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Isn’t part of the reason for using Mailgun, Sendgrid etc that you get to send via IP addresses with good reputation?
by dan1234 9y ago
Isn’t part of the reason for using Mailgun, Sendgrid etc that you get to send via IP addresses with good reputation?
- grenoire 9y agoExactly. These services do not get blocked by spam filters due to their credibility scores. That is the most important feature, not the UX.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hultner 9y agoI think reputation is counted towards your DKIM these days, which also makes the reputation somewhat portable by moving your private key to with you to a new server/ip.
- jrodom 9y agoIP reputation continues to be the most important factor that impacts deliverability. Providers are slowly moving to domain-based reputation systems that leverage DKIM. Gmail seems to weight domain reputation in their calculations higher than most currently.
- michaelbrooks 9y agoFor 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.
- Doches 9y agoAnd 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?
- dozzie 9y agoThis is a major risk of outsourcing part of your operations. You probably shouldn't do this to the core of your business, as you lose control over problems. But sending marketing e-mails usually is not the core of business, unless one is selling the service of sending e-mails.
- user15672 9y agoIf emails are a part of your core business, you should have a business continuity plan for this situation. That may be to fall back to another service, or even a temporary in-house server. Of course, if it's that important, then you'd be foolish to not have invested in a better solution, or to not have a proper SLA with a third party.
- baudehlo 9y agoThat'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-mailchimpsendgridses-etc/ https://baudehlo.com/2016/07/26/setting-up-haraka-to-send-to...
- richardkeller 9y agoUnfortunately, 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.
- bowersbros 9y agoWhat is your emails bounce rates etc? Or is it caused by others using those same IPs too?
- scsh 9y agoIf 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.
- mdekkers 9y agoInteresting. I have never seen those issues, and have been using MG for quite a few years, for many clients.
- user15672 9y agoSame here. I've moved away from paying for a dedicated IP because it seemed a bit redundant.
- lemming 9y agoI used to use Mailgun for sending out licences for my product. I got a lot of people saying they had never arrived, especially Microsoft addresses and Chinese ones. This continued despite repeated complaints and IP switches. I switched to sending through Fastmail and have never had a problem since.
- gondo 9y agobut if opt for dedicated IP address, dose it matter if you have it from Mailgun or if you have your own?
- the_mitsuhiko 9y agoSendgrid gives you dedicated IPs so you are responsible for your own reputation. When you start out using it you might start on a low reputation depending on what the person on that IP did before.
- parenthephobia 9y agoFrom personal experience, if you're not jumping straight from no emails to a million an hour, your mail setup is good (SPF/DKIM/etc), you're not reusing a IP address that was sending spam last week (so be wary sending from cloud servers), and you aren't actually sending spam, then you can send from your own infrastructure just fine.
- speleding 9y agoUntil recently I sent newsletters from our own infrastructure and I agree that it's doable, but: - You have to ramp up sending from new IP addresses VERY slowly if you want to avoid getting grey / black listed by Yahoo and AOL, this makes it quite a tedious process - Make sure you also have rDNS set up, Gmail uses it as an important quality signal - Accurately handling bounces is a bit of a nightmare because each mail server has a slightly different format and you want to make sure you don't process out-of-office messages - Bounces and "message delayed" messages can arrive days later So we ended up switching to mailgun and although they do sometimes give you a bad IP the time saved is worth it, especially their option to have a web hook back to your backend to process the bounces.
- joering2 9y agoSure. Until they email you your account is "temporarily suspended due to some spam complains" and before you find out some angry customer felt that tmher refund process took too long and filter her email to see yours and click "mark as spam" each email and you scramble to setup your own mailservers before you let employees go because your company is unable to send a single email to make a single sale this month... Until then, all is fine I agree.
- giglamesh 9y agoMine was suspended for spam and I was falsely accused by Mailgun of have compromised servers. Initially I freaked out and then discovered that my servers were fine, but my account at Mailgun was hacked and used to send thousands of spam emails. This happened a couple of times. I asked to see the IP addresses of the senders and Mailgun said they didn't track that/could not tell me. And then they had the audacity to bill me for sending spam that was sent as result of their system being compromised.
- jwr 9y agoI 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 for my transactional E-mail, because of the high risk of my E-mails getting blackholed/rejected. I use it for newsletters/marketing only.
- jimktrains2 9y agoWe really need a better solution to fighting spam. https://github.com/jimktrains/email_ng 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 used if sold or stolen, as the receiving mail server would reject it because of a bad signature (bad sender, and coupled with DKIM and SPF, a malicious user wouldn't be able/allowed to spoof the sender's email).
- chatmasta 9y agoThis 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.
- tyingq 9y agoAnd 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.
- j_s 9y agoThere have been a few discussions regarding deliverability: Why does Gmail hate my domain? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855030 How to Avoid Spam Filters | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10465639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10465639 If there are others I'd appreciate a link!
- j_s 9y agoHotmail deliverability: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14210939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14210939
- cnagele 9y agoThis is a big reason for sure. As you can see in this post, those IP addresses can be hit or miss depending on the provider. At Postmark, we don't really believe in dedicated IPs for all customers. We think that our customer base should not include any bad actors, and instead manually approve every customer to ensure our entire CIDR ranges are clean. The benefit is not just clean IPs, but clean IPs that have an incredible transactional-only reputation with the ISPs. This is how we are able to delivery so fast to the inbox. We only really believe in dedicated IPs for higher volume senders, especially since reputation is moving toward the domain more and more. I wrote about this six years ago, and it is even more true today (https://postmarkapp.com/blog/the-false-promises-of-dedicated-ips https://postmarkapp.com/blog/the-false-promises-of-dedicated...). At the same time, if you are willing to install and manage Postal on your own servers, it's not that hard to maintain your own IP with a great reputation. You just need a good hosting provider (probably not AWS), you need to set up your infrastructure like DKIM, SPF, DMARC, rDNS, and Return Paths, and most importantly you need to maintain good engagement (low bounces, high opens). At a glance, Postal looks like a nice option if you want to do it on your own for cheap. You just might lack the stability, support, maintenance, and performance that goes behind an ESP.
- howard941 9y ago> manually approve every customer to ensure our entire CIDR ranges are clean This is probably a key element of good performance. To keep my mail admin duties part time I simply whois the IP of evil senders and drop the resulting entire CIDR block into the our local blacklist.
- cbhl 9y agoWhy wouldn't spammers just start adopting Postal on their servers, too?
- jonknee 9y agoJudging from the amount of it the sending email portion is not what spammers struggle with. It's the "maintain your own IP with a great reputation" part. How would Postal help?
- wl 9y agoMailgun and Sendgrid send plenty of spam. It boggles the mind that they have a "good reputation" when nearly everything they send me is unsolicited.
- hw 9y agoThere's lots of effort in building AI for chatbots, but why aren't there more efforts in building AI for better spam classification? As much as I would like email to die a horrible death just like snail mail died and have everyone (individuals and businesses) start using some form of IM, it's still quite an integral part of the interwebs for people that it deserves a bit more focus on smarter spam filtering instead of relying heavily on IP reputation pools which screws over many legit users.
- massaman_yams 9y agoGmail stopped using IP reputation entirely a year or two ago, and effectively every major consumer mailbox provider relies on domain reputation heavily these days. Almost all major filters look at a combination of indicators, so it's becoming less and less common that a good mail coming from a bad IP is subject to filtering. The answer to why better spam filtering AI hasn't been developed in a non-proprietary setting is fairly straightforward: the success of any filtering method is heavily dependent on consuming data at scale - including recipient behavior (e.g., mark as spam, vs. spend time reading a message), and this underlying data is just as important, if not more so, than the machine learning approach used to compute filtering assessments. In short - you more or less have to be a large mailbox provider in order to have a chance at doing this well.