Mailchimp

How do you know that your Mailchimp emails are going to junk? Are you getting that assumption from the open rate?

One thing you should ensure is that you have added the Mailchimp SPF records and DKIM records for your domain.

Another thing to know, Mandrill is for transactional type emails: Order confirmations, etc. I would need to read the terms of use, but using it for blanket email campaigns probably isn't allowed.

For more information on avoiding spam filters with Mailchimp check out their guide here.

By the way, I run a couple email accounts and have around a 67% open rate for one, and 90% open rate for the other, so simply adding SPF records and DKIM records should help. Also, don't email people too much.

I'd look at SendGrid for bulk and transactional emails. They have a template system where you upload/save templates on their end that you refer to when you use their API. You then pass an object with key/value pairs for replacements in the template. I believe they are handlebars templates. Anyway, you can send in bulk this way.

It will be far cheaper to DIY with AWS SES, but you have to code quite a bit yourself. You may want to look if there's any open source project that helps here. I'm not aware of any, I'd have to Google it.

One downside of SendGrid is that testing things is difficult. They have a "sandbox" that will tell you if the API request is correct, but it's a bit useless. It doesn't let you see if your email looks correct and that the data was replaced correctly. So if as you code and test you're going to be sending real emails. Less than ideal for a QA team. I wish SendGrid had a Mailtrap type feature. Then you can send to any email address you like and just have it land in a fake email bin that you can share with your team. To me, this is a critical feature SendGrid is missing. Other than that, I've been happy with SendGrid. A little pricey I think, but they do a great job retrying to send email, adding emails to a suppression list, etc. Again, all nice features you'd be on the hook for building if you went with something custom with SES. So factor in time savings and SendGrid has great value. Long term and depending on your volume, that may be a different story.

Mailchimp is more user-oriented while Amazon SES is a cheaper solution more suitable for being an SMTP server. If you need to send occasional emails manually, go with Mailchimp or another provider. If you want to send transactional emails from your app, Amazon SES is the best choice.

I would recommend to upgrade your stack and consider Angular.

Also, if you are working with docker, instead of manually managing your EC2 and docker inside it, switch to ECS as its free of cost and hassle free way to deploy and keep running your containers efficiently.

Good luck.

Instead of Docker , no doubt its great but it has vulnerabilitis and restricitions with dameon and root thread. I would pickup Podman. Also Ambasador is a culmination of Gateway LB and ServiceMesh on istio and Envoy. Great for both East-west and North south microservices communication, policy managment and security with Istio. Spring Boot is not a WebFW. For platform web fw one can use Reactive like SPring WebFlow rather than Spring MVC. For java experience, Spring provides great assets.

I will switch to using Kubernetes whether managed or custom depends on several factors rather than AWS ecs. For LB Amabassador is a great alternative on AWS. One can simply use this on top of ECS clusters. Instead of running in to different frameworks one can simply use one FW at both client and server side for consuming and SSE. I believe one can look at Lot of it depends what you need a full FW or a light librarry like React to be part of V in your MVC. Whether you need a SPA , on Mobile etc... in that case KOTLIN is also another option on Java. Dont go with Android. Best luck. Swapnil S

Tray.io is expensive and only makes sense in a few rare occasions where you need 2-way constant data binding in a 'loop' where Zapier is more like an automation swiss army knife. Tray.io is aimed exclusively at enterprise while Zapier supports businesses of any size. Tray.io is very expensive and Zapier is much more reasonable especially early on before you have massive amounts of zaps.

You may also want to look at Integromat but Zapier would be my choice in this case. I almost don't see Tray.io as being something worth considering for your particular use case unless there's a massive scale behind your product that I'm unaware of (absurd amounts of tasks in the hundreds of thousands).

Zapier also has a great community and an "experts" program in the event that you want to outsource your automation.