Institutional Knowledge

It’s inevitable. You’re developing a web application and the “need” arises for it to send e-mail. Now, we’re not trying to sound too dismissive of e-mail, but lets face it, e-mail has a number of flaws.

1. SMTP is not a real-time protocol. There is absolutely no guarantee of delivery and most applications that send e-mail are not aware of bounces.
2. Spam is a problem. Everywhere. The tools put in place to battle spam will inevitably treat one of your messages as spam.
3. E-mail overload is an even bigger problem, even if you “solve” the spam problem you are often just tossing more needles in the ever-growing haystack that is the INBOX.

These are issues we see time and time again when some kind of workflow or notification scheme needs to be put into place. What are the alternatives? The easiest is probably RSS, but that assumes that the users are already using some form of RSS reader. Luckily mail programs are starting to incorporate syndication formats and present them to people with the e-mail interface they know and love/loathe.

But at the end of the day you decide that you really do have to send e-mail, the best thing to do is to keep it short. That is, if you want people to actually read the e-mail.