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Comment by russjones | Hacker News Reader

Hi Zikes, I'm the developer of this service at Mailgun. Nice to meet you.

We've been using this service at Mailgun during testing and we've reduced bounce rates by 5%. That might not seem like a signficant number, and it may not be for a personal blog, but it can be significant number for a larger ecommerce website.

For someone like us, a service that sends billions of emails, it's huge and we wanted to provide additional value for our customer to help them reduce their bounce rates and improve conversion.

Plus we don't correct typos on local-parts, just domains. So we won't correct Jooohn@gmail.com, but would suggest a correction for john@gmaill.com.

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Hey Russ, thanks for your reply.

I think I've been a bit harsh and quick to judge, sorry about that. Obviously the service must have value, and it's my own failing not to have seen it.

I do wish you the best of luck with this new service, and I hope that many people are able to benefit from all the hard work you guys have put into it.

Thanks for this service. There isn't any replacement for actually sending an email and having someone click a link to confirm receipt, but this is a step closer towards that.

Could you confirm you won't store or otherwise log email addresses submited for check for any time longer then neccessary?

Hi airnomad, I'm the developer of the validation service here at Mailgun.

I can confirm that we do not store email addresses. The parser runs completely in memory and no address is persisted after the request is complete.

So tomorrow a national security letter shows up. Whaddyado?

This is probably a valid concern for some services. Do you keep the address in log files somewhere?

If national security letters are part of your threat model, nothing they can say can make the service acceptable to you.

You should also stop using EC2 or linode, stop injecting the google analytics JS into your pages, stop taking payments via Stripe, and so on.

UX improvement: highlight what you changed in the autocorrect suggestion: https://www.monosnap.com/image/OtGnn60OhykMAx9s3xsNXkyn5#

Maybe I'm an idiot but it took a while to see the 'user' actually entered "gmall" (I assumed it was correcting the spelling of Michael since the vowels in that name get mixed up so frequently).

Can you talk about why reducing bounce rate is important? For me, ensuring that the email address entered belongs to the user who entered it is the most important.

Hey, mailgunnner here. Thanks for the ux suggestions! On bounce rate, a bounce will happen when you collect an email address that is invalid, and then send to it. It is basically the symptom that you can measure to know that the email is indeed invalid. By measuring a reduction in bounce rate, we've been able to determine that the validator does its job catching invalid addresses. For determining whether the email address entered belongs to the user who entered it, you can (and should) use double opt-in, where you email a confirmation link to the users.

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