If you send email in a web application, you should know how hard it is. Not the implementation, which is trivial, but making sure your emails aren’t being blacklisted, marked as spam, or simply discarded.

Jeff Atwood described some of the steps needed on So You’d Like to Send Some Email (Through Code). I remember doing those and some more when I was working on Stream19, just to get emails to show up on spam folders, let alone inboxes.

Fortunately, now there are other options. SendGrid and Postmark are two good email delivery platforms you can use. SendGrid is already integrated with Heroku (the hosting service I’m using), but Postmark’s pricing scales better. In alternative, you can always send through GMail.

On my next web app, I will try out Postmark, and then review it here.

and so far I’m attending.

As expected from a book geared towards a mainstream audience, Free is not as practical as it could be. Most of the book are company stories and economy history. Although they were interesting, I was looking for more detailed data on free business models.

Nevertheless, there were some bits I loved to read like the “How can X be free?” sections (example: “How can everything in a store be free?” about the SampleLab stores), or the list 50 business models built on free. An entertaining book, but don’t expect to create a business model only around its concepts.

I bought the paperback version, but you can read it or hear it for free online.