1m emails/mo:
elasticemail.com - $90
sparkpost.com - $474
mailgun.com - $515
sendgrid.com - $534.95
smtp.com - $900
Or is there anyone between elasticemail / mailgun worth considering?
Thanks
* Please don't suggest Amazon SES.
The original question was for marketing email, if you are sending a million marketing emails a month and not making enough money then the conclusion that you are sending spam is not unreasonable
Or just use something like Elastic Email or SES.
> The original question was for marketing email, if you are sending a million marketing emails a month and not making enough money then the conclusion that you are sending spam is not unreasonable
That's fair enough.
Before you know it, you're sending 20k-50k notification emails every day, and over a million emails a month, without making any money or while barely staying afloat with $100-400/month in ad and donations revenue.
Almost none of the SaaS or IaaS solutions HN loves to praise are within this use case's price range but scrappy not-for-profit communities like this deserve to exist, too. You're basically limited to leasing a bare-metal server or two and making it do almost everything you need.
The difference between $100/mo and $900/mo is the difference between getting to stay online or shutting the forum down. Even the difference between $10/month and $100/month might be enough to close shop over.
Personally, in this scenario, I've found setting up my own mail server with a tool like Postal or Cuttlefish to be worth every minute and delivery rates to even be better (due to getting to manage my own IP address's reputation vs sharing a mail-sending IP with anyone else).
It can take months for an IP to earn a reputation as a non-spammer, but once it's earned I find it hard to believe that Sendgrid offers any additional ability to get emails delivered outside of the natural earning of reputation.
It’s worth paying someone if deliverability is important.
Getting blacklisted is a temporary state and I maintain it's easy to recover from if your IP's and domains had a good history. I've experienced the IP's that email hosting services send my mail through being blacklisted and then waiting days for them to deal with it versus being able to contact blacklists on my own behalf to resolve things same-day.
I used to pay one of these services $xxx/month and experienced delivery rates around 60-70% that they couldn't do anything about other than offering me a dedicated IP for a lot more money. Moved to my own mail server with an OSS transactional email system and delivery rates shot up to 99%-ish while eliminating the email bill.
You end up on blacklists by sending out spam. Don't spam - meaning, don't send unsolicited emails. That's it. That's all. Done. There's no magical secret sauce to this like SES, SendGrid, Sparkpost, and friends want you to believe.
There are two things you have to do to not spam:
- Don't be the one sending spam. Don't send your users any email they don't ask for short of extenuating circumstances that truly or legally warrant it, like a security breach. Just don't. This also includes making it brain-dead simple to unsubscribe from anything they once signed up for.
- Don't let anyone else send spam through your server. Keep it locked down. Lots of criminals are constantly prowling the IPv4 address space for poorly secured mail servers to fire out a million crappy scam mails from before a blacklist notices.
The amount of work that blacklists create is grossly overblown. If you're doing email right, the only time you'll ever interact with one is when your mail server gets owned - in which case, you send the blacklists a quick note to explain what happened, that you fixed it, and they take you off of it within a day.
Sign up for mxtoolbox.com, secure your server, respect your users' inboxes, and you only have the box's uptime to worry about.
Microsoft is the pickiest email provider to get good delivery rates to - they require a gradual volume ramp-up over 1-4 weeks on a fresh IP to see it as good, in my experience, and SNDS is something to keep a close eye on during that time - it clearly indicates your IP's reputation with them and how much mail they see from it. That number being higher than expected plus the sample emails they provide may indicate something going wrong - through this, I once discovered an obscure feature in a software package I used that allowed visitors to send emails to arbitrary addresses.
Mandrill has better delivery than the other email services I've tried but is cripplingly expensive for a hobby project that happens to have a nontrivial userbase.
No, not really, we are using one the most expensive offerings in Switzerland. Renting dedi servers for spamming would be not only extremely expensive, they would kick you right away if they noticed. As i said we did nothing wrong, used monitoring and our invoice emails would sometimes end in the spamlist for microsoft, after trying to get it right i gave up and hooked mandrill.
if you are runnig some random internet forum, some part of your notifications ending in spam is not a big deal, but for us, invoices ending in spam box is not something you can ignore.
And in my experience the major services have unpredictable spam filter behavior.
I even saw Google being cute and assuming mail in Japanese was spam - because my profile is western.
So yeah. If your goal is 100% (not high 90s) deliverability - including the odd big attachement or foreign encoding mail - it's not trivial.
Thankfully I don't care that much if a recepient at Gmail or outlook don't get my mail;it's their fault. If it's a problem the recipient should move to a more reliable mail provider.
It's obviously not as easy for commercial/work mail...
Seems to be fewer such services now than a decade ago, but maybe something like: https://www.freelists.org/
The idea behind SaaS is that it's wildly more expensive (higher margins) because it frees up all those hours to making profit. So make a hundred spend fifty, versus make twenty spend ten on hosting. Or something along those lines.
When I last tried to use them for marketing purposes with paying clients, it was really hit and miss.
See below. They are old links, but serves my point.
[0]: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=233001
[1]: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=538207
[2]: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=220517
Just configure SPF and DKIM, and send email basically for free, no? Is there some back magic that these services perform to avoid getting blacklisted?
What’s the benefit of using one of these services besides a nicer API and a dashboard?
1. SAAS web app to manage the service with logs, and configuration as well as multi-user management with various roles. 2. HTTP Rest-like api for sending mail from your app 3. API keys for authentication, managed through web app 4. They do monitor black-lists and removals from blacklists. They also manage the warm-up time for your IP to make sure it is ready to send the volume of email you are sending, and can queue emails to avoid sending too many at once to the same destination mail service. 5. Spam control, in case you use the key in an app that turns out to have a relay vulnerability. 6. Return-path management to catch blocks and smtp errors.
I've managed my own SMTP services with PostFix and SendMail, and I will never go back to doing that myself again. It would take a lot more than 1M emails/month to make that worthwhile.
1. IP address reputation - Keeping your IP addresses reputable is not a simple task. It requires balancing your emails for popular destination domains (gmail.com, aol.com, yahoo.com, etc.) across multiple external IP address. It requires you to deal with many different conflict resolution departments, who don't care about email, when a dispute comes up. It's practically a requirement to use a service like ReturnPath to maintain your reputation.
2. Throttling - When doing it yourself you need to throttle yourself. This is problematic on "big" days, especially when your marketing department wants to send many millions of emails for a big product push, promotion, or on days like black friday/cyber monday.
3. Hiring - A lot of people think sending email is easy. When you get up to the multiple million per day mark things start to fall apart. Do you have someone(s) on staff who really know sendmail/postfix/qmail inside and out?
4. Monitoring - sendmail/postfix/qmail are often times hard to monitor. You have to put together all of your stats. You have to put together all of your alerts. If you aren't really experienced with bulk email, you won't know what to look for and that can impact your reputation. Also consider your logging infrastructure. sendmail/postfix/qmail are noisy.
5. Cost - All of the points above play into the cost aspect of it. Is it cheaper to run it yourself, pay for all of the services and salaries, etc. Or is it actually cheaper to just use sendgrid/mailgun/etc. IP address reputation services are not cheap. Infrastructure cost is also something to consider. AWS IPs all have pretty terrible reputations so running this in AWS (and maybe other cloud providers) is a non-starter since no one will accept your email.
If you've got the expertise and you are sending a massive amount of emails then it might be worth it to run your own infrastructure, but at the end of the day, a single developer consuming an API is often easier and less problematic.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...
Keep the one off transactional ones on a different domain. Then, if your bulk emails cause a false positive, you haven't burned essential things like receipts, password resets, shipping notices, etc.
Yes. No matter what your project is, unless your secret sauce has to do with email delivery or your business model requires email delivery to be free, do not attempt to roll your own email delivery service. No one has ever looked back and wished they had.
If you set up SPF and Domainkeys/DKIM that is an added vote of confidence but Sendgrid doesn't even require it, so I think most of the value of Sendgrid is simply offering a stable IP address and a convenient API. Am I wrong?
That poster gave a very detailed breakdown, but point #1 is enough to make anyone who’s done this before cry in a corner from the abuse they endured.
I use one of the service even for my private email server (which is essentially free for the volume being sent), so I don't have to have stupid conversation like check for spam box whenever I send emails.
Having emails land in spam box pretty much makes your email non existent with the volume of spams being sent today. What is the reason not to use one of the services either privately or professionally?
At a previous job (company sent ~2m emails/day), I was good friends with the engineer in charge of our mail infrastructure and he was really impressed by their platform, particularly the APIs around getting non-deliverability notification.
As long as it isn't spam and bounces are handled appropriately deliverability shouldn't be a problem.
The costs for delivery service aren't really high, not sure what the point of sending it all by yourself.
You should at least use a long living domain to increase deliverability.
I could very easily see someone spending $500/mo of their time, or a couple of days at most, fiddling with the mail system every month or dealing with crises.
I guess I'll have to keep looking.