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I want to code, not configure mail servers

blog.sendgrid.com

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Re: I want to code, not configure mail servers

#11

Post by potyl »

pilif wrote: post #7
acabal wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever tried configuring your own mail server? It's very close to black magic at times. Installing a mail server is easy, but configuring it to actually get mail into inboxes and not spam filtered or even blacklisted is complex. You could certainly do it yourself and supplement it with a galaxy of addons like you mentioned, but why bother when Sendgrid does all of it, through a simple smtp interface, and for p…

I have indeed configured my mail server. Maybe it's my bad choice in server software (Exim), but setting it up (also for receiving messages and exposing them using IMAP) was really not hard[1] The Exim that comes per default in Ubuntu server has a default configuration that works as an SMTP server for a web application - no tweaks needed. As I said: Your SMTP server needs two things: 1) You need an IP address in good…

> 1) You need an IP address in good standing. If you don't have that (if you are on EC2), you might need to sign up for an SMTP service (or sendgrid, but my concerns of using a nonstandard JSON API over the SMTP standard still stand).

You only need the JSON API header if you want to use their "apps". If all you want is to send simple emails you can just use their SMTP server as a real SMTP server.

Re: I want to code, not configure mail servers

#12

Post by lobster_johnson »

While I like SendGrid, there are a few things I'd like to note:

* It's extremely expensive compared to handling your own email. If you count dollars, what they deliver isn't really worth the cost (expontentially so if you already have your own dedicated sysadmin, which you will want to have anyway). Our app currently sends out around 800,000 notification emails per month, or about $600/mo.

* It's been a rocky road. It's been quite buggy for us. I think I had two support tickets within an hour of starting to use it, then another 3-4 tickets open within a week. Things like their email activity and graphs page not working (badly optimized and overloaded, basically); JSON mangling in their API output; and thousands of emails being stuck in their mail server for several hours before being delivered. Everything has been resolved, however, so right now it's fine.

* There are some stupid weaknesses. For example, it's not possible to turn off their built-in spam and bounce handling. If a recipient accidentally marks an email as spam (it happens more than you think), SendGrid will simply stop sending email to that user. Similarly, if a recipient's mailbox goes full or has a temporary failure, SendGrid will often hard bounce, and stop sending emails. You can set the expiry times for bounces, but you can't turn them off.

Pretty much the only feature that is worth paying for is their stats; they have nice APIs to get stats about deliveries, reads and clicks. So while we are ditching SendGrid for our notification emails, we will continue to use them for newsletters.

Re: I want to code, not configure mail servers

#13

Post by syaz1 »

acabal wrote: post #5
pilif wrote: post #4

I really don't understand how people are afraid of email. It's no rocket science and smtp is a well documented and used standard. Why would I lock myself into some API of a third party service (code I will have to change if I change services) instead of using practically any distributions default configuration of any SMTP server and then just talk SMTP. If you own a static ip address not previously used for spam and…

Have you ever tried configuring your own mail server? It's very close to black magic at times. Installing a mail server is easy, but configuring it to actually get mail into inboxes and not spam filtered or even blacklisted is complex. You could certainly do it yourself and supplement it with a galaxy of addons like you mentioned, but why bother when Sendgrid does all of it, through a simple smtp interface, and for p…

How true. Very recently I tried to setup SMTP for intranet and gave up 2 days after. There is just no simple enough guides. Most of them make assumptions of my knowledge, when I had 0 of DNS/SMTP servers.

Re: I want to code, not configure mail servers

#14

Post by rdg »

We have to use SendGrid at work and more often than not email gets delayed way beyond acceptable (about 1 hour, for example). It does have great features but if I could choose, I'd chose not to use it... at least not for everything.

Re: I want to code, not configure mail servers

#15

Post by brandonmwest »

rdg wrote: post #14

We have to use SendGrid at work and more often than not email gets delayed way beyond acceptable (about 1 hour, for example). It does have great features but if I could choose, I'd chose not to use it... at least not for everything.

If your emails are routinely being deferred then you should contact SendGrid support to get to the bottom of it, there's probably a simple fix.

Re: I want to code, not configure mail servers

#16

Post by eli »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #12

While I like SendGrid, there are a few things I'd like to note: * It's extremely expensive compared to handling your own email. If you count dollars, what they deliver isn't really worth the cost (expontentially so if you already have your own dedicated sysadmin, which you will want to have anyway). Our app currently sends out around 800,000 notification emails per month, or about $600/mo. * It's been a rocky road. I…

The spam reporting thing is indeed annoying, but it's likely a contractual obligation. Yahoo, Hotmail, etc agree to share data on who has clicked the spam button in exchange for a promise that that person will be immediately removed from all future messages.

Re: I want to code, not configure mail servers

#17

Post by lobster_johnson »

eli wrote: post #16
lobster_johnson wrote: post #12

While I like SendGrid, there are a few things I'd like to note: * It's extremely expensive compared to handling your own email. If you count dollars, what they deliver isn't really worth the cost (expontentially so if you already have your own dedicated sysadmin, which you will want to have anyway). Our app currently sends out around 800,000 notification emails per month, or about $600/mo. * It's been a rocky road. I…

The spam reporting thing is indeed annoying, but it's likely a contractual obligation. Yahoo, Hotmail, etc agree to share data on who has clicked the spam button in exchange for a promise that that person will be immediately removed from all future messages.

Hm. I never bothered to check, but I just assumed/hoped that there was RFC somewhere that allowed providers to ping a URL (specified in a domain record or similar) when the user marked something as spam. Can't find anything, so you're probably right, SendGrid gets that information "under the table" from email providers.

Re: I want to code, not configure mail servers

#18

Post by eli »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #17
eli wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spam reporting thing is indeed annoying, but it's likely a contractual obligation. Yahoo, Hotmail, etc agree to share data on who has clicked the spam button in exchange for a promise that that person will be immediately removed from all future messages.

Hm. I never bothered to check, but I just assumed/hoped that there was RFC somewhere that allowed providers to ping a URL (specified in a domain record or similar) when the user marked something as spam. Can't find anything, so you're probably right, SendGrid gets that information "under the table" from email providers.

You might be thinking of the List-Unsubscribe header which supposedly provides a machine-readable method of unsubscribing. But, no spam reports are all proprietary. And my guess is that they don't want actual spammers to get their hands on them lest they figure out how to tune their messages to avoid getting reported.
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