tl;dr: don't use sendgrid. no it wasn't. i have 100s of messages stuck in my queue marked as 'deferred'. these are critical emails that affect us financially. and the response is to "wait a few days". laughable. even without this process, lots of messages get stuck for 10 minutes or more with no response from their support department as to why. And this is a PAID service. over to AWS i go. i don't need complex reporting or elegant UI. just send the bloody email.