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I'm not convinced about the need for SendGrid. Learning to set up an email server isn't that hard in this day and age, and we seem to get very decent deliverabi

by swombat 16y ago

I'm not convinced about the need for SendGrid. Learning to set up an email server isn't that hard in this day and age, and we seem to get very decent deliverability with our own SMTP server - and don't pay a penny for any emails sent. I'm planning to build an email subscription feature for swombat.com soon, and was looking at options like SendGrid, but I just can't justify the cost. When you send people a sign-up confirmation email, they expect it right now. If it's not there in a couple of minutes, in my experience, even the least tech-savvy have learned that they need to check their spam folder.

fookyong 16y ago
you get decent deliverability now - what are you going to do once that stops happening? one of the points of SendGrid is that you pay them to worry about that, so you can concentrate on your core competency.
- moe 16y ago
  one of the points of SendGrid is that you pay them to worry about that Where are you getting that from? I see nothing on the SendGrid page to suggest they track your blacklist status or feel obliged to help with unlisting when it happens.
  - c3 16y ago
    We use Postmark, (we've sent a few million emails through them) and they indeed do this for us.
  - fookyong 16y ago
    http://sendgrid.com/deliverability.html http://sendgrid.com/deliverability.html
robert_mygengo 16y ago
I don't think you're wrong — I just think that for $80, we get a lot of peace of mind once we were sending thousands of mails per day. Particularly because we're sending job notifications to translators too — so if they don't see them, they might not think to check spam.
arn 16y ago
Not sure how many emails you send a day, but I signed up for sendgrid almost immediately after I learned it existed. ISPs have lots of arbitrary policies. For periods of time my emails have been blocked from AOL and AT&T accounts, which make for a lot of headaches and support emails to deal with. (I'm just sending out forum registration, activation and thread subscription emails. no mass mailings.) For a while, we just told people to use non-AOL addresses. Also, I haven't noticed a delay in email deliverability. It seems to deliver quickly. Edit: If it matters, for reference, my forum sends out 6000-7000 emails a day.
simonw 16y ago
I was talking to the guys from mailgun.net recently, which provides a similar service to SendGrid, but also makes it easy to receive e-mail via webhooks. They told me a ton of interesting things about how this stuff actually works. Getting high deliverability is actually incredibly complicated. You need a dedicated IP address to send mail from, which you need to be whitelisted by the big ESPs (E-mail Service Providers). To get it whitelisted, you need to "warm it up" before you start using it properly. You need to be very careful about setting the right headers. You need reverse DNS configured correctly, you need SPF and DomainKeys set up, you need to make sure the IP/domain you are sending from hasn't previously been used for spam... and even after all that, you probably need to set up a relationship with AOL/Gmail/Yahoo etc to make sure your stuff gets through. You also need to watch for their bounce / rate limit notifications and dial back your sending rates to match. There's a whole lot more to it than just setting up an SMTP server.
- swombat 16y ago
  All of this apart from the relationships with ESPs is relatively easy to do if you're a competent sysadmin. As far as the ESPs are concerned, all of them appear to accept our emails just fine, except for Hotmail. We've largely given up on Hotmail, but then everyone who uses hotmail seems to be aware that it marks everything as spam and so they check their spam box as often as their inbox, from the looks of it. It's a nice convincing argument. It just hasn't borne out in practice for us. Email is critical to us, and it gets delivered just fine the vast majority of the time. We've had about 2 cases in 3 years where we needed to intervene manually to talk to some kind of ESP to get us unblocked, because they'd randomly decided to blacklist our IP. That's not worth $80/m.
  - mike-cardwell 16y ago
    The trouble with hotmail is they sometimes just blackhole what they classify to be spam, instead of filtering it into the Junk folder. It doesn't even bounce, it just disappears.
    - idlewords 16y ago
patio11 16y ago
I use SendGrid, too. It was a no-brainer: $80 a month is cheap, I am expensive. I was quite expensive indeed dealing with persistent minor clusterflops like, e.g., automated forum spambots for the forum I host for college debaters (an old hobby) caused the BCC mailserver they were freeloading off of to have enough of a spike that a large multinational advertising company decided BCC "Thanks for paying me $30 Cindy, here's the software you just bought" emails needed to be consigned to the seventh circle of hell sandwiched between Viagra spam and their own customer support requests.
relix 16y ago
I dropped the idea of using Postmark after I read this blog-post: http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/1431120311/oddities-in-gmail-delivery-adaptive-filters http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/1431120311/oddities-in-gmai... In there they admit that mails sent through Postmark still end up in Spam-folders or black holes. That was basically the only added value I'd get from using them.
rlivsey 16y ago
For us it's just another thing that's not our core competency which we're happy to have outsourced so that other people worry about security/maintenance etc... Similar rationale for using Spreedly [1] for subscription billing. In the future it may be the case that we move that in house, but right now it's working out really well. We're using PostMark [2] which amounts to $1.50 per 1000 emails, which is cheap enough for our uses. It's one less thing to worry about so we can focus on more important tasks such as finishing the v2 we're about to launch! [1] - http://spreedly.com/ [2] - http://postmarkapp.com
smhinsey 16y ago
My company uses it because we run our web front ends on various cloud providers, most of whose IP space is blacklisted. I don't even bother to verify that they are anymore and just assume that they are. Sendgrid gets rid of this entirely, which is a pretty big win.
robgwin 16y ago
This isn't a technical question, it's an economics question. If you would rather put in effort than dollars, then do it yourself, and it will work great for a while. But if your business takes off, you will accumulate email-related problems like bacteria, and suddenly that $20/month starts to sound reeal worth it.

by swombat 16y ago

fookyong 16y ago

you get decent deliverability now - what are you going to do once that stops happening? one of the points of SendGrid is that you pay them to worry about that, so you can concentrate on your core competency.

moe 16y ago
one of the points of SendGrid is that you pay them to worry about that Where are you getting that from? I see nothing on the SendGrid page to suggest they track your blacklist status or feel obliged to help with unlisting when it happens.
- c3 16y ago
  We use Postmark, (we've sent a few million emails through them) and they indeed do this for us.
- fookyong 16y ago
  http://sendgrid.com/deliverability.html http://sendgrid.com/deliverability.html

robert_mygengo 16y ago

I don't think you're wrong — I just think that for $80, we get a lot of peace of mind once we were sending thousands of mails per day. Particularly because we're sending job notifications to translators too — so if they don't see them, they might not think to check spam.

arn 16y ago

Not sure how many emails you send a day, but I signed up for sendgrid almost immediately after I learned it existed. ISPs have lots of arbitrary policies. For periods of time my emails have been blocked from AOL and AT&T accounts, which make for a lot of headaches and support emails to deal with. (I'm just sending out forum registration, activation and thread subscription emails. no mass mailings.) For a while, we just told people to use non-AOL addresses. Also, I haven't noticed a delay in email deliverability. It seems to deliver quickly. Edit: If it matters, for reference, my forum sends out 6000-7000 emails a day.

simonw 16y ago

I was talking to the guys from mailgun.net recently, which provides a similar service to SendGrid, but also makes it easy to receive e-mail via webhooks. They told me a ton of interesting things about how this stuff actually works. Getting high deliverability is actually incredibly complicated. You need a dedicated IP address to send mail from, which you need to be whitelisted by the big ESPs (E-mail Service Providers). To get it whitelisted, you need to "warm it up" before you start using it properly. You need to be very careful about setting the right headers. You need reverse DNS configured correctly, you need SPF and DomainKeys set up, you need to make sure the IP/domain you are sending from hasn't previously been used for spam... and even after all that, you probably need to set up a relationship with AOL/Gmail/Yahoo etc to make sure your stuff gets through. You also need to watch for their bounce / rate limit notifications and dial back your sending rates to match. There's a whole lot more to it than just setting up an SMTP server.

swombat 16y ago
All of this apart from the relationships with ESPs is relatively easy to do if you're a competent sysadmin. As far as the ESPs are concerned, all of them appear to accept our emails just fine, except for Hotmail. We've largely given up on Hotmail, but then everyone who uses hotmail seems to be aware that it marks everything as spam and so they check their spam box as often as their inbox, from the looks of it. It's a nice convincing argument. It just hasn't borne out in practice for us. Email is critical to us, and it gets delivered just fine the vast majority of the time. We've had about 2 cases in 3 years where we needed to intervene manually to talk to some kind of ESP to get us unblocked, because they'd randomly decided to blacklist our IP. That's not worth $80/m.
- mike-cardwell 16y ago
  The trouble with hotmail is they sometimes just blackhole what they classify to be spam, instead of filtering it into the Junk folder. It doesn't even bounce, it just disappears.
  - idlewords 16y ago

patio11 16y ago

I use SendGrid, too. It was a no-brainer: $80 a month is cheap, I am expensive. I was quite expensive indeed dealing with persistent minor clusterflops like, e.g., automated forum spambots for the forum I host for college debaters (an old hobby) caused the BCC mailserver they were freeloading off of to have enough of a spike that a large multinational advertising company decided BCC "Thanks for paying me $30 Cindy, here's the software you just bought" emails needed to be consigned to the seventh circle of hell sandwiched between Viagra spam and their own customer support requests.

relix 16y ago

I dropped the idea of using Postmark after I read this blog-post: http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/1431120311/oddities-in-gmail-delivery-adaptive-filters http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/1431120311/oddities-in-gmai... In there they admit that mails sent through Postmark still end up in Spam-folders or black holes. That was basically the only added value I'd get from using them.

rlivsey 16y ago

For us it's just another thing that's not our core competency which we're happy to have outsourced so that other people worry about security/maintenance etc... Similar rationale for using Spreedly [1] for subscription billing. In the future it may be the case that we move that in house, but right now it's working out really well. We're using PostMark [2] which amounts to $1.50 per 1000 emails, which is cheap enough for our uses. It's one less thing to worry about so we can focus on more important tasks such as finishing the v2 we're about to launch! [1] - http://spreedly.com/ [2] - http://postmarkapp.com

smhinsey 16y ago

My company uses it because we run our web front ends on various cloud providers, most of whose IP space is blacklisted. I don't even bother to verify that they are anymore and just assume that they are. Sendgrid gets rid of this entirely, which is a pretty big win.

robgwin 16y ago

This isn't a technical question, it's an economics question. If you would rather put in effort than dollars, then do it yourself, and it will work great for a while. But if your business takes off, you will accumulate email-related problems like bacteria, and suddenly that $20/month starts to sound reeal worth it.