9 ms·
Ask HN: Anyone else having no email deliver with SendGrid?
We have had no email delivered through SendGrid in over 16 hours. Their status says everything is normal but there are reports on Twitter of people having problems.
Is anyone else here having problems today?
- phil_s 10y agoYep for 12-13 hours now. One thing I've noticed is that the CNAMEs I set up for DKIM etc are not resolvable in DNS - could this be related to the issue? All emails are listed under 'Activity' as being deferred. Waiting for AWS to approve my SES access so I can switch away.
- codegeek 10y agoWe have gone from Mandrill to Sendgrid and back to Mandrill. We switched over to sendgrid after being pissed of with Mandrill due to their sudden change but switching to sendgrid was a bad decision in hindsight. Mandrill was rock solid and we never had issues. Sendgrid continues to have deliverability issues every once in a while and not to mention the blacklisting of their shared IPs (which I understand is a common problem with all providers but never happened with Mandrill for our business). We have switched back to Mandrill (yes, got a paying mailchimp account just to use mandrill). Not only sendgrid's UI is confusing, they don't even show the actual email content in their dashboard.
- bshimmin 10y agoThey gave two months' notice of the change to having to have a paying Mailchimp accounts with Mandrill - do you regard that as sudden? They also sent quite regular reminders, too. (I will admit we ended up leaving it a bit until the last minute, but it wasn't particularly arduous, even under moderate pressure.) We use AWS' SES on a few projects, and, while it seems to work effortlessly, I have absolutely no idea how to get any logs out of it (like, anything beyond the absolute number of emails sent), which is a fairly major limitation for me.
- crazypyro 10y agoTwo months is very sudden for any enterprise software to make a large change in payment and account system, in my experience.
- nuschk 10y agoSame here. Had a chat with the support team and they say they had to allocate a number of new IPs, since some of their existing IPs were blacklisted. Now they need to warm up the new ones first, which may take an undefined amount of time. Support was very helpful and migrated our traffic to already warmed up IPs.
- selckin 10y agowhat does warm up mean in this context?
- crazypyro 10y agoI'd assume its a process of slowly ramping up new IP addresses to send out emails. If you take an IP and instantly use it on a massive scale, I'm sure it triggers a lot of spam filters.
- mrw34 10y agoSame experience here - we were migrated without warning 3 days ago and the majority of outgoing messages were subsequently deferred for 12 hours or more. When we reported the issue we were basically told they would be delivered eventually. No offer to migrate our traffic or to compensate us in any way.
- DanitaBaires 10y agoWe filed a support ticket and also had our traffic moved to a new IP, but I had to write to their Twitter account for them to pay attention. I urge everybody with an Essentials plan to do this, because it seems that if you don't complain on any channel possible you'll stay on this situation until it passes which can be "a few days" as they say.
- DanitaBaires 10y agoSame here, we have no delivered messages since yesterday at 17.00 GMT-3. Contacted Sendgrid support about this because we're having a lot of registered users that cannot activate their accounts.
- joet3ch 10y agoWe are experiencing this issue also. Contacted SendGrid support and had them switch our traffic to different IP's. Wish they would have communicated this in advance, or even update their status page.
- AznHisoka 10y agoI used SendGrid years ago, and never want to go back to it. Then I switched to AWS. Nobody got fired for using AWS S3.
- nullcipher 10y agoYou mean SES?
- brianwawok 10y agoNo he literally writes his all emails to AWS s3. Just dumps them in a file. Hence, no one can get fired. How can you get fired, if your fired email is just dumped in an s3 file?
- Epskampie 10y agoYou may have gotten downvoted to shit, but I thought that was funny!
- brianwawok 10y agoHumor usually costs karma on hacker news but I can rebuild it with a few "wow Ruby is slow" comments.
- mead5432 10y agoS3 == SSS == Simple SMTP Service?
- Kequc 10y agoSendgrid is overly complex for what I need it to do. It's bloated with features, and over-complication. Their API to build a simple email necessitates creating at least three different objects. They have a whitelisting feature, in case you are using your own domain you need to go through whitelisting steps. You need to configure your domain appropriately. It goes on and on. Then there are multiple ways to go about all of those things. If you don't do it correctly then sometimes it doesn't work or a high amount of email ends up in spam. By default they enable features which some countries tightly control like tracking which all needs to be tinkered with to get right. Then once it's all working perfectly I have seen it take up to 10 minutes for an email to be actually sent. I went with Sendgrid because they billed themselves as easy to use. You might be better off using a SMTP server of your own. You've got to configure it anyway.
- linkregister 10y agoI didn't down vote you; your comment adds to the discussion. The annoying SPF/DKIM additions to your DNS zone file are necessary for the basics of delivery to the inbox. Gmail now displays a scary red unlocked padlock for unsigned/unverified email. Running an SMTP server is indeed the way the internet was meant to handle email. However, the other tenants in your /25 CIDR block will ruin your sending IP address's reputation and you will face delivery to Spam and throttling unless you stay on top of blacklist removal requests. There are plenty of use cases for using your own SMTP server for sending, but I think the labor cost of doing so far exceeds the prices of Sparkpost, Postmark, Mailgun, Sendgrid, or hell, even Mailchimp.
- omfg 10y agoNo emails going out over here either. Our customers are complaining. Might be time to switch back to MailChimp.
- poppup 10y agoI am using SendGrid on one project. Another surprising thing is that nobody from SendGrid is responding to this thread to explain and rectify as I have seen other companies do.
- jrs235 10y agoAre you using their shared IPs or do you have a dedicated one?
- restlessmedia 10y agoStatus page seems so to suggest nothing is wrong... http://status.sendgrid.com/ http://status.sendgrid.com/
- SendGridBecca 10y agoStatus page is for outages & maintenance only. Since this is not applicable to all accounts and should only last at most a few days we have decided not to post to our status page.
- martin_ 10y agoI truly hope that an impact duration of more than a few days is not a requirement for updating your status page.
- OJFord 10y agoOr even the other supposed requirement "effects _all_ accounts". Wow!
- 0xmohit 10y agoYou would have done better to remain silent instead of making such posts. A email delivery service isn't able to send those, and it considers that it isn't worth posting on their status page! Are these messages really from SendGrid support? Looks like a desperate bid to prevent any future takeover attempts.
- jessaustin 10y agoAre these messages really from SendGrid support? Haha that's a great idea for a "dirty tricks" campaign against a competitor. Every time they have an outage, a greenbean HN user starts posting less and less plausible excuses with the aim of pissing everyone off. Eventually the real CEO has to get on and say, "We don't know who this is but please ignore them but no I don't want to say anything about our outage." Repeat for added lulz...
- SendGridBecca 10y agoSendGrid Support here! We wanted to step in and provide some color for what is going on. We’re currently making changes to our shared IP system in order for our customers to have a better delivery experience in the long term. As a result of this, the IP group you’re sending from has a new shared IP address(es). As these IP groups warm up, you may see some deferrals if you are a Free or Essentials customer. However don't worry, this warm up period won't last long. Maybe a few days at most, or until major email receivers have enough data to determine the legitimacy of email being sent from these new IPs. Keep in mind SendGrid will continue to attempt to deliver these throttled emails on your behalf for up to 72 hours (it rarely takes the full 72 hours to deliver an email throttled in this way). If you wish to avoid disruptions like this in the future, considering upgrading your account to a Pro or higher plan (https://app.sendgrid.com/settings/billing https://app.sendgrid.com/settings/billing), which includes a dedicated IP address as opposed to sending from a shared IP group. Dedicated IP addresses are great because instead of many different users sending from the same IP or group of IPs, you are in complete control of your sending reputation. Customer feedback is extremely important us here at SendGrid, and we have made these changes as a result of that feedback. We know in the long run, this will immensely help your sending. This will go away, just hang in there with us! If you have additional questions, please feel free to contact us by going to support.sendgrid.com.
- mathgeek 10y agoI'm not a SendGrid user, but I'm curious as to if this was announced or sent out as a notification in some manner before it happened.
- airyt 10y agotl;dr: don't use sendgrid. no it wasn't. i have 100s of messages stuck in my queue marked as 'deferred'. these are critical emails that affect us financially. and the response is to "wait a few days". laughable. even without this process, lots of messages get stuck for 10 minutes or more with no response from their support department as to why. And this is a PAID service. over to AWS i go. i don't need complex reporting or elegant UI. just send the bloody email.
- jerkstate 10y agoI'm not a Sendgrid customer but their "warm up" answer here is totally insufficient. It strikes me as an attempt to spin a major outage as standard operating procedure, and as a result I'm not going to use their product in the future.
- monkpit 10y agoWhat leads you to believe that their explanation is not acceptable? I'm not saying I don't believe you, but more information about why you hold this opinion would be interesting to me.
- jerkstate 10y agoTo accept their explanation would be to accept that they went into this maintenance either with the intention of causing a several day long service outage or without knowledge that they would cause a service outage (i.e. something happened that they didn't anticipate.) If it was intentional, Bob help anyone who trusts them with their business. If it was accidental/unanticipated, they need to own up to what went wrong and show how they're going to prevent it in the future.
- crisnoble 10y agoIn case others are looking for alternatives to SendGrid, SparkPost has been amazing to work with and offers 100,000 free transactional emails per month: https://www.sparkpost.com/ https://www.sparkpost.com/
- bmh_ca 10y agoAnother suggestion on excellent personal experience: postmark HTTPS://postmarkapp.com
- scosman 10y agoWhatever you do, don't consider Mandrill/Mailchimp. What they pulled earlier this year makes this issue look like nothing.
- medmunds 10y agoIf you're using Django, I created django-anymail[1] earlier this year to simplify switching between full-featured transactional ESPs. This was a direct response to Mandrill's (relatively) short notice of major changes -- I used to maintain a popular Mandrill-Django integration. [1]: https://github.com/anymail/django-anymail https://github.com/anymail/django-anymail
- inertial 10y agoIs it this ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11203056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11203056 (Mandrill's Betrayal)
- scosman 10y agoyup
- defied 10y agoWe were previously using SendGrid but noticed a lot of email ended up in the Junk folders. Now we're using Postmark; much better service and no issues with deliverability.
- ComputerGuru 10y agoWe're heavy SendGrid users and this is basically the excuse we've been looking for to jump ship after several years with them. SG is incompetent with regards to email delivery. This should not come as a surprise to anyone that uses their service. It took a month for them to confirm what we told them: users will still receive previously-queued emails even after they unsubscribe (!!!), meaning it's no surprise that they will flag future messages they receive as spam. A month or so later, SG acknowledged the bug but stated they had no intention of fixing that behavior at this time! Their _core_ selling point is email delivery with low rejection and you don't need to build it yourself. They totally failed there as users are rightly marking their messages as spam _and_ we are therefore required to write, run, and maintain our own mail queuing service to check outgoing emails against _their own unsubscribe list_ before forwarding the email to SG to deliver for us. At this point, we use them only for the metrics, which is just not worth supporting such a sleazy operation.
- SGDeepThroat 10y ago-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: BCPG C# v1.6.1.0 SendGrid under cover agent here... Don't believe the conspiracy theorists out there, that this wasn't a push to the PRO plan for free tier usage account holders. The free tier customers don't actually earn any money for send-grid, so I wouldn't be surprised if this little stunt increased subscriptions for the pro plan! Remember, this wasn't an outage for anyone other than free tier account holders and that's why it wasn't on the outage page! SendGrid does want your business, as long as you don't spend too long on the free-tier plan and ultimately upgrade! Keep on Trucking... Secret Agent... out! -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
- samwillis 10y agoNo, it's is an outage for paid accounts. It is just apparently that you need a dedicated IP account to have not been effected.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- loloferrari 10y agoam i the only one who is positive about this? no spams today from sendgrid accounts. - that's great news! ;-)
- rubenmch 10y agoSame here, all of our emails have been Deferred since yesterday. We have a $9.95/month Essentials account. Talked to chat support and they moved us to a new IP group and emails started being Delivered, however this lasted only 10 minutes. After that all of our emails started being Deferred again. Contacted chat support again and they moved us again to a new IP group. Let's see how much it lasts this time. Chat support said having all of our emails Deferred for days with none being Delivered is normal and expected. We send transactional emails so having our customers wait days for the emails is not feasible for us. We had recently switched from Mandrill, we'll have to start searching for a new provider.
- spdustin 10y agoI can heartily recommend Postmark. Generous free credits, excellent API, and one of the best DMARC tools (also free, https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com)
- bruno222 10y agoLol! How to NOT answer a customer. Lesson 1: Never say "you are probably a small customer." Lesson 2: Never say "don't worrryyyy duuuude, it will take a lot of days to fix it. Daaayyyys... Go get a donnuts in meanwhile! Regards, Homer Simpson."
- bruno222 10y agoIf this guy was Homer Simpson, the answer would be: (read using Homer voice) "Uhhh, I love donuts! The status page is used only when something wrong happens. In your case, we decide to give you an outage by purpose, without telling you - haha - duh. (Where is my beer, Marge?) Oh, the customer is still waiting for my answer: Dooonn't wooorrryyyy so much, we always do this on low plan customers - you know, we need some dumb guys to warm up our new IP range - hohoho - meeeryyyy x-mas!"
- dang 10y agoWe've banned this account for violating the HN guidelines. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. We're happy to unban people when there's reason to believe that they'll only post civil and substantive comments in the future. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12144124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12144124 and marked it off-topic.
- jazoom 10y agoYup. Will be leaving SendGrid. This is appalling.