id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	resolution	keywords	cc
420	Document alternative outgoing email approaches	adehnert	leee	"At the moment, outgoing email from scripts is unreliable. Hopefully something like #357 could improve that. In the short term, and possibly even once #357 gets fixed, users may be better served by sending their email in other ways. We should ideally document some options.

The obvious option is to tell people to use Kerberized auth to outgoing.mit.edu. It's an obvious, MIT-run service that (hopefully) has good deliverability, and I believe any principal can auth. However, I think many languages have mediocre support for Kerberized SMTP, so it may be hard to for our users to do this.

There are also various companies that provide this sort of service. Some options are:
* SparkPost, which supports both a [https://www.sparkpost.com/api#/introduction/api-conventions custom API and SMTP] and [https://www.sparkpost.com/pricing allows 10K emails/month for free]
* SendGrid, which also has [https://sendgrid.com/docs/Integrate/index.html an API and SMTP support] and [https://sendgrid.com/marketing/email-delivery seems to have a free 12K emails/month tier]
* Mandrill/MailChimp, which also has [https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205582427-What-is-Mandrill- API/SMTP support], but appears to have a [https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205582797-Does-Mandrill-offer-a-free-trial-or-demo- 2K emails/account] limit for the free trial, after which it's [http://mandrill.com/pricing/ $10/month]

These have the advantage of probably being easier to set up than kerberized outgoing.mit.edu and likely having better deliverability, but disadvantage of requiring a non-MIT party and having a lower free message cap (I think MIT is effectively 1K/day so ~30K/month)."	task	closed	normal		mail	fixed