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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

#131

Post by cyphar »

stephenr wrote: post #96

This sort of thing is fantastic to see, regardless of whether you want to run your own mail servers for this task. That they provide a hosted service using the same stack is great to see: host it yourself, or pay them to host it for you. This is what great open source businesses can look like. No "open core" where the good stuff isn't available for the community, and community efforts to implement the same thing get…

> No viral licensing like the GPL or jesus shit on a stick, the AGPL.

This GPL hatred is completely orthogonal to your point. In fact, GPL/AGPL ensures that other services won't turn your lovely free software project into an open core product. See ShareLatex for a similar free software business and project that uses the AGPL and appears to be working just fine.

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

#132

Post by ushi »

brightball wrote: post #76

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.

We are running this[0] with some postfix boxes in front of it. Works quite well for us.

[0] https://github.com/ushis/mailhook

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

#133

Post by jimktrains2 »

Neliquat wrote: post #128
masukomi wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, but as someone who's worked on the sending of emails side of this i can assure you that the techniques for fighting spam are TOO effective. There are many legit emails that go into black holes before any standard idea of spam filtering comes into play. I wrote an embeddable smtp server so that you could have an app that sent email without ever asking your users to put in their SMTP server info... it was USELESS…

I hear this all the time, but the culprit is always someone sending spam, who does not consider it spam. Usually stuff like missing unsubscribes, spammy language, sending bulk to bought email lists, etc.

For a company I worked for, it was transactional emails (recipes) that would get blackholed. So while you're probably right that a lot of people doing legit marketing, but not 100% correctly often complain, it's also people doing legit work as well.

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

#134

Post by hw »

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?

There's lots of effort in building AI for chatbots, but why aren't there more efforts in building AI for better spam classification? As much as I would like email to die a horrible death just like snail mail died and have everyone (individuals and businesses) start using some form of IM, it's still quite an integral part of the interwebs for people that it deserves a bit more focus on smarter spam filtering instead of relying heavily on IP reputation pools which screws over many legit users.

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

#135

Post by massaman_yams »

eloff wrote: post #56
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…

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.

In practice, while there are some services which will purport to tell you an IP's reputation, their output isn't well correlated with actual delivery outcomes at scale (depending, to some extent, on what domains you're sending to).

This is because the big consumer mailbox providers often don't rely on public datasources for assessing reputation, and because reputation is tracked at the domain level, in addition to - or sometimes instead of - the IP level. For example, there have been some indications from Gmail that they no longer use IP reputation at all, starting a year or two ago.

And re: blacklists: +1 to Spamhaus, but in practice it's one of very few blacklists that have meaningful impact to net delivery.

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

#136

Post by jjeaff »

lucaspiller wrote: post #84
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…

I had exactly the same experience. For context I run a SaaS targetting small/medium businesses, who usually have in-house email servers with extremely restrictive spam filters. The IP was on a blacklist, so some of my customers just couldn't use my service. I contacted SendGrid and their only solution was to upgrade from a $20/mo plan to a $80/mo plan with a dedicated IP - they wouldn't even move me to another IP in…

Unless you are doing a TON of sending, you are better off with a shared ip since it will have a known reputation. That is assuming that the provider is maintaining the integrity of those allowed to send with that ip. I haven't used sendgrid, but mailgun has been good about moving me off of any ip I don't like. Although I wish they were more proactive about it, I have setup a weekly monitoring script to check a bunch of the blacklists. If there are any issues, I will have them move me. And I am still on the free tier so I can't complain.

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

#137

Post by massaman_yams »

hw wrote: post #134
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?

There's lots of effort in building AI for chatbots, but why aren't there more efforts in building AI for better spam classification? As much as I would like email to die a horrible death just like snail mail died and have everyone (individuals and businesses) start using some form of IM, it's still quite an integral part of the interwebs for people that it deserves a bit more focus on smarter spam filtering instead o…

Gmail stopped using IP reputation entirely a year or two ago, and effectively every major consumer mailbox provider relies on domain reputation heavily these days. Almost all major filters look at a combination of indicators, so it's becoming less and less common that a good mail coming from a bad IP is subject to filtering.

The answer to why better spam filtering AI hasn't been developed in a non-proprietary setting is fairly straightforward: the success of any filtering method is heavily dependent on consuming data at scale - including recipient behavior (e.g., mark as spam, vs. spend time reading a message), and this underlying data is just as important, if not more so, than the machine learning approach used to compute filtering assessments.

In short - you more or less have to be a large mailbox provider in order to have a chance at doing this well.

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

#138

Post by massaman_yams »

joering2 wrote: post #92
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…

I second to that. For a few years now my opinion was that Sendgrid is a good guys of sending email... until I realized most of the spam I'm getting is from Sendgrid IPs, including for example continuance of work offers from Uber (I am disabled and I cannot even drive a car) I'm unsure what problems Sendgrid is battling but their customer support staff is certainly understaffed or they simply gave up on fighting spam.…

Spam sucks, but don't waste your time reporting it to federal agencies. In practice, 'unsolicited' isn't a high enough bar for them to care - it has to be overtly fraudulent, malicious, etc. in order to have a shot at getting attention.

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

#139

Post by pbreit »

cbhl wrote: post #116
cnagele wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big reason for sure. As you can see in this post, those IP addresses can be hit or miss depending on the provider. At Postmark, we don't really believe in dedicated IPs for all customers. We think that our customer base should not include any bad actors, and instead manually approve every customer to ensure our entire CIDR ranges are clean. The benefit is not just clean IPs, but clean IPs that have an incre…

Why wouldn't spammers just start adopting Postal on their servers, too?

Because their IP address reputation would plummet instantly.

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

#140

Post by pbreit »

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 generally don't believe these anecdotes when pertaining to successfully companies with 10s of 1000s of staisfied business users. Most are far better off with shared IP addresses. After you establish a sterling domain reputation you can think about your own IPs.
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