Sendgrid & Digital Ocean notes
Here are some notes I made for myself while exploring using Sendgrid with Digital Ocean DNS.
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Proceed with reduced complexity
I wasted over an hour and almost destroyed a keyboard while testing the mail server. I quadruple checked my perfect settings and debugged with telnet to no avail until I realized it was my own stupid fault all along. Do yourself a favour and make sure your VPN is disabled when testing out new networky things locally.
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Services are too clever
Both Digtial Ocean and Sendgrid want to make it super easy for you to get started. Watch out for fqdn injection when copying over your dns records. The Digital Ocean cname editor will (cleverly) drop in your fqdn, which means if you are copy pasting from Sendgrid’s equally helpful setup guide you will end up with an incorrect record. A well intentioned misalignment a busy founder doesn’t have time for.
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Convenient Pricing
The Sendgrid free plan is for one user. What they mean by one user is one user in addition to your account sign up user. This is a big win for frugal hands on collaborators when bootstrapping a new venture.