SafeDelivr

If you are looking for the source of UI app of safedelivr, you can find it here

An abstract API documentation can be found here.

Detailed Architecture documentation is here.

Introduction

Safedelivr cascades multiple email providers to help ensure successful email deliveries, it also helps in cost distribution among multiple providers. Safedelivr has a built in mechanism of fail-safe retrials, it will automatically retry sending a mail if any of the provider fails or returns a failure through webhook or in during trasmission.

Requirements

In order to use safedelivr, you will need the following:

• cassandra@3.7
• rabbitmq@3.6.9
• redis@4.0.1
• golang@1.8.3
• nodejs@8.0.1 (for UI server)
• datadog-agent aka statsd
• supervisord (optional)
• nginx (to proxy pass between frontend and backend, config is included with the code)

Steps

Make sure you have installed the above required packages, after doing so run the below commands

cp ./application.yml.sample ./application.yml
./build.sh

This should compile the binaries and if you have supervisor than you can start the consumers as well as the app server by passing --deploy option to it.

./build.sh --deploy

Troubleshoot

If cqlsh throws error of keyspace run the below command

cqlsh -e "CREATE KEYSPACE IF NOT EXISTS safedelivr WITH replication = {'class': 'SimpleStrategy', 'replication_factor': 1}"

If cqlsh throws version error than you can force cqlsh to use a defined version by adding --cqlversion=version

Why Cassandra?

An Email system is generally a heavy transactional system with heavy DB writes, in case of a large scale architecture cassandra serves both as a good heavy write and high availaibility distributed storage.

Why Rabbitmq?

Well I could have gone with Kafka too, but I was more familiar with Rabbitmq so chose the later one.

Sending your first Email

In order to start sending emails you must first login and acquire your user_id and api_key from the Settings page. After that its just a form request away.

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" --data 'from=me@me.com&to=you@you.com&subject=Holla&body=Hello&user_id=user_id&api_key=api_key' https://safedelivr.com/api/batch/

Sending bulk email

To send a bulk email you just need to add the parameter is_bulk=true in your request.

Adding Email Provider

Addition of a new Email provider is quite easy as long as the provider has webhook feedback mechanism, to add a new email provider you will need to add the following things:

• Add a Channel and append it to the rabbit.EmailProvideres
• Bind your listener to the Channel you have created. One individually and one for batch processing, add them here.
• Implement a consumer. Consumers are generically executed, have a look at the sendgrid one to get an idea.
• Add a webhook controller for the same.

Failsafe decision helper

helpers.NextChannelToTry(log.Status) (worker)

This helper is used by the webhook controllers, it will return a new worker if any which can be retried.

Retrying within the consumers is handled automatically by the generics file. Future scopes and further granular details can be found in the architecture documentation.

The UI will reflect the providers with which email was tried to be dispatched

Things left for future addition

• User defined webhooks
• Allow attachments, and other meta Email fields.