Write emails with the help of AI and send them with an API call. E-mail shouldn't be so difficult.Hey everyone! 👋🏻
I'm Luca and together with a small team of friends we're launching Volamail, an open source AI-based email editor and provider.
Volamail was born out of the need for email tooling that didn't get in your way. We wanted to be able to collaborate on emails together and send them with a simple API call, regardless of the tech stack of each project. All this provided via a powerful, open source dashboard that can be self-hosted on any AWS account.
It didn't start out as an AI-first product, it was just a rich text editor but after some experimentation we couldn't settle on a UX that allowed complex templates to be crafted with ease. That's when we started experimenting with LLMs and we found out the current models are actually really good at this.
Volamail is currently in open beta for people to start experimenting with. We want to gather feedback on the editor while we iterate on more complex features (such as localisation, marketing emails, scheduled sending, etc.).
During this open beta phase everyone can sign up for free and send 500 transactional emails per month via the API. We also provide a paid tier that uses a better model and offers 10k emails per month.@plushdohn is there any possibility of integrating it with existing email management systems? how seamless would that process be for someone looking to transition?@dash4u Hey!
Right now its main use-case is transactional emails, marketing emails will be developed gradually as we get out of beta phase. For now you can gradually migrate transactional emails from your stack to Volamail (Authentication emails, order notifications, pipeline outputs, etc.)
When marketing emails are ready you'll have the ability to re-create audiences of users via API, so you can programmatically synchronise your current user audience on Volamail and start sending emails from there.
You can also use the tool just as an AI email editor, it outputs HTML so you can use it in whatever email management system you currently have.
Cheers!So many reasons to support this launch! Team of friends boot strapping, open-source, a new way to build email campaigns!
This product has lots of potential. I think it's a great email campaign creation tool, but it sure can use some beautification toolings like generating visual assets and fit them into the email well. I can also imagine that it can use some help on ensuring the email looks good when rendered by different email providers. Lots of directions this can go!
Congrats on the launch @plushdohn and team!congrats on the launch Luca and team and kudos for making it open source, I will definitely try it out.@danielwchen thanks a lot!Hey @plushdohn I really like this approach. Makes it easy to integrate into everyone's tech stack 👏🏻
2 questions
- What LLM is used for the AI assistant and are there any api keys needed to make the AI assistant work with the self-hosted version?
- Do you give any feedback to the user if mails were not delivered due to bounces or spam complaints?
Congrats on the launch 🚀@crebuh Hey! On the cloud hosted version we use Claude models by Anthropic internally. A smaller one for inline editing and a stronger one for the initial generation. They are provided by us so you don't need to provide an API key.
When self-hosting you can use most models supported by the Vercel AI SDK (OpenAI, Anthropic, Llama, etc.) as long as you provide an API key.
During this open beta phase we don't have a way of showing feedback on reception yet. It's for transactional emails as of now, so spamming and cold-sending shouldn't be a priority with its current use-case. When we integrate marketing emails this will be much more important and we'll provide a way of seeing sending logs to see what exactly happens when you send each email.
Thanks a lot for the questions!@plushdohn nice thanks for the infos!
Although bounces can also happen when sending transactional emails :)
