# Email your app sends to your customers

The moment your app has people in it, it has to send them email. Confirming
they signed up. A link to set a new password when they forget the old one. A
receipt after they pay. A message saying their order is on its way.

None of that is optional. An app that lets people sign in but cannot send a
password reset is an app that locks people out with nobody to ask.

You need an account with an email company for this, and Hatchik does the rest:
it holds your key, it wires your app up, it gives you the settings your web
address needs and checks them for you, and when something does not arrive it
tells you which of the handful of things went wrong. Say to Claude something
like "email people when they book" and it will walk you through it.

## Choosing an email company

There are five Hatchik can wire in. The thing that decides it for most people is
what each gives away free, so that is what this list leads with. **The email is
billed to you, not to Hatchik, and for a small app it is almost always nothing.**

| | Free | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| **Resend** | 3,000 emails a month, up to 100 a day | The one to pick if you have no reason to pick another. Signing up takes about two minutes. |
| **Brevo** | 300 emails a day | The most generous free allowance of the five. |
| **Postmark** | 100 emails a month | The strictest about who you may email, and the best at arriving because of it. Suits an app that sends a few important messages rather than many. |
| **Mailgun** | Has a free tier, but it has changed more than once — check their plans page | Worth choosing if you already have an account. |
| **SendGrid** | Has changed from a standing free allowance to a trial and back — check their plans page | Worth choosing if you already have an account. |

Amazon SES is not on the list, and that is deliberate: it needs an AWS account,
and a new one cannot email anybody but yourself until Amazon has read and
approved a written request by hand. There is no version of that which is not a
wait.

Tell Claude which one you want. If you have no view, say Resend.

## Your key, and why it does not go in the chat

Your email company gives you a key — a long string of letters and numbers that
proves your app is allowed to send on your account. Claude will send you a
private link to paste it into. It works once, it lasts an hour, and what you
type goes straight into your app encrypted. **Claude is never told what it was.**

Never paste a key into the chat instead. Once it is in a conversation it is in
the record of that conversation, and anyone who ever sees it can send email as
you.

## The three settings on your web address

This is the part that decides whether any of it works, and it is the part people
skip. Your email company will not send as `hello@yourbusiness.com` until it can
see that the address really is yours, and the way it checks is three records
added wherever you bought your web address.

Until they are all in, **every message is refused**. Not delayed, not sent to
spam — refused, and nothing arrives. So this is not an optional polish step.

Ask Claude and it will give you the records one at a time, with a sentence
saying what each one is for. Add them, and Claude checks them for real — it asks
your web address's own servers, so the moment you get one right it says so,
rather than telling you it is still missing for another hour. You do not need to
understand them.

They usually start working within a few minutes and occasionally take a day.

## Before you send anything: what actually decides whether it arrives

Worth thirty seconds, because it will save you a confusing week.

Whether an email arrives or drops into a spam folder is decided mostly by **how
long your web address has been sending good email**. Gmail and Outlook have
never heard of a domain you bought last month, so at first they treat everything
from it with suspicion. This is normal, it happens to everybody, and it gets
better on its own over a few weeks of ordinary sending.

**What actually helps:**

- Finish the three records. An unverified address is not "slightly worse", it is
  refused outright.
- Only email people who are expecting it — someone who just signed up, just
  ordered, just asked for a password reset.
- Start small and build up. A handful a day for the first week or two beats
  sending two hundred on day one.
- Make sure replies reach you. Mail to an address nobody answers is a signal in
  itself.
- Send yourself one first, from your draft, and look at it.

**What does not help, whatever anyone tells you:** paying for a "warm-up"
service, buying a dedicated sending address at low volume (a cold one on its own
is worse than a shared one), avoiding particular words in the subject line, or
making the email prettier.

## What your customers see

The email arrives from **your business name at your own address** — "Mary's
Bakery", from `hello@marysbakery.com`. Hatchik's name is nowhere on it.

Tell Claude the address you want replies to go to. If you do not, replies go
nowhere, and someone replying to a receipt is usually someone about to spend
money with you.

## How much you can send

Whatever your plan with your email company allows. Hatchik adds no limit of its
own, and does not charge you for any of this.

There is one exception, and it is there to protect you rather than to ration
you: if your app sends **the same message to the same person more than twenty
times in an hour**, Hatchik holds it back. That is never something a person
wanted; it is an app stuck in a loop, and left alone it burns your whole free
allowance in minutes and then your real password resets stop working. Anything
else to that person still goes out normally.

## Newsletters and announcements

Hatchik does not stop you. It is your account, your address and your bill, so
what you send is between you and your email company.

Two honest warnings. Most free tiers are sized for the messages an app has to
send, not for a mailing list, and you will run through one fast. And every one of
these companies will suspend an account that sends to people who did not ask —
they are protecting their own delivery, and the suspension takes your password
resets down with it.

If you want a proper newsletter, a newsletter company is better at it.
Buttondown, Kit and Mailchimp all handle the list, the sign-up form and the
unsubscribe link for you.

## When somebody says the email never arrived

This will happen, and there is something specific to do about it. Ask Claude to
check your app's email. It can see every message your app sent and what became
of each one, and the answer is nearly always one of these.

**Your address is not verified yet.** The three records are not all in. Nothing
has been sent at all. This is by far the most common one on a new app, and it
does not look like an email problem from the outside — it looks like sign-up
being broken.

**Your key was rejected.** Usually it was deleted or replaced at your email
company. Make a new one there and Claude will send you a link to paste it into.

**You hit your plan's limit.** Your email company is rate-limiting your account.
Nothing is wrong with your app.

**It was accepted, and it is in their spam folder.** Ask them to look in spam,
and — this part matters — to mark it as "not spam". That teaches their email to
stop doing it, for them and a little for everyone else.

**It bounced.** There is no mailbox at that address. Almost always a typo:
`gmial.com`, a missing letter, a work address that was closed. Once an address
has bounced, your app is stopped from writing to it again — carrying on spends
your allowance on mail that cannot be delivered, and makes your email company
trust your address less. If they give you the corrected address it just works,
and if they insist the original was right, tell Claude and it can allow it again.

**They marked an earlier one as spam.** Your app will not write to them again,
and that is the right outcome for you as well as for them.

One honest thing worth knowing: **nobody can tell you whether an email landed in
a spam folder.** Not Hatchik, not your email company, not Gmail. If a message was
accepted and the person says they never saw it, the spam folder is where it is.
Anyone who tells you they can see into it is selling something.

### Knowing when one bounces

Your email company can tell Hatchik when a message bounced or was marked as
spam, but only if you point it at the right address. Claude will give you that
address and tell you where to paste it — it takes about a minute, in the same
dashboard you got your key from.

Without it, a message that was accepted reads as accepted forever, even if it
bounced an hour later. Worth doing.

## Your draft and your live site send separately

Like everything else, your draft and your live site are kept apart. Each
has its own key, so you can put your email company's test settings on the draft
and your real ones on the live site.

Send yourself the sign-up email from your draft before you open. It is the
cheapest test in the whole product and it catches the wrong name, the broken
link and the missing full stop.

## Changing email company later

One sentence to Claude. Your app does not change at all — it always sends the
same way, and Hatchik does the translating. You give it a key from the new
company, add that company's three records, and that is the whole job.

## What Hatchik keeps

Who each message went to, its subject, when it was sent and what became of it.
It does not keep what the message said. Your customers' password reset emails
are not something anyone should be storing, including us.

Your key is stored encrypted and is never shown again — not on your project
page, not in the logs, not in a download.

All of it comes out in your download along with everything else, and it goes
when you delete the project.