How should we send our e-commerce store's email receipts and receive customer service emails?

Question

My company own a number of e-commerce sites, and we are trying figure out a scalable and effective solution for email. The stores are Django apps on Heroku. Each store needs to be able to send email receipts to customers after a purchase, and customers need to be able to send support emails to a support address.

In the past we have used a free Google Apps account set up with our own domain name, created the two email accounts, and sent receipts programmatically through Django. I am not completely pleased with Google Apps for a number of reasons, including customer service and the daily sending limits.

I've looked into services like Postmark for sending mail, but of the services I've researched, they all require being able to receive emails at any address you send from. What would I do for receiving email? We want to keep our setup as simple as possible and would prefer to send and receive emails through the same service.

Answer 1

If I am reading this correctly, you are trying to do the following:

• Send out purchase confirmation and receipts from your e-commerce websites
• Allow users to reply to those emails for support

Third party services like PostageApp and Postmark will definitely let you do the first, but you need to be able to receive the emails that customers send back right? If you own the emails that you are sending from (you can set the FROM address to any email) then you should theoretically be able to receive the replies no problem.

In addition, you can use something like TenderApp to use as a support system - they have the ability to have support tickets opened up when users email a certain email.

Hope that works for you!

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I am the Product Manager of PostageApp!)