Mailgun Acquires Mailjet
mailgun.com
mailgun.com
Hopefully this gets cleared up real soon. I kind of feel like the process might be pushing people to upgrade to premium phone support to regain access to their business, but maybe I'm being pessimistic.
I thought mailgun was for delivering emails? How/why are they your MX?
Fortunately we were able to get it resolved quickly
Got account unlocked after six hours of downtime though, but I changed email provider since then.
I do wish they would let you choose the region where the server is located though, like Mailgun does.
As a B2B SaaS, our opportunity cost for support (and potential for lost goodwill) due to failed notifications is high, and switching to Postmark noticeably moved the needle. Time is our most valuable and scarce resource, and peer recommendation is our primary marketing device, so the price increment for switching to Postmark is easily justified. Their deliverability and support are stellar compared to Sendgrid, Mailgun, and SES.
Two thumbs up
See also: Fastmail over G suite for your mailboxes and calendaring.
It seems they do that on a TLD basis, for example if you add the domain "spammer.xyz", it will probably lock your account because ".xyz" TLD is considered risky.
They support always fix the problem, but we're always locked a few hours, this is super annoying.
You can use gsuite programmatically for easy inbox management with the Gmail API.
You can hire a non technical person to manage your inbox without having to code as much to connect with your systems.
If you have problems with G suite, you are a paying customer and you get support from Google. There's a phone number you can call and get your problems solved.
Detect and block phishing emails that are forwarded through your service. Right now, I get several messages forwarded per day from "Sam at Mailgun" (actually a variety of external senders) trying to get me to log in to review various (nonexistent) problems with my account.
The first time was a mistake on their part when they switched plan tiers and our payment was not processed correctly, they fixed it entirely on their end and did not admit to the problem in the slightest. After this event we made sure to have an intermediate queue on our end in order not to have emails sent into oblivion.
The second time one of our users mass reported a bunch of old emails at once which triggered something that instantly blocked us. Even if we have very low reporting in general (no marketing emails) a single user was able to effectively kill sending of emails to all other users without any forewarning.
After that we forced ourselves out of the platform. When we look for a transactional email sending service, we expect at least an effort on the service to keep the api working while we resolve any issues that arise in a timely manner.
I think efounders track record is really interesting, out of 19 companies, 4 acquisition and 3 other project that seems to work very well (AirCall, Front and Spendesk).
All their companies are here for the curious: https://www.efounders.com/companies
Sendgrid and Sparkpost are the only two I know of doing this correctly at the moment.
They're shutting down accounts without any notice. It doesn't matter how many emails you sent, that you have 0 spam complaints, extremely low bounce rate ... on the first issue they're banning your account.
We used them to notify our customers when new people sign up on their portal so we included details about those users, including the website. We got JUST ONE, SINGLE .tk domain in the email content and they blocked our account completely. We were also on their Premier plan.
No notice before-hand, no warning, nothing.. they simply blocked the account and haven't activated it back even after numerous requests. They couldn't point to any document that stated their policies and what rules we should follow or why they banned us.
tl;dr. Stay away from Sparkpost, they ban your account without notice.
Our account (that we had been using for 6 months) was locked right after we paid a bit over $200 for October.
We filled a ticket and gave them all the info they requested. Eventually the reply was a template that didn't explain anything. They also refused to refund the remaining credits.
Here the nice rejection email:
Thank you for your interest in SparkPost. We strive to offer the very best email service, and to that end, we maintain a strict anti-abuse messaging policy.
Because we cannot offer you the high deliverability you would expect from SparkPost, we must decline to provide our services. We wish you the best in your future business endeavors.
All in all before we had even launched our application they had thrown nearly 200,000 free email credits at us. We hadn't even provided a credit card yet.
Considering at launch we were sending about 2,000 emails per month on a busy month we joked that we would never have to pay these guys.
Come a year and a half later we're sending a lot more than 2k emails per month and we're just about out of credits. At this point Postmark had become so ingrained in our applications (we made heavy use of their SDKs and templates) there wasn't any easy way to switch if we wanted to.
While we thought they were the fools for giving us such an obscene amount of free credits, they ultimately won in the long game and that company is still using (and now paying) Postmark.
All of that said, Postmark IS fantastic. I use them for every project where I need to send or receive mail, and I wouldn't consider anyone else. Highly recommend them.
Spent over 1 year cruising through their free credits, now happily paying a couple hundred a month without a second thought.
It's really intuitive and easy-to-use to see errors, read text of emails, and so forth.
Side note: It's neat to see people come out of the woodwork on this thread for Postmark, which is normally one of those products consumed so quietly, and under-appreciated. I bet their team is really happy to see this. :)
Link to postmark since it’s kind of hard to find on google: https://postmarkapp.com/
Also their deliverability is excellent and when there are deliverability issues, it's easy to find exactly why. The logs also surface the info we need to prove what actually happened during a nondelivery event. ("Here is the actual log line from your MX server rejecting the mail we sent.")
For small near-zero-budget projects, I still use Amazon SES. It's Good Enough for most uses and nobody else with even decent deliverability can touch them on price. All my hobby projects combined are billing well under $1/mo for SES usage.
SES is also decent for some very specific inbound email use cases. If you need to receive email from some system that doesn't have a real webhooks type outbound API, but does have robust email notifications, and send the body to a Lambda function that parses it and makes the API call that system ought to have just made in the first place.. SES is perfect. (And unfortunately all the major systems I work with that process inbound email are stuck needing an IMAP connection - if I was able to use an API based inbound email receipt scheme, and needed to receive mail from various domains, I'd consider Postmark for the better diagnostics and logging.)
I know several companies that seems to shop for these mail services. Someone spams me though a service like this, I complain, next week I'm getting email from the same sender but through a different spam service.
You email/spam service providers need to create a clearing house for bad customers, because bad actors just move around and change names and always find a new home to land in.
For those who don't know MJML: https://mjml.io
Everything else they provide is just gravy for situations where development speed is more important than client support (as we see it) or when you know you’re not going to worry about Outlook users of a certain generation.
To be more accurate, I loathe and despise it, and have done since I first received a commercial email spam, in the early 1990s. The very name "Mailgun" sounds to me no different from "Spam cannon". Substitute "chimp" if you want; it doesn't make it better for me.
My inbox is full of rubbish ads - it overwhelms the stuff I care about, and makes my life sadder.
It all makes me feel ill, to the very depths of my Soul.
"Order confirmations": not necessary. I should have a choice whether I use my email address to confirm an order.
"Transactional": I don't know what that means (I keep finding that term being used). I think it means that the email is being used as part of an agreed deal. Fine: if I've agreed to my email being used as part of a deal, no prob. Otherwise, leave me alone.
"Order confirmations": if I need my order confirmed, then I can opt for that, and give you my email. But in general, orders don't need confirming - you either order, or you don't.
"Password reset": My passwords are my business. I use a password manager. Please don't assume I'm a password slob. Passwords suck; they are an insane way to authenticate, they just don't work. So reset emails are not a good use-case for unsolicited email.
Next?
isn't their reason for existence the sending of multi-recipient emails?
It's not "necessary", same as Stripe isn't necessary for accepting payments but it makes it a whole lot easier if you have to deal with it and don't want to implement everything yourself or run mail infrastructure.
It always a pain point and someone somewhere is certainly not receiving something they feel they should. These services help because of how complex the email ecosystem has become with layers of identity and reputation and such.
That doesn't work for me; I am not a "use-case". I'm an individual person, and my choice is to not receive unsolicited advertising. Marketers don't seem to understand that some people object to receiving "helpful product suggestions" all through the day.
>>KERPLUNK<< another catalogue book just fell through the letterbox, and is destined for the recycling bin. Dammit, save me the trouble; just put it in the bin yourself, it's just by the front door. Hell, the bin's big enough; put the whole batch in my bin, end your shift, and go back to bed.
This sounds like you're saying it's a nasty job, but someone has to do it - like cleaning toilets, or assassinating tyrants.
Just stop.
If there is a security related issue on the receiver side (like an expired certificate), the sender (Mailgun) may hold the email and retry a couple of times. Eventually the issue may get resolved and the email will be delivered, or the sender may choose to deliver the email without encryption (unless MTA-STS is used, of course). During this whole process the email is sent, but not delivered.
I understand that the status 'sent' may be confusing to you, but calling the companies 'trash' just because the email protocol from 1982 does not uphold your standards is a bit harsh.
> We’ll continue to maintain separate brands, develop new products for each brand, and enhance our existing offerings. As a Mailgun customer, you aren’t likely to notice any change, except for new features and functionality coming your way soon.