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Tell HN: Mailgun disabled our domain without notice

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Tell HN: Mailgun disabled our domain without notice

#1

Post by wilsmex »

Quick backstory: We've used Mailgun for email delivery since ~2014. Sent hundreds of thousands of emails in that time. No mailing lists, all user provided emails (account creations, receipts, password resets, confirmation emails) etc. We're on the 'pay per use' plan. Average > 98.5 % delivery rate. We average maybe 1000 emails per day.

Suddenly without prior notice we get an email: "Your account xxx has been temporarily disabled". Total blackout of all our email delivery.

Takes multiples emails and support ticket to get re-instated. Apparently we went above some "complaint rate threshold is 0.05% or lower" threshold, ad boom auto-disable. We now think (but guessing) our own users were complaining about contact form message spam getting through (as it seems google v2 recaptcha is easily spammed these days).

Not faulting MG for having spam protections in place, that's great. One one think after being a client for nearly a decade of clean email sending, you'd at least get a notice about unusual activity before a blanked account deactivation.

/rant

Any alternatives folks have had good relations/practice with?

Re: Tell HN: Mailgun disabled our domain without notice

#2

Post by mtmail »

https://postmarkapp.com/ warned us a 0.1% complaint rate. A stern warning. "For transactional email spam complaints should not exceed 10 complaints in 10,000 emails sent and we're seeing much higher in your activity. This is an expectation that many ISPs have set, which we work very hard to uphold. "

We now use their API to forward any complaint to us to doublecheck, we became paranoid to keep the number lower.

We're very happy with postmarkapp.

Somebody was using random IPs, but real email addresses to signup. We don't know why, it never led to pageviews later. Maybe it was an attempt to check which user (email address) clicks the link in the confirmation email of a service they haven't signed up for. I can understand if such users click 'this is spam' which then gets reported back by the big email providers to postmarkapp.

Re: Tell HN: Mailgun disabled our domain without notice

#3

Post by wilsmex »

mtmail wrote: post #2

https://postmarkapp.com/ warned us a 0.1% complaint rate. A stern warning. "For transactional email spam complaints should not exceed 10 complaints in 10,000 emails sent and we're seeing much higher in your activity. This is an expectation that many ISPs have set, which we work very hard to uphold. " We now use their API to forward any complaint to us to doublecheck, we became paranoid to keep the number lower. We're…

Thanks for info here. Definitely will look into them. I'll also have to look into if MG has some webhook for complaints, as we're also now suddenly super paranoid about that metric.

Re: Tell HN: Mailgun disabled our domain without notice

#5

Post by I_dev_outdoors »

mtmail wrote: post #2

https://postmarkapp.com/ warned us a 0.1% complaint rate. A stern warning. "For transactional email spam complaints should not exceed 10 complaints in 10,000 emails sent and we're seeing much higher in your activity. This is an expectation that many ISPs have set, which we work very hard to uphold. " We now use their API to forward any complaint to us to doublecheck, we became paranoid to keep the number lower. We're…

I'm having the same issue with a project I'm working on. Did you end up doing anything to mitigate random signups with fake emails? For me, they all follow the same pattern so I can usually guess which users are fake but I haven't been able to programmatically block them yet.

Re: Tell HN: Mailgun disabled our domain without notice

#7

Post by 4d66ba06 »

I_dev_outdoors wrote: post #5
mtmail wrote: post #2

https://postmarkapp.com/ warned us a 0.1% complaint rate. A stern warning. "For transactional email spam complaints should not exceed 10 complaints in 10,000 emails sent and we're seeing much higher in your activity. This is an expectation that many ISPs have set, which we work very hard to uphold. " We now use their API to forward any complaint to us to doublecheck, we became paranoid to keep the number lower. We're…

I'm having the same issue with a project I'm working on. Did you end up doing anything to mitigate random signups with fake emails? For me, they all follow the same pattern so I can usually guess which users are fake but I haven't been able to programmatically block them yet.

Any chance the user agents are the same? On some form spam I've seen often only a few user agents with some really old browser versions are used.

Re: Tell HN: Mailgun disabled our domain without notice

#8

Post by I_dev_outdoors »

4d66ba06 wrote: post #7
I_dev_outdoors wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having the same issue with a project I'm working on. Did you end up doing anything to mitigate random signups with fake emails? For me, they all follow the same pattern so I can usually guess which users are fake but I haven't been able to programmatically block them yet.

Any chance the user agents are the same? On some form spam I've seen often only a few user agents with some really old browser versions are used.

Yes and no. It looks like there are at least two different tools creating users on my platform. One of them looks likes it's using chromedriver, and the other one has a varying user agent but some other constant things that they do.

In my case, it's pretty easy to tell a real user from who has an email that matches up with the username and what form they used to signup.

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