I am a big fan of small and simple yet practically interesting ideas, like this one. CurlMail is a super easy API service that allows one to send emails from the command line, using nothing but curl, or a similar HTTP client.
It’d be extra cool if it there was a GitHub link to it too. But even if it’s not openly available, one could use the service for emails which are not sensitive and implement something similar from scratch in a few minutes for private use.
As somebody who spends a lot of time in the text editor, working with code, and on the Linux command line, I see text autocomplete as one of the basic, native functionality. It’s almost like copy-paste, selection, and undo.
Gmail has recently extended the Smart Compose feature with exactly that. No longer it only covers the pre-defined responses like “OK, thanks” and “No problem”. It completes pretty much any words and phrases that you type.
It’s super useful and it makes me wonder why it took so long for somebody to think of this. Surely, the actual implementation is not all that complex (just kidding … it’s not a simple dictionary complete, it’s context aware and smart, so, yeah, it’s pretty complex).
Mailtrap is a handy service for any developer or team that needs to test outgoing emails from test and staging environments, without spamming real users. It’s basically a fake SMTP server with some controls of where and how to forward messages, and ways of analyzing, sharing, and testing of HTML rendering.
Mailtrain is a self-hosted Open Source alternative to MailChimp and other similar mass-mailing and newsletter services. Of course, being self-hosted, it can go only so far – you’ll still need to deal with mail delivery, SPAM filtering, and other modern days “benefits” of delivering mass mailings. But it looks pretty complete in terms of features, so if you want to have full control and don’t mind investing a bit of time in setting up, check it out – you might get a better or at least cheaper alternative.
Mautic is an Open Source marketing automation solution. It features contact management, social media marketing, email marketing, forms, campaigns, reports, and pretty much everything else you’d expect from a tool like this. It is used by top digital marketing firms around the world. Mautic offers the insights necessary for sucessful campaigns and data analytics.
If you are lost between a gadzillion online tools available for marketing automation, and/or don’t trust third-party providers and want to have a system of your own, give it a try.