Comment by andris9
2 years ago
Oh, yeah, I forgot my pitch. The link is https://emailengine.app - EmailEngine acts as a mail client, basically the same way Thunderbird runs on desktop, or the iPhone Mail on the phone, but instead of a GUI it has REST API and instead of desktop notifications it sends JSON webhooks. And instead of a single email account, it can manage thousands of accounts.
How does it compare to eg Nylas? I was looking into that for an email app I wanted to make, but they were enterprise only it seems. I also found your business but I didn't want to self host just to try it out.
I've written an overview about the differences between Nylas and EmailEngine here: https://docs.emailengine.app/emailengine-vs-nylas/
TL;DR Nylas is hosted service that does way more than just emails. Also, it syncs all emails on monitored accounts to their DB, so when you make an API request, it hits their DB. EmailEngine is self-hosted and runs directly against the mail servers, so when you run an API request, the request ends up in the mail server. Both approaches have their pros and cons. Other than that, there aren't any other good solutions than building everything yourself by using any IMAP library.
I appreciate the answer. I believe Nylas also has a self hostable option, just to let you, as when I was doing my research they mentioned that many secure industries like finance or healthcare wouldn't allow storage of emails on Nylas' database, so they allow self hosting. Of course, that is probably much more expensive than yours. Thanks for your last sentence as well, it clears up a bit more about the business, I asked in another thread but was just curious what types of customers need to integrate with email providers, as I'm making an email client so it's core functionality, but I assume most other industries simply use APIs from Gmail or whatever, rather than raw IMAP these days.
Edit, looks like you've answered in the other thread, thanks.