Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

I’ve considered doing the same thing many times. My vote would go to Sendgrid based on my last round of research 2-3 years ago.

Reasons: 1. Automatic DKIM rotation. Sendgrid will setup 2 CNAMES so that they can automatically rotate your DKIM keys making this a “set and forget” situation.

2. Good delivery logs so you can see exactly why something wasn’t delivered if there was a problem.

3. Different permission levels for different users included. You can create a user with only SMTP permissions to use to send with while not having to worry that if it’s compromised someone can go ballistic on your account settings.

3a. Solid 2FA

4. They fiercely guard their IPs against abuse.

5. Ample free tier for personal use.

6. I believe they have an option to spam filter your outgoing messages so that even if the account (or machine) was compromised, you could prevent delivery.

Those are the main reasons from my experience. Plus all the other more standard features like read receipts, etc if you want.

Sendgrid can close your account and you have no recourse, no tickets or appeals. This happened to a friend I had set this up for, account was closed for inactivity

Delivery wise I also heard they are one of the providers most likely to get flagged as spam

SendGrid is hot garbage hacked together. I reported a critical bug (unsubscribed emails still receive future scheduled emails causing high complaint rate) five years ago and they told me they know about it, acknowledged it was a bug, and said they had no plans to do anything about it.

Ugh. I had the same experience with a company recently. Completely put me off them.

Are they a major that we're likely to stumble across in day-to-day use?

Perhaps. I was Plausible's paid analytics service I had trouble with. I'm sure their host-your-own is fine.

Sendgrid has the worst IP addresses I ever used for sending email and the customer support has been even worse.

Yeah, there free tier was useless when I tried it. Essentially couldn't send email to anyone, including myself, since their fiercely guarded IP addresses were crap.

Worse than SES?

I agree, though. You need to pony up for a dedicated IP from Sendgrid to get good deliverability to many hosts. Small ISPs tend to be the worst, IME, where Google, Comcast, etc work pretty well with SG.

I’ve tried a dedicated IP from sendgrid as well, but our sending volumes were way too low even for transactional mails. It would have taken months of sending fake emails to warm the address up.

I'm working through the sign-up process for SendGrid (100 emails/day for free doesn't seem too bad), but their website seems so damn slow. I had to wait about 15 seconds for the signup page to load. You'd expect they'd optimize that page above all others to get conversions?

I see so much phishing from sendgrid that I just blocked the entire domain. I don’t care if they’re trying to be legit, they clearly can’t keep control over bad actors using their platform. I’ve also done the same with Google appspot domains.

Replying to myself:

Wow, had no idea the Sendgrid situation had gotten so bad.

In that case, Mailgun.

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