Mailgun Acquires Mailjet
mailgun.comFair warning, just this week Mailgun locked my account due to random "spam" detection. We only send unique hand created emails and have only sent to about 200 unique users over the last few months. Because our account is locked, our customers cannot contact us at all and we can't reach out to them. It's been 3 days and our support messages have gone unanswered.
Hopefully this gets cleared up real soon. I kind of feel like the process might be pushing people to upgrade to premium phone support to regain access to their business, but maybe I'm being pessimistic.
We have had two separate instances of Mailgun blocking our account without reaching out, forcing us to upgrade the account to have access to chat support in order to resolve the issue in a reasonable time. They seem to only respond tickets once a day at best and make their best effort to wiggle out of any effort to help you get back to sending in any haste.
The first time was a mistake on their part when they switched plan tiers and our payment was not processed correctly, they fixed it entirely on their end and did not admit to the problem in the slightest. After this event we made sure to have an intermediate queue on our end in order not to have emails sent into oblivion.
The second time one of our users mass reported a bunch of old emails at once which triggered something that instantly blocked us. Even if we have very low reporting in general (no marketing emails) a single user was able to effectively kill sending of emails to all other users without any forewarning.
After that we forced ourselves out of the platform. When we look for a transactional email sending service, we expect at least an effort on the service to keep the api working while we resolve any issues that arise in a timely manner.
This happened to us a couple weeks back. One day I woke up and our domain had been blocked from sending and receiving. We upgraded our account temporarily to get phone chat support, and what happened was they added some filters which unintentionally got triggered by incoming spam. It was completely their fault, and they fixed it in a few minutes, but they couldn't give me much more detail. Not enough for us to leave Mailgun -- everything else has been great -- but it was very concerning, and I am sure many other accounts were affected.
Can you email your ticket number to josh@mailgun.com and I'll take a look? This definitely isn't typical and I'll get this resolved immediately for you.
Thanks Josh. Our account has been unfrozen, and I've been given some assurance that it'll not happen again for us. Cheers.
Similar thing happened to me as well. I added another domain for a completely different project and their spam detection locked my account completely, including my main project I've been using for a long time before without any issues.
Got account unlocked after six hours of downtime though, but I changed email provider since then.
I had this and the whole account was locked too after adding a "suspicious" one. But the delivery/reception was still working for other domains, only config changes were disabled.
It seems they do that on a TLD basis, for example if you add the domain "spammer.xyz", it will probably lock your account because ".xyz" TLD is considered risky.
They support always fix the problem, but we're always locked a few hours, this is super annoying.
What did you change to?
Postmark. Very happy with their service so far.
I'll chime in for Postmark as well.
As a B2B SaaS, our opportunity cost for support (and potential for lost goodwill) due to failed notifications is high, and switching to Postmark noticeably moved the needle. Time is our most valuable and scarce resource, and peer recommendation is our primary marketing device, so the price increment for switching to Postmark is easily justified. Their deliverability and support are stellar compared to Sendgrid, Mailgun, and SES.
Two thumbs up
See also: Fastmail over G suite for your mailboxes and calendaring.
In what way does your B2B use Postmark? And do you use Fastmail for your company mailboxes? If so, why not just use Postmark to forward emails?
Another vote for Postmark here. They are more expensive, but worth every penny.
I do wish they would let you choose the region where the server is located though, like Mailgun does.
Just a word or advice: if you're only sending to 200 people you might not need mailgun.
You can use gsuite programmatically for easy inbox management with the Gmail API.
How is paying for G Suite and using their API instead any different?
Mainly from a user experience and customer service perspective:
You can hire a non technical person to manage your inbox without having to code as much to connect with your systems.
If you have problems with G suite, you are a paying customer and you get support from Google. There's a phone number you can call and get your problems solved.
I had a worse experience with mailgun that almost made me lose my job. Our domain was blacklisted for sending spam. I think mailgun's server was hacked at that time because our Api Key was kept securely using the best practices. I dont want to use Sendgrid because of bloated and slow UI but I had no choice.
If this is a recent occurrence, I'd be happy to have our application security team take a look. To be clear, there hasn't been any kind of breach, but our customers are often targeted in phishing schemes that results in the disclosure of account credentials. We're continually adapting our defenses, but this is responsible for the majority of credential leaks.
There's one really easy step you could take that would make a huge dent in those phishing schemes:
Detect and block phishing emails that are forwarded through your service. Right now, I get several messages forwarded per day from "Sam at Mailgun" (actually a variety of external senders) trying to get me to log in to review various (nonexistent) problems with my account.
> our customers cannot contact us at all
I thought mailgun was for delivering emails? How/why are they your MX?
They are actually one of the few services that u can use for programmatically receiving emails. When it works, it just works - but unfortunately the spam thing bit us as well.
Fortunately we were able to get it resolved quickly
We provide that at Twilio SendGrid too: Parse Webhook
Having both phones and email at one supplier sounds risky. If you lock my account it takes out the two major ways a customer can reach us. No thanks.
I use MG for automated email intake too, but I also use sparkpost as a backup email intake.
How do you switch from the primary to the backup?
for our purpose i have two distinct email domains and fwd to both addresses and process which ever hits my servers first.
They provide MX forwarding for delivery, but we use them because it saves us from having to buy a per user email account with gsuite or outlook. It's a little bit of a hassle/hack, but it works well enough in practice. I use a free gmail account that receives forwarded emails from Mailgun, and I can respond via mailgun smtp within gmail.
If I remember right, they recommend using a sub domain and being an Mx.
IIRC Mailgun is one of those services that let you develop your app to use their api (i.e get some skin in the game, let you do a small fraction of the free-tier emails) then instantly locks your acc until you add a card for ID. The first IP they put me on was also blacklisted by Hotmail, meaning emails don't even get through to the user's spam box.
Over time I learned to prefer European B2B tech companies, because they strive to be profitable from the beginning, take less VC money, are more stable, predictable, cost-conscious, engineering-focused, and, therefore, often much less likely to be acquired: Adyen, MessageBird, KeyCDN, OVH, Hetzner, INWX, Mailbox. It's a bit sad to take Mailjet out of this list, even if it's considered a success for the company.
Actually, this is a very helpful feedback for any company. And funnily enough, would Europe’s difficulty in creating a funding ecosystem be the key point that ...reinforces their startups?
In Europe, there is still a lot of pride in completely owning your company, and not having any plans to sell it to anyone, except maybe IPO. In many cases, the original founders are still running their tech companies 20 years later. It could almost be said, that a "serial tech entrepreneur" is not a thing in such a conservative society, because even entrepreneurs prefer certainty and stability in their lives over high risks / high returns, and the fear of failure is much stronger than in the US.
I've never understood why anyone would trust a serial entrepreneur. If a business is great, why would they exit? If it's not, why are they esteemed?
And another company acquired coming from efounders, a startup studio specialized in SaaS.
I think efounders track record is really interesting, out of 19 companies, 4 acquisition and 3 other project that seems to work very well (AirCall, Front and Spendesk).
All their companies are here for the curious: https://www.efounders.com/companies
Indeed, very happy to see this European success.
Semi-related: If you are in the market for an email provider for transactional emails, I encourage you to use Postmark. It's a developer focused company with a simple pricing model and great documentation, and their IPs tend to have great reputation scores. I don't work for them, but I switched from one of these two and am very happy I did.
A semi-interesting story, we used Postmark at my last company. When we signed up they offered something like 50,000 free credits. Then if we setup DKIM they offered another 50,000 or so credits. Then about three months later they sent us a survey and offered us another 75,000 credits if we filled it out.
All in all before we had even launched our application they had thrown nearly 200,000 free email credits at us. We hadn't even provided a credit card yet.
Considering at launch we were sending about 2,000 emails per month on a busy month we joked that we would never have to pay these guys.
Come a year and a half later we're sending a lot more than 2k emails per month and we're just about out of credits. At this point Postmark had become so ingrained in our applications (we made heavy use of their SDKs and templates) there wasn't any easy way to switch if we wanted to.
While we thought they were the fools for giving us such an obscene amount of free credits, they ultimately won in the long game and that company is still using (and now paying) Postmark.
All of that said, Postmark IS fantastic. I use them for every project where I need to send or receive mail, and I wouldn't consider anyone else. Highly recommend them.
I was waiting for the bad news, it’s refreshing to see this retention tactic pay off because of the quality of the product. That’s killer. You can probably get a future discount by offering a testimonial/case study :)
Great assist. Just wanted to say that I am interested in free Postmark credits.
Another (very) happy Postmark user here. Tried most of the available email APIs a few years ago, Postmark was the only one that I could reliably use to get transactional emails into all of my test inboxes.
Ditto here!
Spent over 1 year cruising through their free credits, now happily paying a couple hundred a month without a second thought.
It's really intuitive and easy-to-use to see errors, read text of emails, and so forth.
Side note: It's neat to see people come out of the woodwork on this thread for Postmark, which is normally one of those products consumed so quietly, and under-appreciated. I bet their team is really happy to see this. :)
Yes, we are. :-P
Yet another happy Postmark customer here. They're the only transactional email provider I've found who keeps full text logs of your outgoing mails (for a couple weeks) - in a complex "Enterprise" environment I cannot overstate how helpful having one place that always logs the mail that actually went out to the customer is. No matter what the sending system may have logged or failed to log.
Also their deliverability is excellent and when there are deliverability issues, it's easy to find exactly why. The logs also surface the info we need to prove what actually happened during a nondelivery event. ("Here is the actual log line from your MX server rejecting the mail we sent.")
For small near-zero-budget projects, I still use Amazon SES. It's Good Enough for most uses and nobody else with even decent deliverability can touch them on price. All my hobby projects combined are billing well under $1/mo for SES usage.
SES is also decent for some very specific inbound email use cases. If you need to receive email from some system that doesn't have a real webhooks type outbound API, but does have robust email notifications, and send the body to a Lambda function that parses it and makes the API call that system ought to have just made in the first place.. SES is perfect. (And unfortunately all the major systems I work with that process inbound email are stuck needing an IMAP connection - if I was able to use an API based inbound email receipt scheme, and needed to receive mail from various domains, I'd consider Postmark for the better diagnostics and logging.)
Mailgun's logging is great, and includes the full-text of messages.
Hey everyone, I'm the product manager at Postmark, and it's great to see all these stories. I'd love to find out a bit more about how y'all use the product. I can definitely send some T-shirts and other swag your way as well. If you're interested in telling your story, reach out to support and tell them you came from this thread! https://postmarkapp.com/support
Awesome how active your team is!
Happy Mailgun user here. Sending 1MM+ transactional emails/month and 9MM+ marketing emails/month. Working flawlessly, given that you setup everything correctly (separate domains, dedicated IPs at least for transactional emails, SPF, DKIM)
Same here! Similar volume and same experience- it all works well. Looking forward to the new "time of day inbox placement" feature they're working on as well!
Second this. Postmark is hands down one of the best developer products I've ever come across (on par with Stripe in terms of quality).
They were one of the first third-party APIs I implemented when I started building things properly - very polished, very easy to onboard and I remember being extremely impressed by the simplicity once it was going.
I’ve been using postmark and they’ve been amazing, never had any issues with them. I used to use sendgrid, but had lots of problems with deliverability, never had any issues wish postmark so far.
Link to postmark since it’s kind of hard to find on google: https://postmarkapp.com/
Postmark is the best in my opinion. Stay away from Sparkpost as much as you can, the worst service I encountered.
They're shutting down accounts without any notice. It doesn't matter how many emails you sent, that you have 0 spam complaints, extremely low bounce rate ... on the first issue they're banning your account.
We used them to notify our customers when new people sign up on their portal so we included details about those users, including the website. We got JUST ONE, SINGLE .tk domain in the email content and they blocked our account completely. We were also on their Premier plan.
No notice before-hand, no warning, nothing.. they simply blocked the account and haven't activated it back even after numerous requests. They couldn't point to any document that stated their policies and what rules we should follow or why they banned us.
tl;dr. Stay away from Sparkpost, they ban your account without notice.
I work for SparkPost and would be happy to escalate for further review if you provide me with a ticket number or contact details.
Very happy with mailgun. We had the same experience with sparkpost.
Our account (that we had been using for 6 months) was locked right after we paid a bit over $200 for October.
We filled a ticket and gave them all the info they requested. Eventually the reply was a template that didn't explain anything. They also refused to refund the remaining credits.
Here the nice rejection email:
Thank you for your interest in SparkPost. We strive to offer the very best email service, and to that end, we maintain a strict anti-abuse messaging policy.
Because we cannot offer you the high deliverability you would expect from SparkPost, we must decline to provide our services. We wish you the best in your future business endeavors.
Last I checked they were still lacking automatic DKIM rotation. Has that been fixed? Mailgun was too fwiw.
Sendgrid and Sparkpost are the only two I know of doing this correctly at the moment.
I used to use Postmark but switched to Mailgun. I'm very happy. What would you say is the benefit of Postmark compared to Mailgun?
Postmark seems to have very good diagnostics. They seem to have quite fine grained control over bounce lists too, which Sendgrid is shockingly bad at. I haven’t evaluated Mailgun in detail. Interested to know what factors led you to switch?
Been using them as my outbound processor for my self-hosted email to avoid dealing with all the reputation and it works flawlessly.
Yep, used them for inbound/outbound processing and they are pretty flawless.
Why do all of these mail services look like spam engines?
I know several companies that seems to shop for these mail services. Someone spams me though a service like this, I complain, next week I'm getting email from the same sender but through a different spam service.
You email/spam service providers need to create a clearing house for bad customers, because bad actors just move around and change names and always find a new home to land in.
I don't know about the acquiree but as a mail admin I've found Mailgun to be unresponsive to abuse emails and an unrepentant spammer. Block them and move on.
I think this is a great acquisition for Mailgun. IMO, the biggest pain point for implementing Mailgun is that backend developers don't want to manage email templates, deal with email client compatibility, or manage A/B testing within a backend codebase. This acquisition should fix that disconnect by allowing the marketing team to perform these tasks via the Mailgun control panel.
I hope this means the MJML project was part of the acquisition reason (it underlies their builder) and won’t see its support reduce.
We're really excited about MJML. Creating messages that render properly on all email clients is challenging and MJML solves the problem in a very developer friendly way. You should expect MJML and the Passport editor to be integrated into Mailgun in the near future!
Glad to hear it Josh, can't wait!
Thank you, Josh!
MJML will definitely continue to be prioritized at both Mailjet and Mailgun as it's a big part of our product and brand.
For those who don't know MJML: https://mjml.io
Can all MJML mail be routed to the "bulk" folder?
Great news. Thank you!
I always was intrigued by the premise of MJML but it's just a little weird at this point. Client support is inconsistent. I'd rather it less feature rich than having certain components that aren't fully supported by popular clients. IMO it would be better to have a really simple/easy to remember set of components that were fully supported.
I would say it does have that set of simple components: wrapper, section, column, image, button and text are all you really need. These are the ones we set new developers up with. You can create fully client-compatible versions the more advanced components with these components.
Everything else they provide is just gravy for situations where development speed is more important than client support (as we see it) or when you know you’re not going to worry about Outlook users of a certain generation.
All I'm saying is if I wanted to look up a bunch of support charts, I may as well try my luck with regular HTML, because it's no longer speeding up development trying to remember which component is supported where. And the way it's presented in the link above is awful.
Well, now you’ve read my comment and know the reliable ones. I hadn’t seen that chart so I just tested the first emails I built in Litmus and opened them in a few of my own clients. After the first couple, it was clear how to build the rest of them without worrying about compatibility.
+1 will be curious and anxious to hear what happens to MJML
I dislike automated commercial email.
To be more accurate, I loathe and despise it, and have done since I first received a commercial email spam, in the early 1990s. The very name "Mailgun" sounds to me no different from "Spam cannon". Substitute "chimp" if you want; it doesn't make it better for me.
So company employees should send you handcrafted "Please confirm your email address by clicking this link" transaction emails?
Companies should stop asking for my email address at all, ever. I use email to talk to friends and relatives. I am not interested in commercial email. I don't like my town being decorated with advertisements, either.
My inbox is full of rubbish ads - it overwhelms the stuff I care about, and makes my life sadder.
There are more use cases for sending email other than marketing. We don't like sending them, but many customers prefer to have transactional information (for instance, an audit has been done in some factory plant you manage) and periodic reports come to their mailbox instead of having to log in to some web app to see it.
It always a pain point and someone somewhere is certainly not receiving something they feel they should. These services help because of how complex the email ecosystem has become with layers of identity and reputation and such.
Kewl. There are "use cases".
That doesn't work for me; I am not a "use-case". I'm an individual person, and my choice is to not receive unsolicited advertising. Marketers don't seem to understand that some people object to receiving "helpful product suggestions" all through the day.
>>KERPLUNK<< another catalogue book just fell through the letterbox, and is destined for the recycling bin. Dammit, save me the trouble; just put it in the bin yourself, it's just by the front door. Hell, the bin's big enough; put the whole batch in my bin, end your shift, and go back to bed.
"We don't like sending them"
This sounds like you're saying it's a nasty job, but someone has to do it - like cleaning toilets, or assassinating tyrants.
Just stop.
I have never managed any factory plants. I don't plan to. This is not a "pain point"; it's abuse, and an obvious case of the Tragedy Of The Commons.
Are you confusing marketing emails with transactional emails? What about order confirmations? Password reset emails?
Perhaps I'm confusing one kind of marketing spam with another kind of marketing spam.
It all makes me feel ill, to the very depths of my Soul.
"Order confirmations": not necessary. I should have a choice whether I use my email address to confirm an order.
"Transactional": I don't know what that means (I keep finding that term being used). I think it means that the email is being used as part of an agreed deal. Fine: if I've agreed to my email being used as part of a deal, no prob. Otherwise, leave me alone.
"Order confirmations": if I need my order confirmed, then I can opt for that, and give you my email. But in general, orders don't need confirming - you either order, or you don't.
"Password reset": My passwords are my business. I use a password manager. Please don't assume I'm a password slob. Passwords suck; they are an insane way to authenticate, they just don't work. So reset emails are not a good use-case for unsolicited email.
Next?
is mailgun/jet necessary for transactional emails?
isn't their reason for existence the sending of multi-recipient emails?
If by "multi-recipient emails" you talk about newsletter that's probably more MailChimp's territory which is also clear from their landing page. Mailgun is clearly aimed at developers implementing transactional email functionality.
It's not "necessary", same as Stripe isn't necessary for accepting payments but it makes it a whole lot easier if you have to deal with it and don't want to implement everything yourself or run mail infrastructure.
Start using a wildcard and then you can create promos-company@yourdomain.com
I ran a mailserver for 20 years; I terminated it this year (for unimportant reasons). I never allowed wildcard addresses. They're a spam magnet.
I feel with all the people who left the horrible Mailgun (we've used them for 5 years), switched to Mailjet (we luckily didn't) and are back with Mailgun now.
Both services are trash. Maillgun in particular holds emails even for days and reports them as sent. Apparently it's a "security" feature.
If you bring a letter to to post office, you have sent it, but that does not mean it is delivered. It takes the postal service some time before the letter is eventually delivered. during that time the letter is sent, but not delivered. Email works exactly like paper mail.
If there is a security related issue on the receiver side (like an expired certificate), the sender (Mailgun) may hold the email and retry a couple of times. Eventually the issue may get resolved and the email will be delivered, or the sender may choose to deliver the email without encryption (unless MTA-STS is used, of course). During this whole process the email is sent, but not delivered.
I understand that the status 'sent' may be confusing to you, but calling the companies 'trash' just because the email protocol from 1982 does not uphold your standards is a bit harsh.
I bet they drop "gun" from the name
The "gun" one did the acquiring! They'll obviously give Mailjet a more martial name. Mailbomb sounds good and familiar to me.
Mailevolence?
They should go for the ambivalent “chainmail”.
Visions of FW: FW: FW: FW:
This makes no sense - guns function completely differently from jets. What were they thinking?
It's like the A-10 Warthog, a jet built around a gun.
Key part:
> We’ll continue to maintain separate brands, develop new products for each brand, and enhance our existing offerings. As a Mailgun customer, you aren’t likely to notice any change, except for new features and functionality coming your way soon.
Every company acquisition says this in the beginning. Every.
Same announcement on mailjet website: https://www.mailjet.com/mailgun-acquires-mailjet
We are in the govtech sector and decided for mailjet because of european and national data privacy regulation for governments ("DSGVO", data residency, etc). Does anyone of you know how the merger will affect the companies DSGVO promise or if will mailjet stay a company under european/french law?
I've heard varying degrees of feedback on Thoma Bravo - but I'm curious what the general consensus is? It appears, from the outside, that they allow their investment targets to remain autonomous - but I'm curious how hands off (or on) they are.
Thoma Bravo has been a great partner for us. Our management team has maintained a high level of autonomy in driving the vision and strategy of the company including the decision to pursue this acquisition. There is a tremendous network current/past companies with a wealth of experience that we've been able to draw from that already has proven to be incredibly valuable as we continue to scale the company.
Fantastic, thank you for sharing the insight!
I don’t really use Mailjet for now, but admire their work and think MJML is one of the biggest innovations we’ve seen in the email space in quite some time. Hoping that keeps up in the coming years under Mailgun.
How long before the Salesforce acquisition now?
I wouldn't complain if email in SF stopped being such a tirefire
It's probably unlikely since Salesforce bought ExactTarget a few years ago
This space is really starting to get really competitive
I guess it's the right time to announce my company, Mailsub?
Mailmail or Gunjet?
Missed opportunity to weave "joining forces" in the title somehow :)