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Discourage use of Mailgun as a mail provider

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Re: Discourage use of Mailgun as a mail provider

#81

Post by carimura »

hash872 wrote: post #47
gizmo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t fire a customer for being testy. It’s way disproportionate and if customers are unhappy you want to know this. Rude feedback is still feedback, and most businesses struggle to get honest feedback because most people are just way too nice

I run a business and I absolutely would fire a customer for being needlessly rude to an employee. If they're angry at the employee they can direct their 'feedback' to me. But yeah this 'the customer is always right' chunk of American culture needs to die- abusing employees is not 'feedback', nor is it acceptable

Rudeness is often just a mask for something else. Look behind the rudeness and you find frustration and a need to be heard. Emotion is a bit like a pendulum, one side is anger, the other is happiness, and in the middle is neutral. If you just listen and try and genuinely connect, the pendulum can swing back. In my experience some of the rudest customers became our biggest advocates. It's the neutral customers that you never hear from that can be the most difficult because they just churn away without any actionable feedback.

Specifically to the sales tactic, hopefully everyone knows it's a tactic, and it works because it elicits responses. People crave genuine connection and disingenuous emails like this can be trigger points, but alas the incentive structure of inside sales teams is often to elicit any response. It's the modern day "calling at dinner time because you know someone will be home" trick.

Re: Discourage use of Mailgun as a mail provider

#82

Post by stickfigure »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #56
dioxide wrote: post #6

If I were mailgun, I'd be okay losing Evan as a customer.

I would try to see this from Evan's perspective. Its easy to find next to useless Sales people, its harder to find a good customer. Evan is a busy guy and said please don't waste my time with a Sales call this is only for your own benefit and then got something else. And I don't want you Sales people poking around in my SaaS setup or in my data.

> Evan is a busy guy and said please don't waste my time

Busy people don't spend hours starting internet fights. They delete spam and move on with their day.

Re: Discourage use of Mailgun as a mail provider

#83

Post by manquer »

gizmo wrote: post #65
hash872 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a business and I absolutely would fire a customer for being needlessly rude to an employee. If they're angry at the employee they can direct their 'feedback' to me. But yeah this 'the customer is always right' chunk of American culture needs to die- abusing employees is not 'feedback', nor is it acceptable

I also run a business. I’m a customer of Mailgun as well. As a business it’s not hard to enforce boundaries without going for the nuclear option. Everybody has bad days sometimes, and just as we want customers to be understanding when we have downtime we can be understanding when customers are irate. In my experience customers get rude when they are already unhappy and have been for a while. In the case of Mailgun th…

If product quality level does not matter on how you the customer treat staff why mention it ? How is it relevant?

OP did not say he is going to go nuclear at get go, he just said that is absolutely an option for this kind of behavior.

Re: Discourage use of Mailgun as a mail provider

#84

Post by manquer »

mrsuprawsm wrote: post #69
hash872 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a business and I absolutely would fire a customer for being needlessly rude to an employee. If they're angry at the employee they can direct their 'feedback' to me. But yeah this 'the customer is always right' chunk of American culture needs to die- abusing employees is not 'feedback', nor is it acceptable

Calling out aggressive and uninvited outreach from a vendor is extremely different from "the customer is always right" mentality. The two things are not the same.

Calling out to whom thou ? Is a junior sales rep in any position to effect change ? Why take it out on him ?.

Nobody is saying feedback is bad , but give to someone who can actually do something about it.

Re: Discourage use of Mailgun as a mail provider

#85

Post by snowwrestler »

I don’t know, this interaction kind of makes me like Mailgun. Sounds like they were seeing some weird stuff with a customer and reached out to see what was up. That’s what I want out of an email infrastructure provider. It’s hard to maintain high deliverability if you don’t keep careful tabs on things.

Re: Discourage use of Mailgun as a mail provider

#86

Post by manquer »

xemdetia wrote: post #59
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it sounds harsh to say "I don't take meetings with no agenda", but is the right thing to do Evan's is the wrong way to do it. "I am busy–do you have specific recommendations you can share over email" is more concise, polite and to the point. (Ignoring the e-mail, or a simple not interested, are also options.) And if you want to use those words, fine, but leave off the "low effort" insults at the end.

I would say that telling someone who emailed you in an unsolicited fashion that you have an expected protocol for interaction isn't in the wrong and putting that line first in an unambiguous way is practically required for how people read emails. They did ask for context after that line, which was fine. I will say that the 'low-effort' part of their phrasing could have been constructed better but the first reply was…

There is a difference between saying "I like my meetings to be specific and driven by agenda , what are the points you like to discuss" and saying " I don't take meetings without agenda.

The OP could have ignored the email, or even marked spam it. If you take the effort to reply then do it courteously there is no excuse for being rude.

Re: Discourage use of Mailgun as a mail provider

#87

Post by [deleted] »

jonathonf wrote: post #32

I'm surprised by the other comments here that I'm in the minority thinking that the sales approach was pretty terrible. You're trying to sell something you don't understand to a company you don't understand. Why? If you actually want to "help" a company (by selling them your product... not really sure how that's "helping", but...) then at least do some research into the company and provide something that looks useful…

[deleted]

Re: Discourage use of Mailgun as a mail provider

#88

Post by annoyingnoob »

stickfigure wrote: post #82
annoyingnoob wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would try to see this from Evan's perspective. Its easy to find next to useless Sales people, its harder to find a good customer. Evan is a busy guy and said please don't waste my time with a Sales call this is only for your own benefit and then got something else. And I don't want you Sales people poking around in my SaaS setup or in my data.

> Evan is a busy guy and said please don't waste my time Busy people don't spend hours starting internet fights. They delete spam and move on with their day.

They do for vendors that draw their ire, maybe not for your average sales email.

Re: Discourage use of Mailgun as a mail provider

#89

Post by manquer »

yawnxyz wrote: post #68

I was kind of expecting the complaint to be about how the API only allows a single API key (which is terrible for multiple projects), and doesn't allow generating multiple API keys w/ multiple types of access (kind of like what Cloudflare's API allows you to do)

You can use SMTP [1] if you need something like that . While SMTP technically slower than REST, practically it doesn't matter if your application processes mailjobs in forked background threads or a queue, also most ESPs would rate limit outgoing email after it reaches their system to prevent abuse.

the benefit is also no custom code or needing to add their SDK, you can replace the service by simply replacing the credentials, probably without even a code deployment if you store credentials in env.

[1] https://help.mailgun.com/hc/en-us/articles/203409084-How-do-...

Re: Discourage use of Mailgun as a mail provider

#90

Post by oliwarner »

stickfigure wrote: post #35
hash872 wrote: post #10

Evan, your response was needlessly rude, and if I were Mailgun I'd let you go as a customer. The idea that you'd drop a company over this is overly dramatic. I would encourage you to be nicer to relatively low-level employees, and Joe did seem reasonably knowledgeable about Mailgun's processes

It comes across as desperate for outrage. "One of my vendors tried to upsell me", the horror! I get a half-dozen emails like this every week. Most I ignore. If I'm feeling uncharitable I mark it as spam.

Upsell happens during a sales process.

Trying to sell something [they should have already had] by framing it as technical support outreach is spam.

Obfuscating that behind generic "meetings" (read: let me pitch) is just disrespectful. If you want time with buyer, come loaded, explain what you can deliver, explain why an email won't suffice and you might pique my interest.

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