Discourage use of Mailgun as a mail provider
secure.phabricator.com
secure.phabricator.com
In this specific case, someone somewhere is lying about services being provided. If that's sales then that's not great. If that's accounts/billing then that's probably worse. In any case it's a pretty terrible look for the company concerned, and understandably results in an erosion of trust.
Evan then replied taking a hostile footing, which resulted in the sale rep backing up his opening with a list of agenda items (list cleaning, dedicated IP address, etc).
At this point it became a purely defensive line-by-line encounter because egos got involved once the Mailgun rep listed the real reasons he was writing.
IMO this is a massive overreaction and not a good look for the blog author.
Was Phacility paying for a dedicated IP or not?
If someone from a company is lying to you then is this really an overreaction?
(*Was 80% cherry-picked from a particular domain and so used in a purposefully misleading way? Should a sales rep have access to that sort of data anyway?)
Yes, it was. In the salesman's own words: "First, you're right, it is a low effort sales template. It does work."
> not a good look for the blog author
The OP isn't a blog. It's a task that Evan filed for himself to migrate away from Mailgun.
The Subject and the content really lack actual content, and the points that I find ineffective are:
- Unclear/seemingly random subject; the goal I suppose is to evoke a response based on curiosity, but looking at my spam folder on gmail, I lump such a subject line in with emails like "what're you doing tonight?" "I'm lonely, can you save me?" (I'm cleaning up the titles a bit...) I read it as just fishing for some response and hoping that someone bites
- The email itself hints at a concern by citing a specific number, but then says "or more"; this strikes me as odd that they'd land on specific number but then add some open ended qualifier. To me, I read this as again a way to try to catch my attention and either misdirect me to the fact that the person hasn't really researched anything in my profile for us to talk about and instead just wants to get me on a call. It's "specifically vague", and I get the goal is to provoke a conversation, but I feel that this is very transparently a frustrating sales tactic, and another reason I would have just binned the email in the first place
- "See how Mailgun can help you succeed" to me this says that they have no specific strategy in mind and just want to propose some new offers/features. This in and of itself is fine, but like the author, I actually would just prefer they be upfront about this and mention what features they're interested in upselling. Maybe I do want one, but I don't want to learn about it from a meeting I can't prepare for.
- The "let's meet on Wednesday" part without offering up any of their available times is more of a personal pet peeve as I don't like going back and forth like that; if you want to meet with me, please just tell me when you're available and if it doesn't work __and__ I'm interested, I'll tell you.
The first email really does read just like a spam email in every way, and sure, it probably works.
The author's response is mostly fine in my opinion, though I must admit the last line reads more like someone's fantasy on what they wish they wrote to people, but for convenience I'll assume the author actually wrote that.
The next email from Mailgun though really surprises me if it's true:
> First, you're right, it is a low effort sales template. It does work.
I actually don't understand why they even include the "It does work" part or why they admit it's a low effort template. I feel like the sales person maybe thought they were building rapport and that a small 'mea culpa' would be a common ground to discuss, but personally I find this a very wrong read of the author's initial response, and a fairly low effort attempt to get the conversation going.
The rest of the email and subsequent ones I'm not going to break down point by point, but I have the same problem I had with the first "specifically vague" points; I actually share the author's concern about why the employee would have this knowledge and access (I don't deal with email at all for my company like this, so I have no idea if such access for the mail providers is normal; I assume likely it is for troubleshooting purposes, but if that's the case, I'd expect that such concerns are explained more clearly and why it's an issue, and that there are better answers to the inevitable follow up questions.
Basically, I see a failed attempt at a Sales person that basically raised suspicion in the part of a customer. The author I think had an absolute right to be a bit angry that the sales person basically said "oh looks like we've been charging you for a service that you didn't actually get to use" and then completely ignore the issue. If it was another rouse to get a conversation, I think it's a really offensive way to do so personally, implying that the company was billing me for a service I wasn't getting and not acknowledging "Oh wait, that's really wrong of us as a company" or at least looking into this further.
"It's their job" only goes so far; for me, the Mailgun rep really created a huge amount of discomfort and distrust to the point that they basically said the customer was being charged for a service not being applied to their account, and the sales rep did not even seem to care.
I absolutely would have driven far further and I too would share the same distrust. I'm not sure I'd write such a call to action like the customer, but I definitely would know that I would be looking to talk to anyone else at Mailgun about the entire incident.
The situation got heated as did the author, and frankly I have trouble blaming them. I don't see the author's responses as hostile or abusive; I do see the author as suddenly very concerned while considering that this might just be a bad sales person creating concern/worry for no reason, which I would personally be pretty angry about.
It just seems really weird to take all of that and then jump to a massive conclusion that everyone should stop using Mailgun as a mail provider. The author took an innocuous email, created a battle which he won, and then decided to start a war.
I'm less taking issue with the absolute specifics of the email and more with the decision to turn this into something I'm reading about on the front page of HN.
I guess some founders here owe their careers to scummy sales tactics. Or are just fantasizing about getting rid of the pesky people who pay them money
In my experience customers get rude when they are already unhappy and have been for a while. In the case of Mailgun their service is very mediocre (unreliable api, slow, etc) and I don’t think they care. Does this justify rudeness towards support staff? No, but people tend to be much nicer when they’re generally happy with the service they get for their money.
OP did not say he is going to go nuclear at get go, he just said that is absolutely an option for this kind of behavior.
Nobody is saying feedback is bad , but give to someone who can actually do something about it.
Specifically to the sales tactic, hopefully everyone knows it's a tactic, and it works because it elicits responses. People crave genuine connection and disingenuous emails like this can be trigger points, but alas the incentive structure of inside sales teams is often to elicit any response. It's the modern day "calling at dinner time because you know someone will be home" trick.
I get a half-dozen emails like this every week. Most I ignore. If I'm feeling uncharitable I mark it as spam.
Trying to sell something [they should have already had] by framing it as technical support outreach is spam.
Obfuscating that behind generic "meetings" (read: let me pitch) is just disrespectful. If you want time with buyer, come loaded, explain what you can deliver, explain why an email won't suffice and you might pique my interest.
1. My time is valuable to me. Low effort sales templates are offensive in this light.
2. Joe never answered about why he has different metrics than Evan. You're just going to waltz past that point? Someone in mailgun is lying.
3. Nothing about this was rude or dramatic. Send me an email chain like this, I'd be happy to demonstrate what rude looks like. Waste my time at your own peril
If that's true, yes. But it sounds plausible that the salesman was in error (also a problem, but less severe IMO):
> (Mail headers show the dedicated IP is functioning correctly, see "headers.png", where the outbound route matches the dedicated IP in the web interface.)
Of course, we have no idea what other customer information this sales guy might have access to. And it's concerning that the information he had access to was incorrect, or he was somehow very badly misinterpreting it. Or, worse, he was confused and actually looking at another customer's dashboard, which, if true, would be pretty concerning. These things are perhaps worrisome, but it's not clear what was actually going on here.
I agree that the sales guy was more pushy than he should have been, seems like he was poorly-trained and not good at his job, and I too hate vague requests for agenda-less meetings, but this whole thing seems like an overreaction.
It comes down to internal controls. If the email in the OP is actually an approach from a compliance or customer management department, it's a clumsy attempt.
To me, it reads as a sales pitch. If so, my opinion remains unchanged - I don't think I'd be happy if sales people had access to the recipient domains of my outbound emails.
Edit: Re-reading the post, the Mailgun employee says in their reply:
> First, you're right, it is a low effort sales template. It does work.
That really does suggest that this was an attempt at an upsell from a sales person.
And I don't want you Sales people poking around in my SaaS setup or in my data.
Busy people don't spend hours starting internet fights. They delete spam and move on with their day.
Time is certainly the most valuable asset, and if someone is wasting my time/energy then I just ignore them.
If I see an email that's coming from a random sales-related channel and not from my support rep, I'm ignoring it. If I'm using a service incorrectly, and the email is vague and gives the same vibe when someone asks "Can I ask you a question?" on slack and waits for a response, then I'm not going to bother replying.
Waste your time, but don't expect the same from me.
I'd be similarly upset if I was treated this way by someone from marketing.
Edit: From a second read, I really don't see any of this as rude. You know how it's poor etiquette to start a chat message with "Hey, do you have a moment?", And it's much better to just write the question and wait for a response?
This is the email equivalent. "Request too vague, I don't want to meet. Please specify further, unless this is a sales pitch, in which case, preemptively not interested." It's not passive aggressive, it's just business.
If I had received, "You're right, this is a low effort sales pitch, and it works", I don't think I'd bother replying. That is an extremely passive aggressive response.
I think this is the difference. For plenty of people, this is a NOT a widely held norm. It really IS ok to just start a chat or email with a "Hey, do you have a moment?"
That doesn't mean it should be ok. We probably all would be better off providing more context for more effective communication. But standards here seem to vary widely.
I wouldn't reply to someone's email and accuse them of "low-effort sales" or whatever. I'd just say "thanks, not interested" and then be internally mad at the low effort.
From the other side, I think that sales should be aware that these emails can read like "hey, we're going to shut you off unless you chat with me for 30 minutes" which is annoying. It would be nice to clarify that up front, to avoid the negative emotion associated with that prospect.
Evan's is the wrong way to do it. "I am busy–do you have specific recommendations you can share over email" is more concise, polite and to the point. (Ignoring the e-mail, or a simple not interested, are also options.) And if you want to use those words, fine, but leave off the "low effort" insults at the end.
Certainly I think there's a better way of saying it than OP did, though: perhaps, "before we schedule anything, can you propose an agenda so we can both be sure a meeting is the best use of our time?" or something like that.
The OP could have ignored the email, or even marked spam it. If you take the effort to reply then do it courteously there is no excuse for being rude.
> I feel that your initial outreach was intentionally deceptive in a transparent and falsifiable way -- and for no reason. You could just as easily have said you were "interested" in Phabricator without being dishonest.
> It's important that I be able to trust people I do business with. It took you three words to violate my trust by lying to me.
It's okay to be annoyed with someone for using a standard email template. He takes it a step too far and accuses them of having malicious intentions when it's obviously not the case.
I don't believe this applies to salesmen, though. They're trained to exploit all holes related to human decency and courtesy. They expect a polite person will not reject an invitation (to a meeting they absolutely don't need and which serves only one party) and so on.
2. You're free to just ignore them, especially over electronic communication. (Silently mark it as spam if you're really annoyed). I teach my kids that the adult way to respond to this kind of pushiness over something like email is to simply ignore them. Responding back with rudeness is juvenile, this is like day 1 of Being A Professional 101 kind of stuff. 'No thanks' and/or then ignoring them puts you in control of the situation, it's ultimately the high road
It's really not, but I agree completely with your second point. I've managed interactions with vendors for only ~5 years and this is for a small startup, with not a lot of them, and still over 5 years they switch up your account managers left and right (people keep moving companies) and you never know what you're going to get. And each of them thinks your whole job is to just wait for their random emails to have calls without agendas scheduled where they'll go over whatever playbook they were given to see if you'll commit some more spend this quarter before their earnings.
I tend to reply after only several days and try to not get baited into looking an asshole like this Evan person did - but sometimes it's hard. I can imagine this person gets way more email than I do and my advice would be to just not reply if what you're going to write is to "teach them a lesson". There's no point in telling someone they lied to you in a sales email, get over yourself.
Someone illegally robocalling my cell will earn my scorn immediately. As well as any idiot calling at 3AM in the region of my area code. When I'm called the very next day by a company I asked to put me on their do not call list, while I won't emotionally terrorize the fellow on the phone, it's worth pointing out in no uncertain terms that this is completely unacceptable, and exactly why. If someone scrapes my git logs for emails to give poorly targeted recruiter spam, I'm going to share my two cents about how exactly I feel about their half assed effort.
> he comes off a low EQ.
Low in empathy, maybe. Low in EQ? I disagree.
High EQ doesn't make you a slave to false smiles and empty pleasantries, nor require you to engage in networking with anybody with a pulse. Not all relationships are positive, cooperative, and worth building and reenforcing, nor necessairly worth attempting to salvage in such a direction. The author's initial responses are a bit cold and testing - correctly suspecting low effort sales full of faux relatability without much actual common ground - while not being so negative as to prevent the possibility of correction should that suspicion be proven wrong instead of validated.
Evan perhaps makes a minor mistake in not triaging, cutting off, and ghosting these sales pitches earlier - when it becomes clear it's not a relationship or conversation he'll value. This would likely be driven by curiosity, concern, a desire to give the benefit of the doubt, and/or empathy despite the cold demeanor - but that's not particularly a low EQ thing either.
TL;DR: Sith lord EQ techniques are still EQ techniques.
Could the sales outreach be done better? Sure, but I've seen a lot worse and I feel like the initial email setting the tone with "This request is so vague and nonspecific..." was already more passive aggressive than it has to be and set the tone for the rest of the thread.
Same thing happened with me on GoDaddy. I used GoDaddy's domain purchase system to negotiate and buy a domain, and transferred it to Cloudflare. A few years later, a GoDaddy buyer contacted me about buying the domain. The only way they could have gotten my email is to trawl through their past purchase records since the domain wasn't using any GoDaddy systems (DNS, email, etc) after it was transferred out.
I sent a very unhappy email back to them and I've been transferring my domains out to other registrars. I no longer recommend GoDaddy.
That said GoDaddy has never been a good registrar anyway.
I'm just going by what you are saying: that not using GoDaddy email means they couldn't have contacted you. Not using GoDaddy email service is irrelevant and your mention of it at all implies you aren't aware of how your information can get out. It's certainly possible to prevent it but you're not giving the vibe that you understand this.
And in fact they did get my email from the past purchase because I use separate email accounts for my domain registrations and a separate account for domain purchases.
First, ESPs send email on a client's behalf. One of the primary benefits of using an ESP is co-opting their email reputation and their contacts with real time blacklist (RBL) operators, postmaster organizations at major email providers and third party email reputation groups. A good reputation keeps a sender's email out of the junk folder (or worse refused/dropped on the floor) and is really all most folks care about (especially at an API driven company like Mailgun).
In order to do all of the above, an ESP needs access to the details of the email that's being sent, including recipient email addresses and the contents of the message being sent. This is because both of those things can potentially be dangerous and the ESP is the ultimate responsible party in the eyes of the receiving email provider (i.e. Google holds Mailgun as the responsible party for what Phabricator sends).
Now, as to this sales call, sometime ago (circa ~2004 I guess) it became apparent that ESPs could work with their problematic clients to improve their sending habits, thereby improving their reputation and collect more money from the client in the process (via either direct consulting fees or increased sending volume). This kind of win-win made a lot of sense, but as the price-per-email sent was dropping ESPs were looking for ways to reliably generate more revenue and, well, "deliverability consulting" became a thing. My guess is that this is what this email exchange was about, and like any consulting effort, it's only as good as the last interaction and here I agree with Evan that "Joe" fumbled the ball fairly badly.
Personally, I would have just reached out to Mailgun support and asked what's up with the incorrect billing and Joe's problematic responses, but that doesn't appear to have been Evan's first choice.
Source for the industry insider info is that I used to run the technical side of a small ESP from about 2003 to 2009, was an active participant in MAAWG and generally had to work with my peers across orgs to navigate deliverability problems regularly.
Of course they have data about the customer performance, it's part of their job, it doesn't mean it has access to private data.
This rep was honest ("it was a template"), gave a specific agenda when asked, and gave useful information. Complaining that your rep has access to your data when that's his entire job is ridiculous. Data security best practices are that data should be provided on a "need to know" basis. In order to provide the above 3 values, the rep needs access to that data.
It was quite sad to read the announcement that development had stopped. Phabricator provided me with one of the best development experiences I've ever had. I guess Github + Gitlab won, and it became insanely difficult for the smaller players to make a dent.
I'm keeping an eye on SourceHut, though.
the benefit is also no custom code or needing to add their SDK, you can replace the service by simply replacing the credentials, probably without even a code deployment if you store credentials in env.
[1] https://help.mailgun.com/hc/en-us/articles/203409084-How-do-...
Would definitely recommend mailgun/sendgrid over gsuite for emails and not entirely agree with this blog post.
I had to switch to gsuite because hubspot doenst allow external smtp server to send out emails and we couldnt use mailgun.
I've had multiple clients in the past who have decided to send "Check out my new App!" emails to their entire contact list from Gmail who shortly found out the hard way that it caused all their emails to start being marked as Spam.
Don't use Gmail like this.
Since hubspot is our CRM I had to start using gsuite. The problem is is that the emails from hubspot land in the inbox. BUT the emails from my outlook that I type it out land in people's spam folder.
One reason why I have zero concerns with googles overarching data privacy issue is that I can see how stupid their AI /algorithms are. And with more noise it just gets worse not better.
As somebody who used to work in enterprise support, I don’t see them as having done anything wrong here. It’s just somebody reaching out to do their job.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
This entire sentence was unnecessary..
> Mailgun's hiring or training process for sales employees doesn't seem to be very good: Joe didn't seem to understand the Mailgun system. Beyond not needing it, I also don't think it is acceptable for staff who can not consistently demonstrate a high level of competence to have access to customer data.
He blames the training AND the hiring, lol