Just Fucking Use Lettermint

Oh, you'll just run your own mail server? You beautiful, naive creature.

Let me paint you a picture: It's 3 AM. Your phone buzzes. Gmail has decided your IP is spam because some asshole used it in 2008 to sell crypto. Your customers aren't getting password resets. Your bounce rate is climbing. Your ops guy quit last month.

But hey, you saved $20/month on email. Worth it.

You'll spend more time babysitting Postfix, Dovecot, and certbot than actually building your product. But sure, it's "just a mail server."

Sure, if you love storing your customer data on American servers.

Your EU customer's data is now subject to the PATRIOT Act. The CLOUD Act. The "we can look at your shit whenever we want" Act. Hope your privacy policy mentions that.

SendGrid got acquired by Twilio. Mailgun got acquired by Sinch. Who's Sinch? Exactly. Their pricing pages change more often than their ownership structure.

Enjoy explaining to your CFO why email costs went up 300% and your DPO why you're sending EU data to Virginia.

$0.10 per 1000 emails! What a deal!

Until your bounce rate hits 2% and AWS suspends your account. No warning. No explanation. Just a generic email from a do-not-reply address. Good luck with that support ticket—hope you like talking to robots who forward you to other robots.

Still in sandbox after 6 weeks? That's a feature, not a bug.

And your emails have that lovely "via amazonses.com" vibe. Nothing screams "trustworthy business" like paying for .

Remember when AWS us-east-1 went down and half the internet broke? Your password reset emails broke too. Along with everyone else's.

Cloudflare has an outage and suddenly your transactional emails are stuck in a queue behind 10 million other companies who made the same "reliable" choice.

We're hosted in the EU on independent infrastructure. No AWS. No Cloudflare. No single point of failure that takes down half the web.

When the big clouds go dark, we're still sending.

It's just a 40-year-old protocol designed when the internet was 12 computers and everyone trusted each other. What could go wrong?

SPF. DKIM. DMARC. The holy trinity of "fuck this, I'm going back to carrier pigeons."

That password reset email? It's chilling in spam. Your user already rage-quit and signed up for your competitor. But your logs say "sent successfully" so everything's fine, right?

Right?

"How do you know?" "Because no one complained."

30% of your emails are landing in spam and you have no idea. The customers who didn't get your email didn't complain—they just left. Silently. Forever.

You're measuring success by the absence of complaints. That's like measuring your health by how few autopsies you've had.

Bold strategy.

"I'll just use nodemailer. Or PHPMailer. How hard can it be?"

Congrats, you just reinvented 10% of an email service. Now build: queue management, retry logic, bounce handling, complaint processing, reputation monitoring, analytics, unsubscribe handling, template rendering, and rate limiting.

"But it's just sending an email!"

Famous last words.

"Did the invoice email send?" "I don't fucking know. Did it?"

Debugging email issues without data is vibes-based engineering. Your customer says they didn't get it. Your logs say you sent it. One of you is lying, and you have no idea which.

But sure, analytics are just vanity metrics. You'll figure it out when the support tickets start piling up.