Mailgun (YC W11) is being acquired by Rackspace

You've nicely summarized what I think of them. I met the guys last year while looking for a job and they were great. Kudos to them!

Seem like the app is the right place for that logic to exist.

This strikes me as somewhat of an edge case - to add a full rules engine for what is essentially a very app-specific set of behaviours.

One main reason the application is the best place to manage these rules is that it's rarely just the email content that dictates the engagement pipeline. Whether a user has interacted with a component, or logged in, etc, are all app-side variables which may affect whether or not you wish to send a given email.

That said, one method some of our customers use at PostageApp to simplify some of the logic is to pass a UID to the API based on the unique parameter sets - e.g. recipient + template + hour - and rely on the engine to discard the duplicate API calls.

getvero.com - Very powerful rule system to send delayed emails. It's like Mixpanel for email (Vero is event driven).

Hey Aidos,

IronWorker (our product from Iron.io) has scheduling capabilities and can be combined easily with SendGrid/Mailgun to provide any type of rules engine.

In it's most simple form, you can use it like cron in the cloud.

Errr... SendGrid is $9.95 for 40k emails. You get 200 for free, just as with mailgun.

My guess is they'll integrate both products after which Mailgun and SendGrid will become largely equivalent services.

Yup, I was wondering the same. I'm hoping they don't switch out SengGrid for MailGun.

I'd love to get your feedback. We're always trying to improve the way we handle things and we know we can get better. We're on record publicly in the press about trying to do this differently and better. My email is bret.piatt@rackspace.com.

[From Dow Jones, from their interview with Pat Matthews, SVP of Corporate Development (my boss)], "Mr. Matthews said the acquisition is not an "acqui-hire" (a deal in which a start-up is acquired purely for its talent), and that Mailgun's team will continue to work in San Francisco, where Rackspace has an office. However, they will report initially to corporate development and remain autonomous for awhile so they're not integrated too quickly into Rackspace, a mistake that Rackspace has made in the past, he said."

If you're just sending e-mails, check out Amazon SES. We've been using it and it works well.

I looked at various options just last week and went with Postageapp. Main reasons were easy Rails integration and the lowest plan lets you use your own domain. (Mailgun's lowest plan is $19; the free plan you have to use a mailgun subdomain.)

Mailgun is going to continue to run as Mailgun, as a startup team on the product and operations just as they did yesterday. We believe in the team and what they're doing. This is not an acquihire -- they have a great offering that they will continue to build and manage going forward.

tomjen3, We are don't have any plans on closing or sucking in the future. But if you just prefer to support small ISVs, that is definitely worthwhile.

Your comment is needlessly negative.

Sendgrid. At first glance, their pricing is better than mailgun anyway.

I came here to express my fear of mail gun being not as much awesome anymore. I think it's a legit feeling.

That doesn't mean Rackspace is going to join the club of companies killing great startups but the last few times I saw acquisitions, things were not very sweet.

Hope mailgun will do even better under Racksapce. I wish them all the best.

Mandrill (inbound and outbound transactional e-mail on MailChimp's delivery platform), or Sendgrid.

We use Postmark and it works great (http://postmarkapp.com/). Sendgrid and AWS SES are other common alternatives.

I use and love http://postmarkapp.com/. (For transactional emails only)

I would be a bit worried if I were a direct Rackspace competitor and using Mailgun, but otherwise this seems like a good thing for users -- Rackspace brings more financial and other resources, and this sale (a safe one) precludes a bad sale which might have otherwise happened (if Mailgun sold to Zynga or something and was acquihired or pivoted to in house, or sold to oracle and only bundled with services.)

Their support for incoming messages is pretty slick, especially in that they provide a message body that strips out signatures and replies. At Posterous, we managed that mechanism ourselves, and it was really hellish – it's great to be able to offload that responsibility for Kinsights.

That feature alone made us switch from SendGrid, and the more reasonable price point for our stage just sweetened the pot.

I too did not consider sending mail from applications a big deal, until I had to do it on a huge scale. Turns out it gets quite difficult to maintain an email module that consistently avoids your outgoing app emails being spam-flagged or otherwise corrupted. It's a neat service.

I assume you were downvoted for saying there is no value in being able to send (and receive) email, but there is.

Deliverability is a huge important issue for most people, if I send an email and it doesn't arrive then I'm in a bad spot. I used a similar service to Mailgun (http://postmarkapp.com) and the amount I paid per month (when I was sending emails) meant if I spent more than 1 hour of my time configuring and managing a mail server every month I would be losing money.

This is an especially big issue for people that are using virtual servers or not that great server providers, ones that recycle IPs, if I'm correct in my understanding of mail deliverability, if an IP has sent spam before it's almost guaranteed to be blocked by most spam protection companies, that sort of thing isn't good.

It's not just email deliverability. Mailgun's email API is super useful and worth learning because once you do you'll realize you can now do things with transactional emails in your app you never considered doing before. A few ways in which they are better than Sendgrid: (1) much better inbound JSON parsing of emails that can be used with any "route"; (2) On the fly route creation, modification and removal; (3) Pass through routing of individual mailboxes to your GoogleApps account for corporate email addresses. This is better than the Sendgrid approach because it allows you to put Mailgun in front of Gmail instead of the other way around. That could mean a noticable difference in speed of delivery of transactional emails reaching near real time relative to what you'd normally expect with email (<20 seconds).

If you're just sending in bulk, go with SendGrid, but if you want to do anything mildly interesting with email-as-an-interface, Mailgun cannot be beat. I'm honestly surprised it has taken other mail providers to offer these same features.

To me the real value is that for a very fair price I no longer have to be concerned with the ins and outs of sending email. Once you start sending tens of thousands of emails you run into problems. People don't receive the emails. They get blocked. Users accidentally mark them as spam. And so on and so on.

I don't want to focus on figuring out email - I just want to send them and have them get to the users that want them.

I use MailGun for email for the same reason that I use FreshBooks for invoicing my clients — because I want to spend my time building my business rather than focusing on solving a problem that someone else has already done a great job of solving.