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Comment by d2p | Hacker News Reader

Sounded interesting, but it seems abit misleading to me.. The title says "unlimited" and the page says:

> We do not count your domains, mailboxes, gigabytes or teeth.

yet the pricing page says:

> up to 100 outgoing emails per day

Even the most expensive plan says 2000. I'm not saying it's unreasonable, but it's certainly not unlimited in that respect.

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Hi, thank you for your comments. It depends how you look at it. All email services have limits. However, the limits we set are more as a protection for ourselves and our users.

We have to deal with spammers, phishing attacks etc. We diversify based on the actual, realistic needs of the organisation. For instance, a startup of 3 would not need to send 500 emails a day, that is a clear red flag. In practice we have yet to have a case of a user reaching those limits. Thanks again!

I like this line of thinking! Not-really-obstructive limits that prevent abuse.

I'm glad they list the limits clearly. Other e-mail services have similar limits by nature but you only find out when you hit them.

A startup of 3 can certainly need to send 500 emails a day but there are other services that should be used for that like mail gun or mail chimp or the plethora of other bulk sending providers. Usually 10k-20k per month is the free limit.

Exactly, we prefer using the right service for the right task at hand. Personal / business mail is not for sending bulk emails. It also carries reputation penalties.

I appreciate the fact that you guys made product decisions, but this statement was a little red-flag to me:

> For instance, a startup of 3 would not need to send 500 emails a day, that is a clear red flag.

There are many startups that do cold outreach, via cold emailing, that could do roughly 500 emails per day. I am not sure how typical this is, but as someone that has started doing sending cold emails as a direct sales tool, it seems to me that you just haven't had any customers like that yet.

If you do though, don't assume they are spammers.

You are absolutely right. However, our limits are not really hard limits. If someone occasionally needs to send more emails we do not make a fuss about it. However, a red flag (thanks for mentioning it :) goes up and we check if everything is ok. We never sanction users.

We do have sales teams using Migadu. However, they simply estimated how much they would send and signed up for the higher plan. It's straight forward I believe.

So you have clients sending unsolicited emails touting for business through the same gateways as my mail?

I fear you will not be in the email business for long.

You live up to you nickname :D

Sending sales emails is not the same as spam, at least not in the lines of business using Migadu. We are not judging what people do for living, but rather try to aid them with a worthy advice if there is a better way. Working hand in hand with users pays off and we both enjoy it. We're tired of being nobody to some wise Google(rs)....

If sales stop, the world would stop. Everyone sells something to somebody.

The grandparent post referred specfically to "sending cold emails as a direct sales tool." I'm struggling to find any way to interpret that phrase that doesn't scream "spam" to me. Sending your emails individually from Outlook to an individual you've looked up on the targets website doesn't make it any less spammy.

I'm sure your approach works for the customers you have right now, but if you consider the above to be an acceptable use of your service, then I stand by my statement that you won't last long in the email business.

I see. I will take that as a great suggestion. Thank you. We will update our terms to reflect it.

If you're sending 500 unsolicited emails a day, you're spamming. "Cold outreach" sounds very much like a nice way of saying "Spamming" to me, and I wouldn't want to share a mail server with you.

For me, the bigger red flag is the response you got - I would expect a reputable mail provider to make it abundantly clear that the behaviour you describe is not welcome on their service.

I hear you. The term 'spamming' is quite subjective.

Either way, the fact of the matter is sending cold emails is actually a powerful way to build sales -- there is a simple reason so many people do it, it works.

Like it or not, many startups do it.

So I was simply pointing this out for the OP's benefit.

There's an equally simple reason why they do it from botnets or hacked mail servers. It's illegal in many places, and its a great way to get your mail host blacklisted. There is no benefit whatsoever for OP to allow spamming through his service.

It makes all the other pages look like pure marketing slang. So instead of counting domains or gigabytes, they count outgoing emails. How is this "radically different"?

Their claims basically are that hard drives are cheap and cost drops and that domains and users are simply a configuration change (which is automated).

They're charging based on something that actually has an impact. Sending emails incurs in a load as well as receiving one back (you probably are getting a response) and work that the emails may incur. The more emails you send, the odds of needing a clean IPs in case something happens (blacklist is the first thing that comes to mind) on the amount of emails they send, dealing with blacklists is something that statistically will happen the more emails are sent as well. So they charge you by the impact each email sent has and for the cost of hard drives.

I guess they're charging more on a probability of the time they need to work on it the more emails are sent. There is a cost associated with developing the code, sure, but the more people, the less it is per person and once it's developed, it's only new features and maintaining.

It seems they've set it up to scale and it seem they have a lot automated. I'm assuming this based on this:

  According to our trials, it would take us up to 30 minutes to setup a completely new infrastructure and get all clients back live.

According to the affiliate link, you get up to 50% of what a user you refer pays (if you give a discount, it comes out of your share of the price). So it seems like they've made the math and it looks like they can at least break even, ideally they still see some revenue, with only earning half of what they charge.

It seems very well structured and organized. I'm testing it out. Paid for a year. If I transfer everything (a couple of domains, but only a handful of accounts. Maybe I will end up setting them via aliases...) I may upgrade just to give back. I had been looking into OVH, Rackspace, FastMail, Google Apps, etc and hadn't switched because they charge for everything...

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