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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

#61
Do you have a system to prevent trusted users from being given low-reputation ip addresses without them having to pay for a dedicated ip?

Something like, "if you don't pay for a dedicated ip, but have been a non-spamming client for a month, we move you to a higher-rep ip address pool"?

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

#62
post #56
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How can you check if an IP is good or spammy? It would be nice to get an elastic IP in the cloud, test it for spamminess, and give back the bad ones. Catch and release fishing for IPs.

I found this service a few days ago to monitor our own deliverability. It allows you to test if your emails are delivered by the most common ESPs: https://glockapps.com

(I do not have anything to do with the product or team behind it)

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

#63
post #56
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How can you check if an IP is good or spammy? It would be nice to get an elastic IP in the cloud, test it for spamminess, and give back the bad ones. Catch and release fishing for IPs.

The term to search for is "RBL" (real time blacklist). Search for "check rbl" to find interactive sites, or maybe "check rbl github" for code that you can use yourself (though you may have to sign up for several services if you go that route).

Neither, though, helps with checking if one of the big providers, like Google, would not like your IP. For those, you have to send an email and watch/parse the SMTP error responses.

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

#65

Do you have a system to prevent trusted users from being given low-reputation ip addresses without them having to pay for a dedicated ip? Something like, "if you don't pay for a dedicated ip, but have been a non-spamming client for a month, we move you to a higher-rep ip address pool"?

Their premium plus plan seems to offer this: https://appmail.io/pricing

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

#67

Now if only there was a decent self hosted alternative to MailChimp.

You might want to check out https://sendy.co/, or https://emailoctopus.com if you want a hosted equivalent. Both will save you a lot of money over MailChimp.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of EmailOctopus.

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

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mai…

Sure. Until they email you your account is "temporarily suspended due to some spam complains" and before you find out some angry customer felt that tmher refund process took too long and filter her email to see yours and click "mark as spam" each email and you scramble to setup your own mailservers before you let employees go because your company is unable to send a single email to make a single sale this month...

Until then, all is fine I agree.

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

#69
post #56
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How can you check if an IP is good or spammy? It would be nice to get an elastic IP in the cloud, test it for spamminess, and give back the bad ones. Catch and release fishing for IPs.

Even so, this may not be very beneficial.

In years past, many RBLs would categorize IP Addresses by type. e.g. dynamic IPs assigned to DSL/Cable subscribers. This would enable a receving SMTP server to check if the email came from an ISP subscriber, rather than an email server. If so, it was usually a good guage that the email was "spammy", because it was sent by a subscriber's infected computer.

In this sense, it was (and may still be) possible to simply block, or at least score differently, email from any/all AWS Elasic IPs.

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

#70
post #52

This seems to be the software behind appmail.io[1], a service just like mailgun and sendgrid. [1]: https://appmail.io/

From the repo:

> Postal was developed by aTech Media to serve its own mail processing requirements and we have since decided that it should be released as an open source project for the community. It was originally launched by us as AppMail but renamed to Postal as part of making it open source as we felt the name was more suitable.

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