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Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

mygengo.com

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Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#41

Post by mgkimsal »

ladon86 wrote: post #10

Does anyone recommend any SendGrid alternatives? They look good, I'm just wondering if anyone has had success with another provider also.

I'm using critsend.com - it's just "pay as you go", not a monthly fee. $1/1000, with discounts as you go up in credit purchases. I've had no problems with them in the last year or so. No - I take that back - the bounce stats data was 'lost' from my display for a couple days, but the retrieved it and added it back in. Happened once, IIRC - generally nice people, and there's an IRC channel for help if you want that (in addition to standard other help channels).

Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#42

Post by idlewords »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #15
swombat wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this apart from the relationships with ESPs is relatively easy to do if you're a competent sysadmin. As far as the ESPs are concerned, all of them appear to accept our emails just fine, except for Hotmail. We've largely given up on Hotmail, but then everyone who uses hotmail seems to be aware that it marks everything as spam and so they check their spam box as often as their inbox, from the looks of it. It's a…

The trouble with hotmail is they sometimes just blackhole what they classify to be spam, instead of filtering it into the Junk folder. It doesn't even bounce, it just disappears.

Gmail does this as well. Our outbound mail to Gmail accounts was just disappearing until we fixed a reverse DNS record.

Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#43

Post by 9lessonslabs »

moe wrote: post #24
robert_mygengo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> "You don't magically get higher deliverability only because your mail is passing through them. They don't have mythical "whitelist" slots at the ESPs. They're not even on the radar of the ESPs." That's absolutely right, you don't. But email deliverability turned from a massive mystery and headache for us, into a sure-fire deal, the day after we implemented SendGrid. We develop translation/localization related app…

If they're a good deal for you then there's no arguing with that. I didn't mean to say they have no value proposition at all; the API and stats they provide can sure be useful for some. All I was saying is that their raw deliverability is no different to running your own server. And your own server doesn't charge a few pennies per mail...

Valid

Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#45

Post by pwim »

petenixey wrote: post #30

I'll second that Xero is an excellent service and it really doesn't get as much press as it deserves in the states. They're very easy to use and have done an heroic job building out both the software and support. HOWEVER, their entry-pricing is incredibly irritating. For $228/year you can't add any more than 5 invoices or reconcile more than 20 lines of bank statement per month. For the entire price of quickbooks eve…

But for only $29/month you can. How much is your time worth? If the service saves you even an hour per month, surely it is worth it.

Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#46

Post by paraschopra »

mgkimsal wrote: post #41
ladon86 wrote: post #10

Does anyone recommend any SendGrid alternatives? They look good, I'm just wondering if anyone has had success with another provider also.

I'm using critsend.com - it's just "pay as you go", not a monthly fee. $1/1000, with discounts as you go up in credit purchases. I've had no problems with them in the last year or so. No - I take that back - the bounce stats data was 'lost' from my display for a couple days, but the retrieved it and added it back in. Happened once, IIRC - generally nice people, and there's an IRC channel for help if you want that (in…

Tried critsend.com -- the service threw up random errors and didn't really work well for us. In the end, went with SendGrid. Though if you are sending <500 emails a day, using Gmail SMTP servers is the best option.

Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#47

Post by mike-cardwell »

idlewords wrote: post #42
mike-cardwell wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble with hotmail is they sometimes just blackhole what they classify to be spam, instead of filtering it into the Junk folder. It doesn't even bounce, it just disappears.

Gmail does this as well. Our outbound mail to Gmail accounts was just disappearing until we fixed a reverse DNS record.

Really? I've come across loads of people who have had the disappearing email problem with hotmail (including myself on a couple of systems), but this is the first time I've heared of anyone having it with Gmail.

Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#48

Post by mike-cardwell »

bobds wrote: post #32
moe wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting high deliverability is actually incredibly complicated. Urban legend. You need a dedicated IP address to send mail from, which you need to be whitelisted by the big ESPs That is nonsense. Nobody reaches out to the ESPs to have their IPs "whitelisted" in advance. You reach out when, if and after you've been blacklisted, in order to get unlisted . To get it whitelisted, you need to "warm it up" before you start…

> That is nonsense. Nobody reaches out to the ESPs to have their IPs "whitelisted" in advance. You reach out when, if and after you've been blacklisted, in order to get unlisted. That's nonsense, lots of people do that. Only you don't usually go direct to the service provider, see following links: http://www.returnpath.net/commercialsender/certification/ http://www.spamhauswhitelist.com/en/ http://www.certified-sende…

http://dnswl.org/

Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#49

Post by simplegeek »

petenixey wrote: post #30

I'll second that Xero is an excellent service and it really doesn't get as much press as it deserves in the states. They're very easy to use and have done an heroic job building out both the software and support. HOWEVER, their entry-pricing is incredibly irritating. For $228/year you can't add any more than 5 invoices or reconcile more than 20 lines of bank statement per month. For the entire price of quickbooks eve…

I've recently consulted on a Xero API gig and trust me their API and contributed code is totally awesome, too.

Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#50

Post by rodh257 »

Klonoar wrote: post #14
ladon86 wrote: post #10

Does anyone recommend any SendGrid alternatives? They look good, I'm just wondering if anyone has had success with another provider also.

Postmark App ( http://postmarkapp.com ) has worked well for me in terms of sending large quantities of emails in the past. Easy integration, good team, active development.

I've just used PostMarkApp on a site, I love their interface, all works great but they only allow 'transactional' emails, which I guess is like 'click here to activate your account', whereas my site was sending out alerts to people (kind of like facebook does, but not as often), which they didn't seem to like too much.

Does sendgrid allow this? I've signed up to SocketLabs which seems to do it but haven't been able to get SMTP sending working correctly yet, haven't spent much time on it though.

For the record, the amount of hassles I've had with SMTP servers these services are very handy, especially for logs etc like postmark has

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