Can I build mailing list software on Google App Engine? - google-app-engine

I tried to search if it's legal or GAE will be able to support sending/receiving email just fine with mailing list kind of operation -- but so far I couldn't find anything useful.
Do you know if this is permissible or possible? Or even a good idea?
I'm thinking simple mailing list software for a single owner.

Yes you can build that, and in the GAE documentation is a good chapter about how to do that:
http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/appengine/docs/java/mail/overview.html
If the fairly high quotas for sending mail:
http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/appengine/docs/quotas.html#Mail
are not enough, you can ask for an increase. Not sure if that will cost you money.

App Engine does support sending and receiving email (see sending mail in App Engine and receiving mail in App Engine). The App Engine program policy prohibits sending spam emails (see the "Prohibited Actions" section), but as long as you are sending legitimate emails, there should not be a problem.
That said, if this is secondary to your main application (i.e. you just want to provide a mailing list as a support forum, for example), it may be easier to just use Google Groups for that functionality.

Related

GAE - mail API - dialy limits

According to https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas#Mail
a GAE app developed by a third party (anyone of us) and hosted in GA Cloud has a limit of 20.000 messages that can send each day, right ?
What if an app has registered 100.000 end-users that accepted to receive a daily email notification ?
isnt GAE a platform for this kind of apps ? do we have to find out for another provider ?
does the app must use a third-party service like mailchimp api or similar to do this job ?
thanks,
d.-
GAE no longer supports sending more than 100 emails and they will not increase your quota using this form request. They are nudging people to SendGrid (why SendGrid specifically in unclear). Its an unfortunate reduction in GAE capabilities.
They have a nice little footnote in there that says:
The new limit of 20,000 messages per day only applies to applications
created on or after December 14th, 2012. Applications created before
this date will not be subject to this limit, even if they enable
billing after December 14th.
You may be able to go around this by converting an old and unused GAE project to send the emails. If you don't have one, you can ask your friends if they do. Pretty much everybody I know has at least one or two dead GAE projects.
You can request a quota-increase here: http://support.google.com/code/bin/request.py?&contact_type=AppEngineCPURequest
Explain what you are doing and why you need more of your mail-quota.

google app engine recipients mailed costs

I have an app running on the app engine. Now I am not reaching any of the free limits, except for recipients emailed. My question is, can I pay to just increase that 1 limit? I read the information that google provides about pricing but I can not find an answer to my specific question.
No, you cannot. But you can use another service to send mail, like Amazon SES.
I'am a great fan of app engine. Except for the mail service, because it will give you know feedback about mail delivery. See this issue.
http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1800
I added some code to this issue, to use SES.
No, but why would you want that? Even if you enable billing, you still have all the free quotas.

Setting Google Talk status (with authentication) from Google App Engine

I'm trying to build a site that updates users' Google Talk statuses from Google App Engine using the built in XMPP Python API (or a third-party one, if one works better than another). I've been looking around for some examples or docs explaining how I would go about doing this, but nothing I find seems to offer a fully functional solution.
App Engine's XMPP Python developer docs suggest that updating a status can be done through the send_presence() method (see here):
xmpp.send_presence(to_jid, status="My app's status")
But, how would this be authenticated? Wouldn't I have to send the users password with the request? (Ideally, I'd like to do so using OAuth as suggested here.) Am I misunderstanding something?
Please excuse me if I'm missing something obvious, here. I'm pretty new to both Google App Engine and XMPP. Unlike a lot of examples I've found online, I don't want to create a chat "robot"; I merely want to change an existing user's Google Talk status. Thanks in advance for any pointers!
You can't change someone else' status using the XMPP API.
You can use the XMPP API to represent yourself, or your users (see the description of XMPP addresses in the GAE XMPP API docs).
You cannot send messages or update the status of a gmail user.

Google Application Engine For Sending Emails

I have a newsletter with 13k subscribers. I would like to use Google to send the newsletter instead of the free edition of mailenable I am using currently.
The main thing that has put me off is the 2,000/day sending limit as it would take a week to send out a bi weekly newsletter which may have time sensitive information in it.
I saw a post here that said you can send over the 2,000/day limit if you use the GAE.
I went to the GAE page and had a look at the limits and it does say that you can make 1,700,000 email queries. However, I called the Google apps sales team and they said Google says anything above 2,000 emails is spam and has no legitimate purpose (I had the feeling though that the person I was talking to was poorly trained and had no idea what the GAE was).
So would I need to create my own google app that acts like a SMTP server and uses the GAE to send the email? Would this be the same as sending through Google Apps, i.e. DKIM header added and trusted IP?
Any help anyone can give me is greatly appreciated.
Many thanks in advance.
From my experience GAE is a very bad platform to send bulk emails.
For a long time it didn't support DKIM or Sender Id, its hard to mange bounces, and on top of everything you need to write your own framework for bulk sending using tasks or backends.
The cost of instances time for sending those emails might even double your cost (in $$$) for sending the newsletter.
We choose to go with Mailchimp which is IMHO the best tool for sending bulk newsletters.
Billed applications can indeed send more than the default daily free limit of emails with App Engine. Once you have enabled billing, you can choose how much quota you want to dedicate to your app, including email sending.

Delete Google App Engine Account

I would like to delete the account I have with Google App Engine since I don't use it and I also would like to stop receiving email from Google regarding this account and policies update and alike.
Is there a way to do this?
UPD:
I raised this issue in google issue tracking system and it has been accepted as a valid feature request. http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=5745
UPD2:
A nice person from Google offered his help in deleting of my account as soon as I remove any apps I have there. Thanks for that!
A note from Google accouts TOS:
13.2 If you want to terminate your legal agreement with Google, you
may do so by (a) notifying Google at any time and (b) closing your
accounts for all of the Services which you use, where Google has made
this option available to you. Your notice should be sent, in writing,
to Google’s address which is set out at the beginning of these Terms.
By myself I didn't found how one can delete google app Engine account, so it's possible that this is not Services which you use, where Google has made this option available to you. As other option I see is to ask on Googl App Engine community question board, and hope that google moderators read those question.

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