;Smart Failover&quot;.<p>Another unique feature of Flute is that we aggregate your email history and delivery metadata in an Elasticsearch cluster for fast analysis and easy customer service followups. If you’re concerned about a third-party storing your data, we offer the ability to interface directly with your own Elasticsearch cluster, keeping the data off our servers. Email data can be highly sensitive, so I believe it should be kept on servers you control.<p>The business model I’m experimenting with is to offer all of these features for free to developers and small teams, because I know what a pain it can be to choose a good email API. I plan to monetize this service by charging bigger volume users.<p>Please let me know what you think!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.sparkpost.com&#x2F;incidents&#x2F;ldv2gdc96hx5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.sparkpost.com&#x2F;incidents&#x2F;ldv2gdc96hx5</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mailchannels.zendesk.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;202191674-Fixing-the-550-5-7-1-RBL-Sender-blocked-IP-or-domain-error" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mailchannels.zendesk.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;202191674...</a>