I met the Mailgun guys and they seemed really sharp so it's good to see them getting money. I wish this had been around a year ago - there are so many odd corner cases to managing a transactional email system, it's a pain to deal with. Companies like Sendgrid are only handling one small part of the problem. Good luck and congrats on the funding!
Mailgun (YC W11) Raises $1.1 Million For Its "Twilio For Email"
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Re: Mailgun (YC W11) Raises $1.1 Million For Its "Twilio For Email"
#12Twilio is awesome because setting up Asterisk and acquiring phone numbers is a big pain in the butt and requires knowledge most web developers don't have. Sending email isn't hard. Amazon SES solved that. Receiving email is just slightly more work, but still well within the comfort zone of most developers: $ cat /etc/aliases comment_reply: "|/path/to/email_handler"
Sending and receiving email is easy, unless you want it to work reliably, do intelligent processing, etc.
Re: Mailgun (YC W11) Raises $1.1 Million For Its "Twilio For Email"
#13We've been using Mailgun for all of our email on http://lanyrd.com/ - sending messages via their REST API (and using them to receive bounces and email unsubscribe requests). It was easy to integrate and we haven't had any deliverability problems - they gave us plenty of great advice about that.
I've spent a bunch of time talking to them about email, and they really know their stuff.
Re: Mailgun (YC W11) Raises $1.1 Million For Its "Twilio For Email"
#14Twilio is awesome because setting up Asterisk and acquiring phone numbers is a big pain in the butt and requires knowledge most web developers don't have. Sending email isn't hard. Amazon SES solved that. Receiving email is just slightly more work, but still well within the comfort zone of most developers: $ cat /etc/aliases comment_reply: "|/path/to/email_handler"
Sending and receiving email is easy, unless you want it to work reliably, do intelligent processing, etc.
SES is extremely easy, and I seriously doubt any claims that they're more reliable/faster than what Amazon is offering.
What kind of intelligent processing are they offering?
In the use case of turning a reply into a comment the hard work is not receiving and parsing the email, it's authenticating the user/adding the comment to the database.
I'm a potential customer who just doesn't see the value proposition. I'm sure they can build a business as a Sendgrid competitor, but I don't see anything as disruptive as Twilio here.
Re: Mailgun (YC W11) Raises $1.1 Million For Its "Twilio For Email"
#15hosted/saas james? http://wiki.apache.org/james/
Far more complicated than that. You won't scale james to millions+ of mailboxes as we're planning to :)
Cool, best of luck. I've used two competitors services and spent far too many days pulling my hair out over unexplained slowdowns and api errors. It would be extra cool if you guys did an architecture blog post.
Re: Mailgun (YC W11) Raises $1.1 Million For Its "Twilio For Email"
#16Twilio is awesome because setting up Asterisk and acquiring phone numbers is a big pain in the butt and requires knowledge most web developers don't have. Sending email isn't hard. Amazon SES solved that. Receiving email is just slightly more work, but still well within the comfort zone of most developers: $ cat /etc/aliases comment_reply: "|/path/to/email_handler"
>Sending email isn't hard. Amazon SES solved that.
I don't see how Amazon SES can be said to have "solved" a problem when you need a dedicated 3rd party to do it. As long as you still have to pay regularly, there's still a problem in need of a solution. (And there's still space for someone else to come in and either solve it better or charge a lower fee.) We can't resign ourselves to Amazon, Google and the other big players being the sole providers of these sorts of services.
Re: Mailgun (YC W11) Raises $1.1 Million For Its "Twilio For Email"
#17(I worked with Ev for a year, before he did YC.) The whole Mailgun operation is top notch. If you want to do cool things with email, definitely check out MG.
Re: Mailgun (YC W11) Raises $1.1 Million For Its "Twilio For Email"
#18Would somebody care to sell me on why this is superior to SendGrid or Amazon Simple Email Service? (Or perhaps what use cases it better serves.)
Re: Mailgun (YC W11) Raises $1.1 Million For Its "Twilio For Email"
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sending and receiving email is easy, unless you want it to work reliably, do intelligent processing, etc.
SES is extremely easy, and I seriously doubt any claims that they're more reliable/faster than what Amazon is offering. What kind of intelligent processing are they offering? In the use case of turning a reply into a comment the hard work is not receiving and parsing the email, it's authenticating the user/adding the comment to the database. I'm a potential customer who just doesn't see the value proposition. I'm sur…
Staunch: there will always be guys who want to do everything themselves. But we're selling to folks who have other things to worry about.
Risking to re-type our own front-page, I'll go ahead and give you some tips for how Mailgun can be useful:
Once a message is sent, what happens to it? We give you searchable SMTP logs: see if some crazy admin guy in Canada misconfigured greylisting (because he likes to do everything himself :) and your customer's mail is sitting in a repeat-later loop for 5 days.
Once a message is received, are you sure you'll figure out the encoding of it? Or what happens if your process/machine is down when the message arrives? What if it's spam? And why not record computer-to-person email conversations you're software is doing in a real POP3/IMAP mailbox? No coding required.
On intelligent processing: we transcode all your traffic to UTF-8 and figure out what parts of the message is quoted - so you won't have to. It's not easy, ever wondered why some folks resort to "reply above this line"? Also, if there's no plain text part, we'll generate it from HTML. More is coming.
Mailgun is not an email sending service. We're a full-featured programmable ESP, it's up to developers what they want to use our email servers for. The creative ones keep amazing us every day! :)
Re: Mailgun (YC W11) Raises $1.1 Million For Its "Twilio For Email"
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sending and receiving email is easy, unless you want it to work reliably, do intelligent processing, etc.
SES is extremely easy, and I seriously doubt any claims that they're more reliable/faster than what Amazon is offering. What kind of intelligent processing are they offering? In the use case of turning a reply into a comment the hard work is not receiving and parsing the email, it's authenticating the user/adding the comment to the database. I'm a potential customer who just doesn't see the value proposition. I'm sur…
I kind of agree, I've used SES for a side project through Mailchimp's STS api and it is pretty simple and reliable, and quite free at first. Other than some other bells and whistles like handling unsubscribes I'm not sure MailGun is that much more revolutionary.
I've heard people say before that to beat Gmail you can't just build an email service 10% better. Gmail works well enough that 10% isn't worth the switching costs. Same goes for this I believe.