Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 189 posts

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

#71

Post by kyriakos »

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

this is exactly what i was looking for. thanks

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

#72

Post by jrodom »

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.

This is an area that we're actively working to improve. The system is designed so that customers who are sending high quality messages get moved into better IP addresses. We look at metrics like complaint, bounce, and engagement rates to help make these decisions. This works much of the time, but is imperfect, especially when you start using Mailgun for the first time. We're developing and iteratively rolling out several machine learning classification systems that look at various features when you signup for Mailgun and place your account into better IP pools based on our internal risk calculation.

If you are seeing continuous problems, I'd love to take a look! My email address is on my profile.

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

#73

Post by _jal »

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.

This is true, with the exception of AT&T. The Deathstar rejects all mail from my server, despite (a) no spam ever having been emitted from my domain in almost 20 years, (b) the IP having been stable for coming on eight years, and (c) I don't send bulk mail. Best I can tell, their blacklist-removal process is auto-deny with no humans in the loop.

I gave up and decided screw them, I don't need to talk to anyone with an ATT address, and bounce messages from them with an explanation.

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

#74

Post by novaleaf »

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…

I use sendgrid for transactional email and I have had no problems regarding that in the year I've been using them.

I have found their nighttime support team to be terrible though, resulting in 14hrs downtime because they didn't have authority to re-enable my account.

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

#75

Post by cryptarch »

charlieegan3 wrote: post #65
cryptarch wrote: post #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"?

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

That's a dedicated ip address, I meant a system to isolate spammers and new users in a relatively low-rep ip address pool.

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

#76

Post by brightball »

I'm most interested to see what their solution for handling INCOMING email looks like. Having used the inbound APIs with the others they are all pretty polished and reliable but have inconsistent APIs. I've always been a little bit concerned about how to handle high volumes of inbound email functionality if the prices on those services ever went up.

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

#77

Post by AJ007 »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #47
jwr wrote: 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…

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…

I think overall ISPs do a very good job at fighting spam. Compared to a decade and a half ago, I would call it a minimal problem.

My greatest fear is that Google and Facebook will co-opt email and charge money for companies to get access. Google has already made some progress with this by selling ads in Gmail that look like email while pushing commercial messages in to other inboxes.

This is bad because it penalizes companies with low margins while shifting the advantage to those who are able to squeeze more money out of the users (you can see the effect of this on Google Search, Facebook, and now Amazon. It isn't pretty.)

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

#78

Post by jrodom »

hultner wrote: post #10
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 think reputation is counted towards your DKIM these days, which also makes the reputation somewhat portable by moving your private key to with you to a new server/ip.

IP reputation continues to be the most important factor that impacts deliverability. Providers are slowly moving to domain-based reputation systems that leverage DKIM. Gmail seems to weight domain reputation in their calculations higher than most currently.

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

#79

Post by brightball »

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.

You could also try something like Sendwithus hooked up to your SES account. They provide a consistent template, delivery and customer support interface for email that integrates with a lot of different providers.

It's a nice layer who's pricing works if you're sending a lot of emails to the same people over and over again. The entire setup (pricing and interface) is build around individuals sent to and not total email volume.

Post reply on HN