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I'm developing a web app on Google App Engine, for which I recently decided that it requires a high performance inbound email processing functionality. GAE's functionalities for incoming email are rather limited, however CloudMailIn on Heroku seems to be able to do everything that I want (https://addons.heroku.com/cloudmailin)

Would you consider it a wise decision to run the website, user accounts, and databses on GAE, and run CloudMailIn separately with e.g. an API connection to write to the datastore on GAE? So far I have built all my web apps on GAE, so I prefer to stick with what I know. However if this is likely to bite me once I scale, then of course I will move everything to Heroku. Does anybody have experience with this?

Vincent
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  • Why do you find GAE inbound email functionality limited? – Peter Knego Dec 03 '14 at 09:23
  • One of the main limitations is that I need to receive the email on multiple @mydomain addresses, whereas GAE only allows to use myapp.appspotmail.com addresses. It concerns a large amount of addresses, so e.g. creating a forwarding Google Group doesn't solve the issue (this also has a limit on how much can be forwarded). – Vincent Dec 03 '14 at 09:25
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    GAE now has integration with Sendgrid, including their Inbound Parse API: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/java/mail/sendgrid#inbound_parse_api This way you can have rich mail parsing and direct webhooks to GAE, without the need of intermediate servers. – Peter Knego Dec 03 '14 at 09:33
  • Thanks for the tip. I'll check with SendGrid if they fullfill all requirements, but this definitely could be a good solution. – Vincent Dec 03 '14 at 09:53
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    CloudMailin has the ability to send emails to any website via an HTTP POST (webhook), it doesn't have to be run on the Heroku platform, why can't you use CloudMailin and your existing GAE setup? – Steve Smith Dec 03 '14 at 17:06
  • I guess I misunderstood that. Thanks for clarifiying, I'll reach out to CloudMailIn as well to see which of the two can provide a better package for my project. – Vincent Dec 06 '14 at 16:44

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Thanks to answers from Peter and Steve I now understand that both Sendgrid and CloudMailIn can be controlled through a simple webhook, so no need to include Heroku here. FYI I ended up using MailGun Routes because their features had a better fit with my requirements.

Vincent
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