Continuing on V3 of this project, I once again tackle auth. One of the bigger challenges this time around was (since I'm implementing my own auth) figuring out how I wanted to handle email services and verification. I looked at a few different options, before eventually settling on what will (hopefully) be the easiest.

The Options

I was already aware of SendGrid when I was going to attack this project. However, after fiddling around with SendGrid, I found the service to be too slow for what I needed. While it is probably one of the better documented and more widely known options, I think SendGrid would make an excellent choice... in any other situation. I specifically needed an email service that would send a quick link for users that recently created an account, so something that took such a long time to just send one email was out of the question.

I also took a look SparkPost and SMTP2GO; both of these options required a "company account." It's a bit unfortunate that this space in particular seems to lack resources for hobbyist developers, but I think this also presents an opportunity in the future.

I eventually settled on MailerSend, which was very fast. I integrated their SMTP service with NodeMailer, and that's where this project is currently headed.