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Building the Ops Side of emilybuilds.ai

When I added a simple sign-up form to emilybuilds.ai, I thought the hard part was over. The idea was straightforward:

Let people subscribe for occasional updates
Send a friendly welcome email from hello@emilysas.com
Keep everything lightweight, privacy-friendly, and under my control

Easy, right? Not quite.

What went wrong

I already had my domain registered with Namecheap, and I’d set up a mailbox via their PrivateEmail service. It was cost-effective, worked well with my domain, and gave me a professional @emilysas.com address.

It seemed like a sensible way to send branded updates - without relying on Gmail or paying for a heavier solution.

When I tried wiring up email sending via Zapier + SMTP, things quickly broke down:

TLS vs SSL: Zapier defaults to TLS on port 587, but PrivateEmail prefers SSL on port 465. I tried both combinations. No luck.
Authentication errors: I repeatedly got authentication failed: read ECONNRESET, despite using the correct credentials and ports.
No 2FA or App Passwords: PrivateEmail doesn’t support app-specific passwords or modern two-factor auth flows — which Zapier often expects.
Zero helpful logs: Error messages were vague, and the troubleshooting process felt like chasing shadows across forums, dashboards, and settings panels.

I checked recovery keys, control panels, and mailbox permissions in both Namecheap and PrivateEmail. Still no dice.

The fallback

After several hours of experimenting and getting nowhere, I decided to email support, pause the automation and keep the form simple for now:

✅ The Tally form collects email + optional name

✅ Zapier sends this data to Airtable for safekeeping

❌ The welcome email is temporarily disabled

This avoids broken functionality and lets me revisit email delivery later.

What I learned (the hard way)

“No-code” still involves setup ops. Not unsimilar to coding tbh, it seems much of the time sink is caused by sorting out weird niggly config issues.
Tool choice matters. It might be better to test a small, reliable stack and stick with it, rather than assuming new tools will automatically work well together. This is a tricky one because part of what I’m wanting to do is experiment with what’s out there, but I may do better to pick a few tools that play nicely together and stick with them, rather than constantly swapping things in and hoping they’ll just click.

What’s next

I’ll revisit this email flow when I have a more robust comms strategy. In the meantime, if you want to follow along as I experiment, build, and (occasionally) break things — you can still sign up here.

Update – 9 July 2025

After all the back-and-forth, I finally got the email workflow up and running. The key fixes were:

Using my regular password, not the application-specific one (thanks to Namecheap support for clarifying this).
Switching from using a hardcoded record ID in Airtable to finding the signup by email address, then updating that record — much more robust.