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Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

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Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#181

Post by hippich »

jitbit wrote: post #151

Great discussion here, not necessarily about the OP's link, but still learned a lot. Would love to contribute my 2 cents... Our app[1] sends/receives several million emails per month. Not an exaggeration, it's actually seven figures. Meaning it's more than 100k a day. Meaning it's 5-6 emails every friggin second. On average. It, of course, peaks during US daytime, up to 30 per second. We tried a looooh-ot of solution…

while it will not give your such configuration precision, i highly recommend to checkout sovereign project - https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign

In the beginning I used to setup just personal "cloud", but now actually using it to send emails for other businesses I run.

In theory it should be possible to run these playbooks without all extras and just keep bare minimum to send emails (never tried it, so not sure what it will take)

Sovereign will configure postfix + dkim + spf + blacklists for you. Plus provides your imap mailboxes to receive bounces and regular mail.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#182

Post by no1youknowz »

lancer wrote: post #178
no1youknowz wrote: post #27

Has anyone tried elasticemail.com? I've seen their CEO post here before. If you have, what's your experience with them vs Mailgun or Sendgrid? Thanks

After the demise of Mandrill I started to divide transactional email between Elastic Email and SparkPost. I send around a thousand messages a month through them and haven't had any problems with either. I still miss Mandrill though. I send high volume mail through Mailgun and have had a great experience with them and their API. I tried integrating with Sendgrid but they have some constraints around MX records that we…

Thanks. SparkPost mention they have the best deliverability in the market.

How would you rate the deliverability out of 100% for Elastic Email and SparkPost?

Thanks

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#183

Post by joering2 »

giglamesh wrote: post #165
joering2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Until they email you your account is "temporarily suspended due to some spam complains" and before you find out some angry customer felt that tmher refund process took too long and filter her email to see yours and click "mark as spam" each email and you scramble to setup your own mailservers before you let employees go because your company is unable to send a single email to make a single sale this month... Un…

Mine was suspended for spam and I was falsely accused by Mailgun of have compromised servers. Initially I freaked out and then discovered that my servers were fine, but my account at Mailgun was hacked and used to send thousands of spam emails. This happened a couple of times. I asked to see the IP addresses of the senders and Mailgun said they didn't track that/could not tell me. And then they had the audacity to bi…

Dispute with your credit company. Tell them you did not agree for this service. Easily to recover the fee.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#184

Post by lucaspiller »

jjeaff wrote: post #136
lucaspiller wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had exactly the same experience. For context I run a SaaS targetting small/medium businesses, who usually have in-house email servers with extremely restrictive spam filters. The IP was on a blacklist, so some of my customers just couldn't use my service. I contacted SendGrid and their only solution was to upgrade from a $20/mo plan to a $80/mo plan with a dedicated IP - they wouldn't even move me to another IP in…

Unless you are doing a TON of sending, you are better off with a shared ip since it will have a known reputation. That is assuming that the provider is maintaining the integrity of those allowed to send with that ip. I haven't used sendgrid, but mailgun has been good about moving me off of any ip I don't like. Although I wish they were more proactive about it, I have setup a weekly monitoring script to check a bunch…

I've been doing this for 6 months now, and haven't had any issues. Over the last 7 days my deliverability of 64k emails has been 99.5%. The only bounces I have are because of invalid email addresses or mailboxes being full. I didn't do any 'warming up' of the IP when started, I just started sending.

I've heard this many times, and maybe it was true before but it doesn't seem to be any more. I suspect now companies like Sendgrid still spread this FUD so people are more willing to buy their services and assume it's the only option.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#185

Post by lucaspiller »

erlend_sh wrote: post #87
lucaspiller wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had exactly the same experience. For context I run a SaaS targetting small/medium businesses, who usually have in-house email servers with extremely restrictive spam filters. The IP was on a blacklist, so some of my customers just couldn't use my service. I contacted SendGrid and their only solution was to upgrade from a $20/mo plan to a $80/mo plan with a dedicated IP - they wouldn't even move me to another IP in…

I think you meant to link here: https://cuttlefish.io https://github.com/mlandauer/cuttlefish

Oops :D

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#186

Post by movedx »

krakensden wrote: post #179
movedx wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, So firstly, I don't work for AWS or Amazon, or any Cloud provider. Just wanted to make sure that was clear. After reading your very interesting comment I thought I'd do some maths on the costs SES should be charging you. Essentially at $0.10 per 1,000 messages, and sending "several million" or "seven figures" worth of messages per month, so a possible total of 9,999,999, you should be paying almost exactly $1,00…

SES is on a couple of email black lists though, on the grounds that they're too laissez faire. On your own IP at least you own your own reputation.

Do you have a citation for this?

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#187

Post by movedx »

jitbit wrote: post #173
movedx wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, So firstly, I don't work for AWS or Amazon, or any Cloud provider. Just wanted to make sure that was clear. After reading your very interesting comment I thought I'd do some maths on the costs SES should be charging you. Essentially at $0.10 per 1,000 messages, and sending "several million" or "seven figures" worth of messages per month, so a possible total of 9,999,999, you should be paying almost exactly $1,00…

SES is indeed much cheaper that the others (mailgun, sendgrid, postmark etc.) But you have some things missing from your calculation: 1) Attachments (yes, SES charges separately) 2) Dedicated IP addresses (SES charges you separately for this) 3) S3 (where emails are stored 4) AWS Lambda (because you need a script/function, that processes incoming messages as they come in). But yes, you're right, with SES its cheaper…

Developing and managing your own system, like the OP did, takes a lot of time and energy - all of that, when calculated, costs a lot more :)

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#188

Post by znpy »

movedx wrote: post #187
jitbit wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SES is indeed much cheaper that the others (mailgun, sendgrid, postmark etc.) But you have some things missing from your calculation: 1) Attachments (yes, SES charges separately) 2) Dedicated IP addresses (SES charges you separately for this) 3) S3 (where emails are stored 4) AWS Lambda (because you need a script/function, that processes incoming messages as they come in). But yes, you're right, with SES its cheaper…

Developing and managing your own system, like the OP did, takes a lot of time and energy - all of that, when calculated, costs a lot more :)

> Developing and managing your own system, like the OP did, takes a lot of time and energy - all of that, when calculated, costs a lot more :)

> costs a lot more

> costs a lot more

> costs a lot more

The point was super clear, and yet you managed to miss it.

@jitbit clearly stated that he and his colleagues evaluated several possibilities, and the decided to set up their own system.

It's literally short-term decision: it's a make-or-buy problem.

The make options surely takes some time, but it is a one-time expense with pretty much low maintenance and super-low operating-cost ($4/month). It also requires some study but hey, that's know-how that is going to stay in the company.

The buy options is a lot more costly, but gives the gift of ignorance: you are not required to know or do anything.

And if you are wondering what the costs are: setting up a basic mail server for a domain takes as little as a couple of hours. A little-more complicated might take a day, and a complex setup not more than a week, for a skilled person.

Considering other options, it might just be cost-effective to hire a consultant to set it up.

Source: i've been running my mailserver for years, and I've done consulting in setting up and troubleshooting mail servers.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#189

Post by jjeaff »

lucaspiller wrote: post #184
jjeaff wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you are doing a TON of sending, you are better off with a shared ip since it will have a known reputation. That is assuming that the provider is maintaining the integrity of those allowed to send with that ip. I haven't used sendgrid, but mailgun has been good about moving me off of any ip I don't like. Although I wish they were more proactive about it, I have setup a weekly monitoring script to check a bunch…

I've been doing this for 6 months now, and haven't had any issues. Over the last 7 days my deliverability of 64k emails has been 99.5%. The only bounces I have are because of invalid email addresses or mailboxes being full. I didn't do any 'warming up' of the IP when started, I just started sending. I've heard this many times, and maybe it was true before but it doesn't seem to be any more. I suspect now companies li…

I'm curious to know what type of customer you have? My customer base is made up of quite a few less tech-savvy types and we get a lot of issues with spam for AOL and MSN accounts.

And I don't show any bounces either. Stuff getting sent to spam doesn't give you a bounce message usually. It will appear to have been delivered successfully.

As for needing to warm up the IP, I think there is still something to that. I am surprised you were able to just start right off sending large volume. My guess would be that that you lucked out and got a gently used IP address by chance. The fact that it was on a blacklist would indicate that it probably was previously used rather heavily... just enough to get blacklisted at one place. But not abused in a way that got it blacklisted other places.

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