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Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

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Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#31

Post by lemming »

mdekkers wrote: post #25
richardkeller wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, unless you're paying for a dedicated IP address with Mailgun, their sender reputation is mostly quite bad. We are constantly having to request our account to be moved to a new IP due to them landing up in some blacklist.

Interesting. I have never seen those issues, and have been using MG for quite a few years, for many clients.

I used to use Mailgun for sending out licences for my product. I got a lot of people saying they had never arrived, especially Microsoft addresses and Chinese ones. This continued despite repeated complaints and IP switches. I switched to sending through Fastmail and have never had a problem since.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#32

Post by user15672 »

Doches wrote: post #21
michaelbrooks wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it's more the support you get from using third party APIs. It's nice to break away from companies to a certain extent, but if you need help/support you only have yourself to fix the issue. If you go with a third party and something happens, you can go to them for a solution.

And if the third party service goes down, you're SOL -- there's nothing you can do to fix the issue, and it's your users who are suffering. What's your answer when a customer says "my emails aren't getting through, please fix it" and you...can't?

If emails are a part of your core business, you should have a business continuity plan for this situation. That may be to fall back to another service, or even a temporary in-house server.

Of course, if it's that important, then you'd be foolish to not have invested in a better solution, or to not have a proper SLA with a third party.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#33

Post by throwanem »

hultner wrote: post #6

I suppose this is more like a open source alternative to PowerMTA? How would you compare them?

More an open-source alternative to Sparkpost, if you're looking to compare it with a Message Systems offering. (But not really all that comparable, since Sparkpost is nothing without Momentum, and this does not appear to rely on or include any specific MTA.)

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#35

Post by Ensorceled »

madspindel wrote: post #7

This project fails to answer the question 'Why?'.

Some organizations can't (due to regulation) or won't (due to privacy/security concerns) give their email list to third parties. That eliminates most of the third party MTAs as they all maintain sending lists, logs etc.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#36

Post by tpetry »

ksajadi wrote: post #11

We sent a lot of emails which makes services like Postmark or Mandrill very expensive. Since switching to Amazon SES, the cost has been much lower but the lack of individual email tracking has been a pain (in case a recipient claims they haven't received it or we need to track opens, etc). This UI with an Amazon SES backend would be ideal.

If you want to track opens and some more metrics independent of your mailing solution you should try mailspice.com

(Disclaimer: Developer of mailspice)

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#37

Post by r_clark »

Doches wrote: post #19
blowski wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just begging the question. What's the advantage of running on your own servers vs using SendGrid?

Fair. To a certain mindset, "self-hosted" is its own advantage -- but to pick a couple of advantages out of thin air: + Free: I can run Postal on my own hardware, with no usage limits or costs other than the VPS or AWS costs (which I'm paying anyway) + Independent: I'm not relying on a third-party to provide core features. If SendGrid goes down there's nothing I can do about it + Private: Maybe I don't want to hand o…

I feel like you're still begging the question. The proposition is not really "SendGrid vs Self-hosted SendGrid", but "Self-hosted SendGrid vs any IMAP/SMTP server":

> Free: I can run Postal on my own hardware, with no usage limits or costs other than the VPS or AWS costs.

So is postfix.

> Independent: I'm not relying on a third-party to provide core features.

What features? This is the crux of the question. What do you actually need that justifies having to maintain a web application?

> Private: Maybe I don't want to hand over a list of my user's email addresses to SendGrid.

Again... so is Postfix.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#38

Post by slig »

ksajadi wrote: post #11

We sent a lot of emails which makes services like Postmark or Mandrill very expensive. Since switching to Amazon SES, the cost has been much lower but the lack of individual email tracking has been a pain (in case a recipient claims they haven't received it or we need to track opens, etc). This UI with an Amazon SES backend would be ideal.

If you want to send newsletters, try Mailwizz.

Be careful with some of the alternatives and be sure to read their source code with an empty stomach.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#39

Post by novalis78 »

dan1234 wrote: post #18
ksajadi wrote: post #11

We sent a lot of emails which makes services like Postmark or Mandrill very expensive. Since switching to Amazon SES, the cost has been much lower but the lack of individual email tracking has been a pain (in case a recipient claims they haven't received it or we need to track opens, etc). This UI with an Amazon SES backend would be ideal.

If you’re sending newsletters, you might want to look at Sendy[1] (no affiliation), which sends via SES. 1 https://sendy.co

Seconded. Can only highly recommend send. The license is inexpensive, you get the whole code base and can modify when needed as well. Setup is easy as integration into SES very mature at this point.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#40

Post by jwr »

dan1234 wrote: post #3

Isn’t part of the reason for using Mailgun, Sendgrid etc that you get to send via IP addresses with good reputation?

I tried using Sendgrid and was surprised to find out that unless you buy an expensive plan, then:

* You get IPs from a shared pool, and the reputation is nowhere near guaranteed. In fact, many of my mails were blackholed or rejected.

* The "bad" IPs that were used by someone for spamming are not immediately removed from the pool, so you will encounter them.

The net result for me was that Sendgrid is not a solution for my transactional E-mail, because of the high risk of my E-mails getting blackholed/rejected. I use it for newsletters/marketing only.

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