Thanks for the kudos, Jeremy. If you can share where you're using the inbound API, I'd love to see it in action!
1,563 karma · joined August 15, 2009
Regarding forwarding: that step is already being taken away - it's in beta for a number of our customers, and we'll be adjusting workflow then releasing to everyone.
There's lots of people who don't have access to their DNS records but still want a tool like this. We want this utility to be simple for more them, too!
As far as SHA1/MD5 encryption - we know better than to use weak encryption on any TRULY sensitive information. In the context of the walkthrough, we're talking about internal IDs and other things that you might want to be obvious to your customers, not things that pose a security risk to you or them. If you even thought about using something like that as part of a unique identifier in your email replies - I think there would be bigger problems at hand than choosing SHA1 or MD5 to obfuscate that information. :)
We use a combination of algorithms and humans to determine "unusual" activity (not just spam or forged emails) and act accordingly.
We're even proactive about finding customers who break into new send volume thresholds and offer them discounts. We'd much rather have high quality senders in our network for a LONG time than just keep the highest billing rate on autopilot.
We're working on the workflow for retries, it's coming soon.
Thanks for the feedback about the download URLs. Any particular reason for this preference that I can share with the team?
As far as stats go, that's on our list as well.
http://developer.postmarkapp.com/developer-inbound-parse.htm...
Also, if you use Gmail forwarding to foward emails into Postmark, you get the benefits of their spam filtering before it even hits our system.
That said - we watch for spam-like activity across our entire system.
Our credits work for inbound and outbound and never expire.
* 500,000+ - $1/thousand ($500) * 1MM+ - $0.75/thousand ($750) * 2MM+ - $0.50/thousand ($1,000)
Sending even more? Email me - alex@wildbit.com and we can talk.
Also, we're home to many happy customers that are sending very high volume - we offer them bulk-credit purchase rates as low as $0.50 per 1000 when buying 2MM credits at a time or more.
I'm happy to answer any questions, or field any ideas you might have.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
We do not allow newsletter (or any bulk style) sending - I explained our reasoning behind separating and only sending transactional email through Postmark - by definition of transactional, the recipient is expecting the email and it is a custom response to an action.
Edit: typo.
>Very simple pricing
This isn't always talked about as part of "design", but we consider simple pricing an element of design and a benefit as well and many of our customers agree.
In our mind, Will shouldn't have had to draw diagrams to figure out what would cost more.
This sounds cool - is there a non-obvious (at least to me) case for this beyond providing your customers with fully-functional inboxes?
Our price per 1000 drops with large credit purchases, and all features/benefits stay the same. If you've got a monthly send-count you can share more detailed than "10s of millions", email me alex@wildbit.com and we can talk about volume credit pricing options.
Beta is closed now until we open the feature to the public, which is planned to be very soon.
First and formost, there's a bit of an "apples vs. oranges vs bananas" comparison here. We need to start by drawing a line between email sending engines and email deliverability engines. Then, we'll draw a line between the delivery of transactional email (that your webapp sends) and bulk email (your marketing campaigns).
While Postmark's price per 1000 sends is "higher" than some of our competition, we provide our customers with access to the full deliverability & diagnosis stack that we provide for our accounts regardless of how much they spend monthly. Also, our price per 1000 sends drops to $1.00 for bulk credit purchases starting at 500k credits, $0.75 for 1MM+, and $0.50 for 2MM+.
When you compare Sendgrid (along with SES, Mailgun, etc), you need to look at what we each offer at each price point.
In Tim Falls' answer on Quora, he says:
>"If you want the best possible feature set we have to offer, which includes a dedicated IP, our entire suite of APIs, an exhaustive collection of stats and more, you can sign up for our Silver plan or higher - Silver gets you 100k emails/month for $79.95, and everything we have to offer.
> In conclusion: yes, our Lite plan is similar to SES and is very basic in terms of features - which could put it in the "commodity" category. However, at higher price points, you can get everything you need to operate a fully functional email system - without the hassle of doing everything yourself and with access to our team of experts, who are available by phone, live chat, and email."
Tim's right. SES is very basic and is in the commodity category. It's an email sending engine, NOT a deliverability engine.
Tim also points out that in order to get what they consider "a fully functional email system", Sendgrid customers need to spend at least $80/month.
Postmark is $1.50/thousand (or less) with no minimums. You can literally spend $1.50/month with us and get the same level/quality of service as someone spending thousands of dollars/month with us.
In addition to our specialized delivery infrastructure, and the tools we provide that can help you with self-diagnosis of delivery issues, our team has over 7 years of email delivery experience and has an extremely strong track record for pinning oddball delivery problems that arise even with best-of-breed delivery infrastructure. Our customer service isn't just fanatical and friendly, they're experienced in the problems you're likely to have.
How does this "transactional vs. bulk" mail conversation affect you bottom line?
Sending an important transactional email from the same infrastructure as your marketing email queue increases the likelihood that your transactional emails will be throttled as if they were part of a bulk campaign. A missing or slow-to-deliver "forgot password" email, for instance, could be the loss of a customer to a competitor while they can't get into their account, which obviously affects your bottom line. Further, transactional email gets read, which means if you're going to put "marketing" in an email, it has much more value in a transactional email because it's more likely to be read (with the caveat, of course, that it's done tastefully).
So in addition to our low tolerance, we also strictly prohibit bulk/marketing email sending on Postmarks infrastructure to keep our reputation for transactional emails as high as possible. Our laser focus on a specific email delivery category keeps our delivery rates as high as possible for customers who abide by our sending guidelines, and that premium informs our price point as well.
And how do we know all this?
We ran an email marketing service for 7 years and learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. We ALSO run one of the most popular SVN/Git/Mercurial hosting services - Beanstalk. Beanstalk sends significant volume every single day, and was one of Postmark's first "customers". And when we have ZERO deliverability problems ourselves, we have huge confidence in our ability to provide that to others by following our own guidelines. And it's not just our own apps - we've had people come to Postmark after being dissatisfied with others' deliverability rates, and have been pleased with Postmark's performance.
[1] http://www.quora.com/Why-are-Mailgun-and-Postmark-so-much-mo...
Between that and the Facebook navigation, this app is more stolen than it is crappy.
Now onto the technical stuff.
One of the main reasons that it is impossible to compare Postmark with Mailchimp (and even difficult to compare it to Sendgrid or SES) is our laser focus on transactional email delivery.
We've been in the email business long before building Postmark, and we know the differences between how ISPs treat transactional (event or customer triggered) emails and bulk (marketing) emails.
We also know that because ISPs treat these emails differently, they need to be SENT differently. This is why we strictly prohibit bulk sending on Postmark, to make sure that the transactional email sent through our system has the highest rates of (and the fastest) delivery possible.
We know that we've had customers leave because we limit sending to transactional emails - but its to the benefit of the customers we have because we maintain extremely high delivery rates.
Email delivery is, as we've leanred, very susceptible to "Tragedy of the Commons" in the fact that it's very easy for a small number of people to spoil the value for the many. We're protective of our infrastructure this way because our customers can trust the result.
Comparing Postmark to SES on the pricing front is something we chose to avoid as well. You can drink well whiskey or top shelf bourbon. Both can get you drunk, but you'll only really enjoy sipping one of them :)
We decided to offer it as a free API to make the world of email just a bit better. We also built a simple single-page scoring tool for anyone to use even if they're not API savvy.
Ideas and feedback are welcome!
Amit's brilliant, kind, and as others have said here is one of my favorite humans on this planet.
It was a very, very strange day where in 24 hours:
1) I got a call about being a bone marrow match for a 30 year old man with leukemia 2) Steve Jobs passed from cancer 3) A dear friend's battle with cancer went crazy-public as he searches for help with this match.
I have great confidence that with the amount of good that Amit has put into the world, he stands a chance of finding a match. I'm very happy to see the internet rallying behind him.