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Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign

wildbit.com

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Re: Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign

#51

Post by onphonenow »

Man, this feels like the chrome extension buyouts by marketing companies.

A bit of a backstory. Postmark was a delivery first company. Initially they were actually transaction email ONLY (not even product updates, release notes). They broadened eventually, but manually reviewed each new customer AND if you were doing marketing often pointed you elsewhere

"If your needs are less about supporting application-based sending and more around enabling marketing promotion, there are other tools that may be a better fit for you than Postmark."

ActiveCampaign is the opposite. Marketing first. Fingers crossed.

Re: Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign

#52

Post by tullo_x86 »

polote wrote: post #39

> was a team with great empathy and values, and a true desire to make this an acquisition that served all the human constituents as best as possible. Every acquisition announcement almost paint the acquirer as an amazing company, that care deeply about the mission of the acquired company and that is aligned with its vision. But 99% of the time it is false. This is especially false when the founders don't even stay in…

Trouble is, you can do this once just fine. But it means the next time you want to get investors or sell a company, potential payers will also weigh your past performance. If you say "yeah we have no idea what's going to happen, good luck" and the company tanks after being sold, who would trust that it wasn't your actions at fault?

As much as it sucks for consumers, the self-interested thing to do is sing the praises of your buyer -- because your reputation is at stake otherwise.

Re: Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign

#53

Post by sandstrom »

What are some other options in this space?

What I need:

- Focus on transactional email.

- Support for inbound emails, sent to us via POST webhook.

- Good developer documentation and overall good product obviously.

- DKIM, SPF and DMARC support.

- Decent UI to troubleshoot delivery problems, i.e. easy to inspect the status for any one email.

- Happy to pay for it, price not a big factor.

I've looked at Mailgun, but happy to hear other suggestions.

Re: Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign

#54

Post by pkulak »

mbStavola wrote: post #5

Extremely mixed feelings on this one. On one hand, it's awesome Wildbit was able to sell Postmark on their terms. To be able to build something, make money, and then walk away when you want is a huge accomplishment. Hats off to them. On the other hand, the reason I always chose Postmark over Sendgrid, MailChimp, et cetera, even though they were much smaller, is because they seriously cared about their customers. Supp…

Exactly this. Postmark is my go to when the mail actually needs to show up. I don't do campaigns or other bullshit. When a service I've written sends an email, it's a password reset or similar.

Re: Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign

#55

Post by troydavis »

polote wrote: post #39

> was a team with great empathy and values, and a true desire to make this an acquisition that served all the human constituents as best as possible. Every acquisition announcement almost paint the acquirer as an amazing company, that care deeply about the mission of the acquired company and that is aligned with its vision. But 99% of the time it is false. This is especially false when the founders don't even stay in…

> But 99% of the time it is false.

Another possibility: it's true far more than 1% of the time, yet that's not enough reason for the acquirer to make the same decisions as the previous owners would have.

The acquirer can be amazing, care deeply about the mission of the acquired company, and see it as aligned… and after a year or a few years, decide that it's not the best use of their resources. The difference doesn't need to be that the acquirer isn't amazing or doesn't care; often, it's simply that their decisions have different inputs.

Re: Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign

#56

Post by kevincox »

sandstrom wrote: post #53

What are some other options in this space? What I need: - Focus on transactional email. - Support for inbound emails, sent to us via POST webhook. - Good developer documentation and overall good product obviously. - DKIM, SPF and DMARC support. - Decent UI to troubleshoot delivery problems, i.e. easy to inspect the status for any one email. - Happy to pay for it, price not a big factor. I've looked at Mailgun, but ha…

I run an email based service and while I send most email on my own I have been using the following providers for fall-back (for inbox providers that have very strict policies).

- https://serversmtp.com/

- https://aws.amazon.com/ses/

I prefer SES for a number of reasons:

- The price is about the best you will get.

- You can DKIM sign messages yourself if you want (although IIRC they remove the ability to verify your domain with DKIM from the console recently. Hopefully they don't drop this support).

- Pay as you go Pricing means that you don't pay for unused quota.

- Regional service may be more complicated but in theory you should be able to tolerate localized issues. The main downside is that you need to verify in each region which is very annoying.

Re: Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign

#58

Post by kakwa_ »

Belphemur wrote: post #7
mbStavola wrote: post #5

Extremely mixed feelings on this one. On one hand, it's awesome Wildbit was able to sell Postmark on their terms. To be able to build something, make money, and then walk away when you want is a huge accomplishment. Hats off to them. On the other hand, the reason I always chose Postmark over Sendgrid, MailChimp, et cetera, even though they were much smaller, is because they seriously cared about their customers. Supp…

I agree with you, such a bittersweet taste in the mouth. I don't think that a Marketing company is the right type of company to run Postmark. Postmark care about deliverability not about "engagement". Everything is about being sure your mail get to your clients not about how to craft marketing campaign from their product. How much do you bet ActiveCampaign is going to add some email editor and campaign management fea…

I'm also not convince this is a good fit, but for another reason: if you're a pure Deliverability Company, it's far easier to maintain healthy relations with email hosting providers and get useful information or data from them.

By contrast, if you're a Marketing Company, well 'enemy' might be bit strong but these providers will definitely be far less cooperative, and your service might suffer from it.

Re: Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign

#59

Post by skeeter2020 »

StanAngeloff wrote: post #23

I've been through something very similar with Mailgun. Mailgun was acquired by Rackspace in 2012. «Rackspace will make Mailgun available to its Rackspace Hosting customers for integrating cloud-based email services into applications and websites» Up until the acquisition, Mailgun was a solid product with a core set of features, i.e., an «API for creating and managing online email inboxes for apps and websites». And t…

SendGrid was great, but between the countless upsells and the fact they keep terminating my azure marketplace-based accounts for lack of use (not true) with no way to recover (create a new account!) is super annoying. I don't doubt the people at Postmark think nothing will change as they're still as dedicated as yesterday, but they no longer drive the ship and will do what they're told, then probably leave.

No blame and expected, but still sad.

Re: Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign

#60

Post by tanto »

Years ago I loved mandrill. After they got acquired by Mailchimp it became toast. The user experience went downhill and wasn't comparable to products like Postmark at all. I fear Postmark will go down the same road now. Many great products unfortunately become quite bad after acquisitions. I hope ActiveCampaign is a better new owner than most.
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