There are tons of email marketing tools on the market, the most well-known being perhaps MailChimp and Campaign Monitor. These tools have varying prices and flexibility and each one has its own fanbase and target group.

We wanted to create a simple, developer friendly email campaign tool that we could use internally for our monthly newsletter at restdb.io (it's available as a database template you can play around with).

The requirements were these:

• Edit the emails in Markdown syntax (to save time)
• Possibility to upload email addresses using CSV/Excel or using an API
• Ignore duplicate emails when uploading
• Have an unsubscribe feature
• Track emails sent and opens in realtime

And last, but not least: Everything should be written using serverless Javascript, HTML and NoSQL.

Difficult? Yes. Doable? Certainly! Read on.