Today we launched Courier Inbox, a set of APIs and UI components for building a modern application inbox. Inbox components are available for both web, iOS and Android applications and are totally customizable so that devs can build a notification inbox that feels like a native part of the rest of the application. To test this proposition, we decided to use Courier Inbox to build something lightyears away from a product inbox.

Product notifications keep users engaged and informed about important updates related to web and mobile applications. However, building an effective notification system for your app that sends timely and personalized messages can be challenging. Courier's development platform for notifications simplifies this process by consolidating various communication APIs, data, and development tools in one place.

Resetting passwords is a critical way to make your app accessible to users, but setting up email notifications for password resets from scratch can be tedious and error-prone. While Laravel does support password reset email templates, Laravel emails can be unreliable and prone to being caught in spam filters, and the default email templates are not particularly customizable. It might also be desirable to set up a backup channel like SMS or a backup email provider in case the primary fails.

Setting up a password reset workflow inside your web application can be challenging. At a minimum, you need to build the logic to update the user’s password with a new hash, send the appropriate emails with the right content, and manage different user sessions across browsers. If you’re responsible for managing password reset emails, it’s likely that you also have to manage all aspects of authentication and password management for your application.

Transactional emails are automated emails triggered by a user (or group of users) taking action on your web or mobile application. Some examples include password reset emails, confirmation emails for purchases or reservations, welcome and onboarding emails, and shipping notifications.

When you’re building a web application, there’s an immediate decision to make about how to handle Users and Authentication. There are lots of services (Auth0, Clerk) and libraries (Passport.js) to choose from, and the right choice will depend on the requirements of the application that you’re building.

Send limits are a new addition to the Courier app that allow you to manage notification rate limits. This means you can set a maximum limit on the number of notifications you can send over a certain time period. The advantages of using send limits are twofold: you can save money by imposing spending caps on notifications, and you can improve the customer experience of your app by avoiding bombarding users with too many notifications at once.

We are excited to announce the official launch of One-Time Send, a powerful feature designed to simplify and expedite the process of sending one-time notifications through Courier. It's one piece of a web app redesign that we started recently (dark mode shown coming soon). Based on invaluable feedback from our customers during the closed beta, we have refined and improved One-Time Send to make it even more efficient and user friendly.