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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

#41

Post by uuoc »

itburnslikeice wrote: post #28
nbevans wrote: post #20

The reason why we use Mailgun is to avoid deploying and maintaining e-mail infrastructure which is very hard and high cost. We would rather keep paying Mailgun about $20/mo as this is cheaper by several magnitudes than the self-hosting option.

> 20/mo as this is cheaper by several magnitudes than the self-hosting option. exactly this, even the cheapest cloud instances cost around 100$/m, while some might be 20$/m it's just not worth the effort to host your own because it also needs management/maintenance if you do which translates in to hours of work. Yes you can automate these things but it simply not worth it when the only thing you want to do is sent ma…

> when the only thing you want to do is sent mass emails

If that is the only thing you want to do then you should be disconnected from the internet entirely, never to be allowed to return.

We do not want your SPAM, spammer.

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

#42

Post by jpkeisala »

Is Postal and services like Mailgun solution for a functionality where email can be viewed/replied from personal email inbox and a web app? Then somehow magically these services routes mail to relevant inboxes and the web app like Zendesk etc?

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

#43

Post by mikekchar »

uuoc wrote: post #41
itburnslikeice wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 20/mo as this is cheaper by several magnitudes than the self-hosting option. exactly this, even the cheapest cloud instances cost around 100$/m, while some might be 20$/m it's just not worth the effort to host your own because it also needs management/maintenance if you do which translates in to hours of work. Yes you can automate these things but it simply not worth it when the only thing you want to do is sent ma…

> when the only thing you want to do is sent mass emails If that is the only thing you want to do then you should be disconnected from the internet entirely, never to be allowed to return. We do not want your SPAM, spammer.

Hmm... We use Sendgrid to do things like sending confirmation emails. We send a lot of them because we have a lot of customers (long may it continue ;-) ). That's what I was thinking when I read "mass emails". YMMV.

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

#44

Post by speleding »

parenthephobia wrote: post #29
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?

From personal experience, if you're not jumping straight from no emails to a million an hour, your mail setup is good (SPF/DKIM/etc), you're not reusing a IP address that was sending spam last week (so be wary sending from cloud servers), and you aren't actually sending spam, then you can send from your own infrastructure just fine.

Until recently I sent newsletters from our own infrastructure and I agree that it's doable, but:

- You have to ramp up sending from new IP addresses VERY slowly if you want to avoid getting grey / black listed by Yahoo and AOL, this makes it quite a tedious process

- Make sure you also have rDNS set up, Gmail uses it as an important quality signal

- Accurately handling bounces is a bit of a nightmare because each mail server has a slightly different format and you want to make sure you don't process out-of-office messages

- Bounces and "message delayed" messages can arrive days later

So we ended up switching to mailgun and although they do sometimes give you a bad IP the time saved is worth it, especially their option to have a web hook back to your backend to process the bounces.

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

#45

Post by sbarre »

r_clark wrote: post #37
Doches wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

You're only thinking of the technical angle here.

If there were no valid existing answers to your questions, Mailgun, Sendgrid and others would not exist, right?

These platforms provide OOB business and productivity tools (logs, metrics, dashboards, API integrations, etc) that Postfix does not.

Sure you can write all your own stuff on top of Postfix, but not everyone wants to do that.

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

#46

Post by gondo »

richardkeller wrote: post #16
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?

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.

but if opt for dedicated IP address, dose it matter if you have it from Mailgun or if you have your own?

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

#47

Post by jimktrains2 »

jwr wrote: post #40
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 fo…

We really need a better solution to fighting spam.

https://github.com/jimktrains/email_ng is an overly complicated idea I had once, but the basic gist is that the receiver could give the sender a signed receiver email address that is for the sender's email address. This way, transactional email (and sure, I guess marketing from your company) would be able to get through and the email given out wouldn't be able to be used if sold or stolen, as the receiving mail server would reject it because of a bad signature (bad sender, and coupled with DKIM and SPF, a malicious user wouldn't be able/allowed to spoof the sender's email).

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

#48

Post by mtw »

r_clark wrote: post #37
Doches wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

Postfix allows you to send emails and that's all.

Imagine a retail business that relies on emails to get information on what's next: what are the most popular products, what's a good tag line, which segment of its customers are interested by what, who is most likely to buy. Sendgrid allows you to add A/B testing, scheduling (send a % of emails at a specific hour), track who opened emails when, track who unsubsucribed.

If you are doing simple emails like email confirmation or simple user reminder, these features are totally overkill. But email has still the best ROI for many businesses and thats why they need sendgrid

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

#49

Post by carterehsmith »

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.

> the lack of individual email tracking has been a pain

SES did introduce tracking back in 2014 or so. You can get notifications for deliveries, bounces, and complaints.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ses-delivery-notifications/

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

#50

Post by spuz »

Does Postal allow you to set up an email group? I.e. an email address that will forward to a defined list of other email addresses any email that is sent to it? This is a feature of Mailgun but unfortunately it does not quite behave in the way we need with regards to setting the 'Reply-to' address.

I'm looking forward to seeing the documentation and setting up Postal on my server.

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