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Mailgun (YC W11) Raises $1.1 Million For Its "Twilio For Email"
- smokeyj 15y agoAn encrypted mailbox service would be nice, considering our privacy is pimped out by the big guys.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- handrake 15y agoI can see that on the top of their list already. Somebody has to fix this problem with less-complicated solution than PGP.
- jodrellblank 15y agoSomebody has: http://www.watchguard.com/products/xcs-overview.asp http://www.watchguard.com/products/xcs-overview.asp Not seen one myself yet, but $Boss who went to infosec came back impressed and is trying to arrange some for testing.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoI'm working on it. :) We hope to have a private alpha start the end of next month.
- X-Istence 15y agoI am definitely interested in this, do you have any website up yet? Any possible way to get onto that private alpha? ;-)
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoWebsite is http://ClickLock.com/ http://ClickLock.com/. We've pivoted slightly, so some of the details are out of date, but there is a sign-up form at http://clicklock.com/install/ http://clicklock.com/install/ for people wanting an early look. I'm working through the pivot tech changes, then will update the web site at that point.
- cagenut 15y agohosted/saas james? http://wiki.apache.org/james/ http://wiki.apache.org/james/
- old-gregg 15y agoFar more complicated than that. You won't scale james to millions+ of mailboxes as we're planning to :)
- cagenut 15y agoCool, best of luck. I've used two competitors services and spent far too many days pulling my hair out over unexplained slowdowns and api errors. It would be extra cool if you guys did an architecture blog post.
- maneesh1 15y agoCongrats guys. I beleive this is going to be huge, especially for enterprises.
- rishi 15y ago"Let your users leave comments, answer simple questions, upload data as attachments and interact with each other using their email clients." Q: So a customer can reply back to one of your emails and it turns into a comment? thanks
- old-gregg 15y agoWith a little bit of coding on your part - yes.
- X-Istence 15y agoOff topic: Is your username a reference to BBC Three's Old Gregg "episode"? I sure hope so. =)
- matthew-wegner 15y agoI'm curious about this. I found the tagging functionality for outbound mail. If I tag an outbound message, and someone replies to it, can I easily read back the tag from the reply message? Put another way--I want to send an outbound email in relation to a specific thread/ID, and if someone replies I want to associate their reply with that ID. What's the best way to do this with your system?
- old-gregg 15y ago
- mp3jeep01 15y agoFor a over a month now we've been using the service, and it's been smooth sailing without a hitch - really impressed and interested to see what these guys do next
- staunch 15y agoTwilio is awesome because setting up Asterisk and acquiring phone numbers is a big pain in the butt and requires knowledge most web developers don't have. Sending email isn't hard. Amazon SES solved that. Receiving email is just slightly more work, but still well within the comfort zone of most developers: $ cat /etc/aliases comment_reply: "|/path/to/email_handler"
- paul 15y agoSending and receiving email is easy, unless you want it to work reliably, do intelligent processing, etc.
- staunch 15y agoSES is extremely easy, and I seriously doubt any claims that they're more reliable/faster than what Amazon is offering. What kind of intelligent processing are they offering? In the use case of turning a reply into a comment the hard work is not receiving and parsing the email, it's authenticating the user/adding the comment to the database. I'm a potential customer who just doesn't see the value proposition. I'm sure they can build a business as a Sendgrid competitor, but I don't see anything as disruptive as Twilio here.
- old-gregg 15y agoStaunch: there will always be guys who want to do everything themselves. But we're selling to folks who have other things to worry about. Risking to re-type our own front-page, I'll go ahead and give you some tips for how Mailgun can be useful: Once a message is sent, what happens to it? We give you searchable SMTP logs: see if some crazy admin guy in Canada misconfigured greylisting (because he likes to do everything himself :) and your customer's mail is sitting in a repeat-later loop for 5 days. Once a message is received, are you sure you'll figure out the encoding of it? Or what happens if your process/machine is down when the message arrives? What if it's spam? And why not record computer-to-person email conversations you're software is doing in a real POP3/IMAP mailbox? No coding required. On intelligent processing: we transcode all your traffic to UTF-8 and figure out what parts of the message is quoted - so you won't have to. It's not easy, ever wondered why some folks resort to "reply above this line"? Also, if there's no plain text part, we'll generate it from HTML. More is coming. Mailgun is not an email sending service. We're a full-featured programmable ESP, it's up to developers what they want to use our email servers for. The creative ones keep amazing us every day! :)
- lacker 15y agoI met the Mailgun guys and they seemed really sharp so it's good to see them getting money. I wish this had been around a year ago - there are so many odd corner cases to managing a transactional email system, it's a pain to deal with. Companies like Sendgrid are only handling one small part of the problem. Good luck and congrats on the funding!
- simonw 15y agoWe've been using Mailgun for all of our email on http://lanyrd.com/ http://lanyrd.com/ - sending messages via their REST API (and using them to receive bounces and email unsubscribe requests). It was easy to integrate and we haven't had any deliverability problems - they gave us plenty of great advice about that. I've spent a bunch of time talking to them about email, and they really know their stuff.
- muitocomplicado 15y agoYour recommendation in a previous blog post made me sign up for their service and I have been a happy customer for a few months.
- rw 15y ago(I worked with Ev for a year, before he did YC.) The whole Mailgun operation is top notch. If you want to do cool things with email, definitely check out MG.
- jsdalton 15y agoWould somebody care to sell me on why this is superior to SendGrid or Amazon Simple Email Service? (Or perhaps what use cases it better serves.)
- ryanb 15y agoAs far as I know, most e-mail products focus only on sending e-mails and not receiving them. Mailgun works both ways.
- hajrice 15y agoSendgrid accepts incoming emails: http://nanceskitchen.com/2010/02/21/accept-incoming-emails-into-a-heroku-app-using-sendgrid/ http://nanceskitchen.com/2010/02/21/accept-incoming-emails-i...
- Johngibb 15y agoMy interpretation is that this provides a mailbox API, to provision and maintain mailboxes on THEIR servers. Doesn't sendgrid just perform a restful post when an email is received rather than store it and all? Almost akin to pop vs imap.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- old-gregg 15y agoActually we do "everything email": Detailed searchable mail logs: we actually tell you what happens to every single one of your messages - nobody else is that brave! Incoming email push - and our parsing/cleanup of incoming traffic is pretty impressive - if it's time to self-promote, it's now. And our incoming email handling if flexible: we do routing/forwarding, similar to Rails/Django routes. Storing/hosting your email traffic and giving POP3/IMAP access to it - nothing stops you from giving each user of your app their own email address. Some customers do that very, very creatively. Piping it through some battle-tested Mixpanel-powered analytics doesn't hurt too: some companies charge an arm and a leg just for that one feature. Mailgun is not about merely pushing mail, we're more of an "sexy programmable ESP" :) We're just a bunch of oddballs who thought that running an ESP business would be fun!
- justinksd 15y agoWe use and love Postmarkapp (http://www.postmarkapp.com http://www.postmarkapp.com). They have an awesome interface, and SMTP relaying is reliable, and nice reports. MailGun seems to go further than Postmarkapp though, in that they doing inbound automatons.
- alexknowshtml 15y agoHey Justin, thanks for the love. We've been battle-testing our inbound processing before releasing it to the wild. If you'd like to take it for a spin, drop me an email - alex@wildbit.com - and we can get you set up in the private beta. You can be sure that it'll be just as reliable and easy to use (and easy to look at) as the rest of the Postmark you're used to :)
- taphangum 15y agoWow, this will save me hours in development time. Guess procrastinating on HN is useful after all ;). Great service guys, congrats!
- seanp2k 15y agolol....because E-Mail pipes are e-mail processing is "hard". I don't see a real need for this. Twilio is useful because interfacing phones is hard. E-Mail is just plain-text and is pretty simple to parse server-side.
- rumpelstiltskin 15y agoTo the ppl at Mailgun following this thread: I want to see you guys succeed. Please spend a portion of your funding on getting a better website design. The content of the site was enough to get me to sign up, but you'd be surprised just how much the look and feel of a site matter to some customers.
- old-gregg 15y agoWill do! Do you mind if I contact you in private regarding specific design issues you'd want to point out? My email is in my profile. Thanks.
- rumpelstiltskin 15y agoSorry for the late reply. I'm not a designer myself, just know when a final design is bad or good. You don't need something flashy. Something Neat, simple and attractive that gets the USP across will do. Check out the sites of some of your YC classmates, like Indinero for example.
- muitocomplicado 15y agoVery good suggestion and it's really needed. Since the service is mostly focused on developers we can "forgive" a not so polished interface, but the overall look and feel could use some improvement.
- mtw 15y agowhy mailgun.net? you're losing people who are typing mailgun.com
- elb0w 15y agoThis is literally the greatest service I have come across. Honestly, it was like a godsend, all day I was studying on all these little details required to having a solid, protected, non-blacklisted, works on ec2, stable, spam-free, e-mail server. After hours of configuring postfix and looking at files I never wanted to even know about I took a break on HN. Then I saw Mailgun, boom.. problem solved. (With more bells and whistles then I even imagined) I've now saved part of my life thanks to this product. Even chatted with one of their dev's who is extremely helpful. This is the kind of company I would want to invest in.
- elb0w 15y agoHonestly just to add, I like this product so much that i've considered porting their helper libs to every language they don't already cover.
- kyenneti 15y agoCongratulations on the funding. Feedback - Logo is not click able on the documentation page. Can I use your service to send emails on behalf of my clients. We have an bulk email campaigns app, that our clients use to send their mail. I am looking for a SMTP service where we can send email on their behalf.
- jessedhillon 15y agoCan anyone comment how this compares to context.io? (which also appeared on HN) http://context.io http://context.io It seems to me that the analogy "Twilio for email" works better when applied to context.io, which aims to give a uniform API to all mailbox operations.
- mtw 15y agocontext.io turns mailboxes into databases you can tap into. They are especially good with attachments. is there an API call to send or receive email with context.io? I am not sure. from what I get, mailgun makes it easy to send/receive emails, so that email is a completely integrated feature of your web app, meaning users won't even have to check their email, the experience is all within the app. You can also do it the other way around with mailgun, which is interacting with the user in his email client, so he doesn't have to go in the app.
- sjsjsj 15y agoHey guys, it's Sarah-Jane, Community Manager at Context.IO. Yup, you got it. We don't host dedicated mailboxes that your application can receive and send emails from, but since we make the contents of any IMAP account available to your app, whatever is received in that account is like your app receiving it. For the sending part, we're leaving that to Mailgun and other services that focus on this.
- mtw 15y agohey Sarah-Jane, the reply above was from me heri from @mtw
- kljensen 15y agoKiller service, but two things jump out. 1) Need dkim signing by own domain and 2) envelope sender should match from address. These don't matter if you're sending to consumer domains (gmail, yahoo), but, as I've learned, they do matter for corporate environments, which are fragmented and antiqued.
- brianbreslin 15y agook why does everything these days have to be described as "Twilio for XYZ" No disrespect to twilio, I think they've done a great job, but they aren't huge yet. They also weren't the first infrastructure PaaS to hit the market.