6 ms·

Sending and receiving email is easy, unless you want it to work reliably, do intelligent processing, etc.

by paul 15y ago

staunch 15y ago
SES 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 ago
  Staunch: 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! :)
  - staunch 15y ago
    I don't like to do everything myself. I'm actually very inclined to outsource stuff like this. It doesn't sound very interesting for sending email. The receiving part is more interesting. Still, it doesn't seem like it would save me enough time to warrant implementing your API, dealing with yet-another-service, and paying. I don't mean to be too negative. One of my favorite kinds of businesses is taking something every company already does and "productizing" it. Maybe I'll get tired of dealing with it myself and sign up. Either way, good luck!
  - dools 15y ago
    Automatic detection of which bits are quoted sounds good. Having just gone through the process of setting up a VPS to handle sending and receiving email, processing bounces and recording delivery receipts I'd say that, fundamentally, this isn't challenging. Then again I've also setup my own SMPP server for sending SMS and didn't find that particularly difficult either :) Some of the inbound processing features sound pretty good - how about offering them as a paid-per-transaction service? I wouldn't bother outsourcing the sending and receiving per se because it's cheap and easy to do that myself, and I then have control over the up (or down!) time but being able to pass a message through your service and pay, say, $1 per 1000 messages processed with no storage costs would be kinda cool. I'm imagining getting back some kind of structured document (XML and/or JSON) allowing me to see quoted messages, interleaved replies, attachments, encoding blah blah basically all that stuff you're talking about.
    - tworats 15y ago
      Would love to learn more about the SMPP server and your setup, is there a writeup or pointers to more info anywhere?
      - dools 15y ago
        Hey, sorry I just checked this thread. I just use Kannel! You can use Kannel with a GSM modem as a "fake SMSC" or you can get an SMPP connection to one of the many SMS aggregators worldwide that allow it. SMPP is generally faster than HTTP in terms of throughput, but in terms of functionality (for example, setting the sender id) most aggregators have comparable offerings in both SMPP and HTTP APIs. One major difference I've found with SMPP vs. HTTP APIs is on the inbound side of things - ie. receiving messages on a virtual number. Some aggregators I've used don't pass the UDH (user data header) through in inbound requests so you can't stitch long inbound messages together (this is, in my opinion, the driving force behind Twitters much vaunted 140 character limit - if they'd had an SMPP connection with the UDH in-tact they wouldn't have had to restrict posts to "140 characters reserving 20 characters for the username). Even with kannel, though, you still need to stitch long messages together manually. I posted my sample implementation for this in PHP to the Kannel lists a few years back: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.mobile.kannel.user/16642 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.mobile.kannel.user/1664... I've been using the same setup for years with no problems.
- espadagroup 15y ago
  I kind of agree, I've used SES for a side project through Mailchimp's STS api and it is pretty simple and reliable, and quite free at first. Other than some other bells and whistles like handling unsubscribes I'm not sure MailGun is that much more revolutionary. I've heard people say before that to beat Gmail you can't just build an email service 10% better. Gmail works well enough that 10% isn't worth the switching costs. Same goes for this I believe.
- cubes 15y ago
  SES is extremely easy. Unless you actually care about deliverability. Deliverability on the modern internet is hard. SES does not handle this. If Mailgun handles deliverability well, that alone is worth the price. Making it programmable is awesome.
  - staunch 15y ago
    Amazon implements trust-based dynamic throttling and only allows verified email addresses. I don't think anyone else does both. Where's your evidence that anyone has better deliverability than SES?
    - old-gregg 15y ago
      Nobody can claim to sell you "better deliverability". It largely depends on 2 things, they are easy to understand: 1. Infrastructure. A lot goes into this, and you can Google what needs to be done, and do it yourself if you have the time. 2. Content quality. If your recipients keep flagging your mails as spam, nobody will help you - that's your responsibility not to spam people. Myriads email sending services do #1. Mailgun, among many other things, does that too. Plus, we can give you a completely separated, dedicated setup where your reputation won't be affected by other senders (something SES can't promise you). But in the end, you need to send something people want to read. Saying "email company X gives you automatic deliverability" is a bit like saying that "hosting company Y gives you automatic PageRank" :-) Yes, your emails will be 100% solid on protocol/format/rate level and the IP you're sending from is watched, but you'll be taken down if you're spamming. Hope this helps. And if you need assistance regarding deliverability (on your own server, or with Mailgun) - shoot me an email at ev@mailgun.net BTW, this mailbox is hosted by Mailgun itself. see? we're eating our own dogfood here!
    - seanp2k 15y ago
      >"Plus, we can give you a completely separated, dedicated setup where your reputation won't be affected by other senders (something SES can't promise you)." Ahh, so you're using a different IP / subnet for each customer, then? With the internet running out of IPv4 space, I think that companies that do this kind of thing should just have all their addresses revoked. Same goes for "SEO web hosting"

Sending and receiving email is easy, unless you want it to work reliably, do intelligent processing, etc.

by paul 15y ago

Sending and receiving email is easy, unless you want it to work reliably, do intelligent processing, etc.

SES 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 ago
Staunch: 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! :)
- staunch 15y ago
  I don't like to do everything myself. I'm actually very inclined to outsource stuff like this. It doesn't sound very interesting for sending email. The receiving part is more interesting. Still, it doesn't seem like it would save me enough time to warrant implementing your API, dealing with yet-another-service, and paying. I don't mean to be too negative. One of my favorite kinds of businesses is taking something every company already does and "productizing" it. Maybe I'll get tired of dealing with it myself and sign up. Either way, good luck!
- dools 15y ago
  Automatic detection of which bits are quoted sounds good. Having just gone through the process of setting up a VPS to handle sending and receiving email, processing bounces and recording delivery receipts I'd say that, fundamentally, this isn't challenging. Then again I've also setup my own SMPP server for sending SMS and didn't find that particularly difficult either :) Some of the inbound processing features sound pretty good - how about offering them as a paid-per-transaction service? I wouldn't bother outsourcing the sending and receiving per se because it's cheap and easy to do that myself, and I then have control over the up (or down!) time but being able to pass a message through your service and pay, say, $1 per 1000 messages processed with no storage costs would be kinda cool. I'm imagining getting back some kind of structured document (XML and/or JSON) allowing me to see quoted messages, interleaved replies, attachments, encoding blah blah basically all that stuff you're talking about.
  - tworats 15y ago
    Would love to learn more about the SMPP server and your setup, is there a writeup or pointers to more info anywhere?
    - dools 15y ago
      Hey, sorry I just checked this thread. I just use Kannel! You can use Kannel with a GSM modem as a "fake SMSC" or you can get an SMPP connection to one of the many SMS aggregators worldwide that allow it. SMPP is generally faster than HTTP in terms of throughput, but in terms of functionality (for example, setting the sender id) most aggregators have comparable offerings in both SMPP and HTTP APIs. One major difference I've found with SMPP vs. HTTP APIs is on the inbound side of things - ie. receiving messages on a virtual number. Some aggregators I've used don't pass the UDH (user data header) through in inbound requests so you can't stitch long inbound messages together (this is, in my opinion, the driving force behind Twitters much vaunted 140 character limit - if they'd had an SMPP connection with the UDH in-tact they wouldn't have had to restrict posts to "140 characters reserving 20 characters for the username). Even with kannel, though, you still need to stitch long messages together manually. I posted my sample implementation for this in PHP to the Kannel lists a few years back: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.mobile.kannel.user/16642 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.mobile.kannel.user/1664... I've been using the same setup for years with no problems.
espadagroup 15y ago
I kind of agree, I've used SES for a side project through Mailchimp's STS api and it is pretty simple and reliable, and quite free at first. Other than some other bells and whistles like handling unsubscribes I'm not sure MailGun is that much more revolutionary. I've heard people say before that to beat Gmail you can't just build an email service 10% better. Gmail works well enough that 10% isn't worth the switching costs. Same goes for this I believe.
cubes 15y ago
SES is extremely easy. Unless you actually care about deliverability. Deliverability on the modern internet is hard. SES does not handle this. If Mailgun handles deliverability well, that alone is worth the price. Making it programmable is awesome.
- staunch 15y ago
  Amazon implements trust-based dynamic throttling and only allows verified email addresses. I don't think anyone else does both. Where's your evidence that anyone has better deliverability than SES?
  - old-gregg 15y ago
    Nobody can claim to sell you "better deliverability". It largely depends on 2 things, they are easy to understand: 1. Infrastructure. A lot goes into this, and you can Google what needs to be done, and do it yourself if you have the time. 2. Content quality. If your recipients keep flagging your mails as spam, nobody will help you - that's your responsibility not to spam people. Myriads email sending services do #1. Mailgun, among many other things, does that too. Plus, we can give you a completely separated, dedicated setup where your reputation won't be affected by other senders (something SES can't promise you). But in the end, you need to send something people want to read. Saying "email company X gives you automatic deliverability" is a bit like saying that "hosting company Y gives you automatic PageRank" :-) Yes, your emails will be 100% solid on protocol/format/rate level and the IP you're sending from is watched, but you'll be taken down if you're spamming. Hope this helps. And if you need assistance regarding deliverability (on your own server, or with Mailgun) - shoot me an email at ev@mailgun.net BTW, this mailbox is hosted by Mailgun itself. see? we're eating our own dogfood here!
  - seanp2k 15y ago
    >"Plus, we can give you a completely separated, dedicated setup where your reputation won't be affected by other senders (something SES can't promise you)." Ahh, so you're using a different IP / subnet for each customer, then? With the internet running out of IPv4 space, I think that companies that do this kind of thing should just have all their addresses revoked. Same goes for "SEO web hosting"