Background

The auth microservice requires a mail-server to send transaction email including:

• Password Reset
• Account Verification

In addition to transactional email which can be templated, a mailserver will enable Loo Labs to send marketing/promotional email.

Goals

• Easy abstraction of email content from the emails themselves through templated values.
• Ease of email customization and styling to allow for Loo Labs branding.
• Simplistic email API that is well-documented for Node.
• Cheap given projected scale of ≤ 20000 emails/month

Non-Goals

• Cost per email pricing.
• Including HTML-based email styling in code. Instead, we should rely on a web interface to design emails.

Proposed Solution

Based on the above requirements, the service MailerSend was chosen. It offers 12000 free emails per month (which should be sufficient given the size of the student body). The service offers an extremely straightforward REST API for sending templated emails (with substituted values). The service provides development and production API tokens which will play well with our .env configuration, and facilitate easy testing. The web interface allows for test email sending, automated email opt-out, and offers email send history.

The official Node SDK that the auth microservice will depend on can be found here.