Recently I’ve stumbled onto Mailgun, a transactional email service targeted at developers; they provide an API to easily craft and send email messages through their service. You can verify your domain with them using a few TXT records and once configured, you can send emails using your own domain. Currently, Mailgun allows up to 10,000 emails per month for free; adding your credit card info to your account unlocks 30 days of log retention (instead of 2 days) and allows you to add up to 1000 domains. They also provide an SMTP relay that uses ports 25, 2525, 467 and 587 and it supports SSL/TLS or no encryption. There have been many times where I tried to configure Scan to Email on an older multi-function printer; most of the time it didn’t support SSL/TLS for email and there was no on-premise Exchange or other email server to relay with. Having something like Mailgun back then would’ve been nice. Now that I’ve found Mailgun, I was able to delete a spare Google Apps account that I was only using to send email notifications for my computer backups and Synology NAS.

I’ve been using Pingdom to monitor the uptime and performance of this blog; I originally found it on someone else’s blog while doing research on Apache/Wordpress. With a free account you can get a monthly report of your site’s uptime, number of outages and average response time. You can also configure a custom page like this one to display an overview of your site’s performance stats. Finally,  you  can use their speed test to benchmark your site’s load time and it offers recommendations on how to improve it; you can also choose from different locations around the world to test your site from.