Handling Incoming Email With Your Web Application

This morning I was looking for a way to handle incoming email in a web application (similar to the way Highrise and Evernote let you email things to a special email address and have them put into their system). There are a number of ways to do this via procmail, or by using something to connect to your mail server using POP or IMAP and reading emails, but I was looking for a way to do this without having to host my own email infrastructure. Ideally, I want something like Twilio, that will receive the email and then do an HTTP POST to the endpoint of my choosing.

Here’s what I found.

CloudMailIn

Still in beta (and free while it is), this looks robust. It’s also available as a Heroku addon, if that’s how you roll.

(A tip of the hat to @peterc for pointing me to this one)

APInbox

Looks similar to CloudMailIn, though not in beta. There’s a free plan for up to 100 emails a day, and then it goes up from there. Their site was down when I first went to it this morning, which makes me a tad nervous, but that may well be an isolated thing.

SendGrid

SendGrid is a heavy hitter in the email space, mostly doing outbound delivery. They do however have a Parse API that seems to perform the same function as the other two services. I’m not sure on the pricing here, their basic plan is $9.95 per month for 10,000 emails, but I’m not sure if that includes incoming or not. UPDATE: I heard from SendGrid. Their plans cover both incoming and outgoing, so for the in the case of the $9.95 plan, it could be a mix of both, up to 10,000

(thanks to Twilio’s @johnsheehan for the pointer to SendGrid)

I haven’t used any of these yet, so I can’t make an endorsement of one over the other, but I thought I’d post it here in case anyone else is looking for this kind of provider. If you have experience with any of these, please comment with your opinion.