Python for Entrepreneurs Transcripts
Chapter: Sending and receiving email
Lecture: Introduction to sending outbound email
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0:02
Remember back in the mailing list section where I talked about sending email,
0:07
how important email is for your business and communicating with your users? Well, MailChimp is great for things like newsletters
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and certain types of bulk emailing. However, sometimes you want to send one email to one person, things like "hey, I forget my password" or
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"thanks for creating an account", or things like that. And I am going to show you how to add that capability
0:30
as well as accepting inbound email to your web application. You probably have all received at least one or two emails from my system,
0:37
here you see one, Talk Python Training, this is the email you get when you create an account for the very first time.
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You can see it has a nice HTML version with pictures and everything. What you can't see is also there is a text version as well
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that is sent in parallel or sort of embedded within the same message. But like in the MailChimp section in the mailing list section,
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I told you you don't want to create your own email server and maintain and manage that. That's still true.
1:01
So, what are we going to use to send outbound email? We are going to use AWS. So, Amazon has a really great service
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called Amazon SES or Simple Email Service. You can see if we take a step back one slide, look right at the top,
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it says Talk Python Training via Amazon SES, so you can tell that was sent through SES on behalf of talkpython.fm.
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So this is a simple email service, you just get SMTP server address, a port, a username and a password, you set that up in your web app,
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you create a standard Python SMTP client that can send email, and then you just start just sending HTML email,
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we'll talk about specifically how to do that, and we'll go into a demo to see how to do that, you might be wondering what does this AWS thing cost,
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like "could I afford to use this, or would it just make more sense to actually create mailing server?"
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Now, realize that SES actually does anti-spam things, it tracks bounces for you, it helps all sorts of behind the thing stuff
2:01
to make sure your email domain remains trusted. So what does this service cost? Well, as far as I am concerned, it's basically free,
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it costs 10 cents per 1000 emails, or 1 cent US dollars per hundred emails. So, you can basically send as many emails as you want,
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if you have so many users and so many emails going per day, to register, you are going to have a thriving business.