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The hidden costs of infrastructure
• 7 min read
Last week, I tried to be a plumber – there’s an issue with my shower head, and it looked simple enough to fix. I head out, I buy a few things to try & arm with my new toolkit. I tried to fix it. Then, I realized I needed more things – another trip, some tape, more work, and still no luck. With my weekend gone, I’m now spending my evenings during the week. 5 days later, no fixed showerhead, water all over my floor – I finally broke down & called in a plumber who solved my problem in an hour! It looked like a simple project, right up until it wasn’t.
Similar to my own story – have you tried building an email integration? Was it a simple or complex project? The answer: It depends. Some providers are easier to build directly with than others, but complexity comes with scope of functionality and breadth of support. We’ve talked to multiple customers to discover that the reality was not as easy as they thought.
Let me guide you through all the required steps to build an MVP, through to a full scale integration with support for a large user base.
Authentication is fairly straightforward for Google and Office365 – they both use OAuth. Things are a little bit more complicated for MS Exchange, Yahoo!, iCloud, and the long tail of IMAP providers because they require things like app passwords, encrypted storage of usernames and passwords for authentication, and more.
Account lifecycle management handles password changes, app access revocation, corporate policies for account security. OAuth tokens will expire after a set period of time, so you’ll always need to consider how you monitor this and build workflows for re-authentication.
Notification and system updates are how your app starts to get updates from the provider – are they sending you a webhook, or are you polling their server for updates? Webhooks are fast, but neither Google nor Microsoft will provide an SLA for reliability of sending updates. Polling is a good backup system for ensuring you don’t miss any emails because of a provider issue – now we’re thinking through redundancies, which is where the complexity starts to come in. Providers who sync with IMAP won’t give you any webhooks, and you’ll need to automatically check with their inbox every few minutes. Check out our guides on how IMAP connections and sync work.
Looks fairly straightforward so far – authenticate, get updates, keep the account in sync. This is the highest level picture of an MVP for syncing email, calendars, and contacts, but getting your integration production-ready for paying users is more than that.
Your infrastructure requires long term maintenance and dedicated resourcing. We’ve pulled the high level components of the infrastructure.
| Provider/server reconciliation system | Ensuring that the data you have saved matches the data sent by the provider over time. |
| IP and domain reputation management | Throttling so you don’t overload providers, monitoring link tracking and tracking pixel domains, monitoring spam reports and offboarding misbehaving users. |
| Security, privacy and compliance controls | Expanding your controls for PII as the contents of inboxes and calendars is directly linked to user’s identities. |
| Scalability, resilience and maintenance | Efficient load handling, fault tolerance and redundancy, and maintenance demands clear documentation and modular code. |
| Internal tooling and devops | Building internal dashboards and debugging tools for both developers and support staff to support issues with the integration. |
| Observability, logging and monitoring | Comprehensive insight into system health, detailed and structured event recording, and real-time tracking and alerting. |
| Account lifecycle management | People change their passwords, servers have outages, sync has issues – account lifecycle management is the lifecycle of a connected account and its state. |
Without these components, you can’t support more than a hundred users without running into issues. These are solved problems with Nylas. Infrastructure doesn’t just impact engineering – without internal tooling, your support team can’t resolve customer issues as they come up. Without observability, you can’t catch issues before they become global problems. Work in this area is required even if you don’t plan on supporting every email provider or calendar provider in the world.
Now you’re at the starting point for building integrations, these are what we consider the bare minimum functionality for a competitive integration for building email, calendar, and contact integrations. This will be mostly determined by your use case. Functionality like contextual email and calendar management are now ‘need to have’ functionality for competing in a lot of verticals.
While looking through your required functionality, in the back of your mind should be the variations between different providers and how they share data back to you. Google, Microsoft, and even different IMAP providers all share data differently, which you’ll have to normalize. Nylas has a single data model which makes this straightforward.
Providers may look similar on the front-end, but they behave very differently on the back end – for example, Google and Microsoft both have different implementations of recurring events, or you could use the Nylas Calendar API which abstracts the complexity of these different providers into a consistent API with a single data model.
Building with Nylas is up to 6x faster, with more comprehensive functionality at launch and no long term maintenance. This is more than just launching faster – it’s also about enabling your sales team to grow your revenue earlier, supporting your customer success team to reduce churn over a lack of key functionality, and unlocking your product team’s roadmap to focus on your competitive differentiation.
Building without Nylas is a multi-year commitment with a significantly delayed return on investment for functionality, and launches with reduced scope and higher internal maintenance costs.
It’s not as easy as it looks! For example, retrieving an email from an inbox with an API call to Google starts as a straightforward task but rapidly increases complexity when you add in the context of your use case, your customer’s requirements, and the stability that your application needs.
So far we’ve only discussed resourcing in terms of time – when you take into account engineering costs as a component of the total cost of developing email, calendar and contact connectivity, you’ll often have multi-year payback periods. We’ve mapped out time commitments and costs below:
Note: Engineering resourcing is calculated as an estimate of work-hours for a senior developer with an income of $120,000 USD/year.
Instead of reverse engineering decades of communication protocols reinvest your teams’ resources towards innovative features that enhance your core product.
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Nick is our Product Marketing Manager for the AI & Intelligence products at Nylas. Hailing from New Zealand and based in Chicago, IL, Nick spends his free time hiking, cooking pasta, and riding his spin bike.