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"I was sending ~1,000 emails a day on normal days and a monthly newsletter of around 30,000." That's a spammer, by definition.
How on earth would you categorize that as spam?
"I was sending ~1,000 emails a day on normal days and a monthly newsletter of around 30,000." That's a spammer, by definition.
What definition of "spammer" are you using?
"That's the point they [mailgun] lost me as a customer." I would have been mad about the suggested $1k+ cleaning service too. But, you do have to consider mailgun is protecting their reputation and assets as well. Like an IPV4 range that could get blacklisted if your diy cleansing wasn't right. And you mentioned your first run with the new provider was over 5% bounces, so it wouldn't have been good enough. I can see…
I'm less mad about the cleaning service and more mad about the pace of responses and the fact that I got 3 different responses from 3 different customer support reps who apparently didn't read any of the prior history in the thread. I think the shutdown is totally valid and a good practice, but my initial ticket started with (paraphrasing): "ooooops, my bad for forgetting to migrate my bounces to the new domain. I've…
I started migrating while the service was down and they had given no indication that it would be turned back on any time soon. By the time my emails were reinstated, I was around 80-90% migrated. At that point, it's worth kicking the tires on the new service to see how deliverability compares.
Uncleaned, imported list? CHECK
No domain warm-up? CHECK
Ignore hometown hero MailChimp that would have predicted bounces and disarmed your foot gun? CHECK
Passing blame to customer support? SAD
"I was sending ~1,000 emails a day on normal days and a monthly newsletter of around 30,000." That's a spammer, by definition.
I subscribe to a bunch of newsletters that have distribution lists of much, much more than 30K. What definition of "spammer" are you using?
What he did is upload a mailing list manually, rather than curate one with a service. This manual practice makes it almost impossible to guarantee that valid unsub requests have been honored, among other things. In this particular case, he admits accidentally including bounce out addresses.
That's why good email services make it difficult to upload 100k addresses and call it a day.
Additionally, permission to email someone with app notifications is not permission to send them bulk.
DIY campaign mail over a transactional service? CHECK Uncleaned, imported list? CHECK No domain warm-up? CHECK Ignore hometown hero MailChimp that would have predicted bounces and disarmed your foot gun? CHECK Passing blame to customer support? SAD
I don't recall what MailChimp's pricing was back then, but 50k users would be $640/mo today (vs ~$80 on Mailgun). I'm currently north of 300k users, which is up into the "contact us for pricing" range. It just doesn't make sense for a site with revenue sub-$10k (like, well sub-$10k).
I could've dropped that price by spending a shitload of time deactivating contacts and trying to keep my active users count lower, but email just isn't that profitable for me. I wouldn't say I'm great at email or attribution, but I estimate I drive ~$250-500/mo in sales through email (up from $0 when I started).
The other points are good ones -- even on Mailgun, I should've had different subdomains set up for IntroCave for transactional/campaign/newsletter blasts. I got "good enough" results doing it the lazy way, though. I still wouldn't have remembered to migrate the bounces, and this might have actually increased my bounce rate. Since bounce lists are per-domain and not per-account, a signup bounce wouldn't necessarily have prevented me from sending transactional stuff later (I've since added a bounced flag to my user model which would catch this).
(edit: actually the first point is pretty good. i disagree with the rest. list was mine, domain was warmed with a week of email before the ToS blast, and I manually ramped up volume on the ToS blast for the first 30 hours or so while keeping an eye on deliverability. This was entirely my fault, so I'm not sure what you mean by blame... I'm not happy with the customer support response, but the title of the post should make it pretty clear where the blame lies--me!)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I subscribe to a bunch of newsletters that have distribution lists of much, much more than 30K. What definition of "spammer" are you using?
CANSPAM defines it by describing the opt-in and opt-out nature of the messages. What he did is upload a mailing list manually, rather than curate one with a service. This manual practice makes it almost impossible to guarantee that valid unsub requests have been honored, among other things. In this particular case, he admits accidentally including bounce out addresses. That's why good email services make it difficult…
CANSPAM doesn't cover account/privacy/ToS notices -- it's not a marketing message (falls into "other content").
I didn't "upload a mailing list manually" -- the emails are all attached to user records in my wholly-owned database. I send them from a queue on my own server, not through Mailgun's mailing list product (which queues a message to every email on the list instantly and doesn't allow you to ramp it up over time).
"Newsletter" is easier to type than "new content and product updates," but again -- these go out to existing customers and account holders. There's implied permission there from the fact that they signed up for an account. Opt-out is easy, and I don't feel guilty about emailing people who signed up for an account.
I would send this to the whole list if deliverability didn't go to hell after about 50k users (or maybe I just need to write better emails to keep people engaged/opening).
DIY campaign mail over a transactional service? CHECK Uncleaned, imported list? CHECK No domain warm-up? CHECK Ignore hometown hero MailChimp that would have predicted bounces and disarmed your foot gun? CHECK Passing blame to customer support? SAD
I would love to use MailChimp, but it was price prohibitive when I first got started. The site was using Mailgun when I acquired it, and I stuck with it after evaluating a BUNCH of options when I got up to around 30-50k users. I don't recall what MailChimp's pricing was back then, but 50k users would be $640/mo today (vs ~$80 on Mailgun). I'm currently north of 300k users, which is up into the "contact us for pricing…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I subscribe to a bunch of newsletters that have distribution lists of much, much more than 30K. What definition of "spammer" are you using?
CANSPAM defines it by describing the opt-in and opt-out nature of the messages. What he did is upload a mailing list manually, rather than curate one with a service. This manual practice makes it almost impossible to guarantee that valid unsub requests have been honored, among other things. In this particular case, he admits accidentally including bounce out addresses. That's why good email services make it difficult…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would love to use MailChimp, but it was price prohibitive when I first got started. The site was using Mailgun when I acquired it, and I stuck with it after evaluating a BUNCH of options when I got up to around 30-50k users. I don't recall what MailChimp's pricing was back then, but 50k users would be $640/mo today (vs ~$80 on Mailgun). I'm currently north of 300k users, which is up into the "contact us for pricing…
sub $10k per month or per year?