Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 189 posts

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

#51

Post by scsh »

bowersbros wrote: post #22
richardkeller wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, unless you're paying for a dedicated IP address with Mailgun, their sender reputation is mostly quite bad. We are constantly having to request our account to be moved to a new IP due to them landing up in some blacklist.

What is your emails bounce rates etc? Or is it caused by others using those same IPs too?

If they aren't paying for a dedicated IP, those emails would be going out across the shared IP pool, and a particular IP's reputation would be affected be everyone who's email went out via that IP.

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

#53

Post by baudehlo »

Doches wrote: post #21
michaelbrooks wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it's more the support you get from using third party APIs. It's nice to break away from companies to a certain extent, but if you need help/support you only have yourself to fix the issue. If you go with a third party and something happens, you can go to them for a solution.

And if the third party service goes down, you're SOL -- there's nothing you can do to fix the issue, and it's your users who are suffering. What's your answer when a customer says "my emails aren't getting through, please fix it" and you...can't?

That's why you always set up a local mail server that delivers onwards to these services. I documented how to do that with Haraka here: https://baudehlo.com/2016/07/26/setting-up-haraka-to-send-to...

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

#54

Post by chatmasta »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #47
jwr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried using Sendgrid and was surprised to find out that unless you buy an expensive plan, then: * You get IPs from a shared pool, and the reputation is nowhere near guaranteed. In fact, many of my mails were blackholed or rejected. * The "bad" IPs that were used by someone for spamming are not immediately removed from the pool, so you will encounter them. The net result for me was that Sendgrid is not a solution fo…

We really need a better solution to fighting spam. https://github.com/jimktrains/email_ng is an overly complicated idea I had once, but the basic gist is that the receiver could give the sender a signed receiver email address that is for the sender's email address. This way, transactional email (and sure, I guess marketing from your company) would be able to get through and the email given out wouldn't be able to be…

This sounds like a cryptographic way to achieve the aliasing scheme many people already use, e.g "chatmasta+hackernews@gmail.com".

Your proposal requires at least the status quo (aliased email address at signup), but the problem is it also requires cooperation of the receiver's email provider (e.g. gmail) and the sender's email provider. You are unlikely to ever see any new standard adopted by all major email providers, unless it came through a standards committee.

But your idea is interesting. Perhaps you could lower the cost of adoption by replacing the dependency on TLS/SSL with some sort of pgp signing scheme. This way all the "protocol" happens within the message body, so email providers do not need to adopt a new standard. As long as at least one website and one user implement the protocol, it can work without any cooperation from third parties.

As an aside, it would also be nice if password managers included functionality around generating temporary/isolated email addresses.

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

#55

Post by jonathanbull »

ksajadi wrote: post #11

We sent a lot of emails which makes services like Postmark or Mandrill very expensive. Since switching to Amazon SES, the cost has been much lower but the lack of individual email tracking has been a pain (in case a recipient claims they haven't received it or we need to track opens, etc). This UI with an Amazon SES backend would be ideal.

I co-founded https://emailoctopus.com which might be what you're looking for - we're an AWS partner offering marketing features (list management, open tracking, etc.) on top of SES.

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

#56

Post by eloff »

jwr wrote: post #40
dan1234 wrote: post #3

Isn’t part of the reason for using Mailgun, Sendgrid etc that you get to send via IP addresses with good reputation?

I tried using Sendgrid and was surprised to find out that unless you buy an expensive plan, then: * You get IPs from a shared pool, and the reputation is nowhere near guaranteed. In fact, many of my mails were blackholed or rejected. * The "bad" IPs that were used by someone for spamming are not immediately removed from the pool, so you will encounter them. The net result for me was that Sendgrid is not a solution fo…

How can you check if an IP is good or spammy? It would be nice to get an elastic IP in the cloud, test it for spamminess, and give back the bad ones. Catch and release fishing for IPs.

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

#57

Post by icebraining »

gondo wrote: post #46
richardkeller wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, unless you're paying for a dedicated IP address with Mailgun, their sender reputation is mostly quite bad. We are constantly having to request our account to be moved to a new IP due to them landing up in some blacklist.

but if opt for dedicated IP address, dose it matter if you have it from Mailgun or if you have your own?

Paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, every IP address has a past; in theory, an email service will ensure that the IP they give you has a clean bill of health (not marked in blacklists and such), whereas your ISP or VPS provider may not.

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

#58

Post by Arnt »

gondo wrote: post #46
richardkeller wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, unless you're paying for a dedicated IP address with Mailgun, their sender reputation is mostly quite bad. We are constantly having to request our account to be moved to a new IP due to them landing up in some blacklist.

but if opt for dedicated IP address, dose it matter if you have it from Mailgun or if you have your own?

That depends on who you are.

Mailgun will do some chores for you, for a fee. If those chores are things you can do in your sleep, fine! Mailgun does nothing magic.

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

#60

Post by tyingq »

dan1234 wrote: post #3

Isn’t part of the reason for using Mailgun, Sendgrid etc that you get to send via IP addresses with good reputation?

And their collective knowledge of how many concurrent connections to open with each provider, how many emails to send in a single SMTP session, how fast to send, etc. There's a fair amount that experience lends to staying out of the spam box.
Post reply on HN