Context

When you're building a web application, you almost always need to send emails for various reasons. Packages like nodemailer make it quite easy to send your own emails through your own mailserver or a third party's SMTP server as well.

Unfortunately, deliverability will suffer if you're not using a service. The TL;DR is you either dedicate your company's complete resources to "play the game" of email deliverability, or you use a service that does. Otherwise, your emails won't reliably make it through spam filters (and in some cases it can just get deleted altogether).

The guiding principles discourage services and encourage quick setup.

Decision

We will use a service for sending email. If emails don't get delivered then it defeats the whole purpose of sending email.

We selected Mailgun because it has a generous free tier and has proven itself in production. However, to help with quick setup, we will allow deploying to production without the Mailgun environment variables set and will instead log the email to the console so during the experimentation phase, developers can still read the emails that would have been sent.

During local development, the Mailgun APIs are mocked and logged in the terminal as well as saved to the fixtures directory for tests to reference.

Consequences

Developers will need to either sign up for Mailgun or update the email code to use another service if they prefer. Emails will actually reach their destination.

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