Email first

Nothing Rented is a five-part series from Queen City Garage on how we built our own email and RSVP systems for NASCAR Sundays instead of renting them. Read the whole series.

Nascarsundays.com went live on April 18. Two days later, on April 20, it could send its own email.

We did not build a mail server. Getting email past spam filters and into inboxes is a full-time job, and it is not ours. We use Resend, a service that does one thing: it delivers email that our own software writes. Everything around that is ours: the signup form on our site, the subscriber list in our own database, and every message, designed by us to look like the rest of NASCAR Sundays and sent from our own address.

The first message was the welcome note, signed by me, which goes out the moment someone signs up. On April 28 we built the weekly party email, and the first one went out May 1. It tells you the race, the green-flag time and the channel, where each city is watching, and how last Sunday went, with photographs from the room.

One rule governs it now: nothing sends until a person approves it. Every weekly email is written, reviewed and cleared by someone before it reaches a subscriber.

When we started on our RSVP system a few weeks later, which we named Paddock, the hard part was already done. It did not need an email service of its own. It used this one.

What a person did: approves every email before it goes out. What the machine did: built the templates and delivers them.