5 ms·

What's the advantage here over SendGrid? SendGrid has an unlimited free tier of 100 emails per day, and for $15/mo you can send up to 40k emails/mo. Postmark d

What's the advantage here over SendGrid? SendGrid has an unlimited free tier of 100 emails per day, and for $15/mo you can send up to 40k emails/mo. Postmark does have a lower $10/mo starting price for 10k emails per month. But the next jump is $50/mo for 50k emails. I'm currently working on a project and intended to use SendGrid, so I'm wondering if there's any benefits of Postmark.

aledalgrande 5y ago
I opened an account with Sendgrid for a new project the other week. Account got banned right away, didn't even log in one time and they said to contact support to get it unblocked. Only issue is to contact support you have to be logged in and their alternative form also wants you to log in. Sendgrid is not friendly.
- prophesi 5y ago
  Cool, a highly unlikely anomaly that can't be proven.
- maxk42 5y ago
  Are you using linux, by chance? Recently I've noticed Amazon, Google, and others reporting my logins from linux as "suspicious activity". I've never logged-in from another OS, so I'm wondering if they're all relying on some third-party service that automatically equates linux with "suspicious".
  - j45 5y ago
    It could be that Linux drive spam bots are using their system.
    - sodality2 5y ago
      Spoofing the user agent is probably the first thing these spam bots would do.
  - aledalgrande 5y ago
    I am on Mac OS on a residential IP ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    Yet Amazon, Google, and others all use, produce and offer Linux themselves. How can logging into a server running Linux from a desktop/laptop/handheld computer running Linux be "suspicious" activity. Is Android not Linux.
nyolfen 5y ago
i use sendgrid for a small project because it's free and has template support, but the site is unbelievably unresponsive. it takes 30+ seconds for anything to load. we have a paid account at work and it's exactly the same, so it's not my connection or the free tier. my assumption is that twilio has left it on autopilot.
unclebucknasty 5y ago
Recently opened a SendGrid account on their $14.95 tier for a new project and found the shared IP blocked by MS domains (outlook.com, live.com, hotmail.com). MS servers confirmed the reason in the SMTP negotiaton as owed to the IP/provider. We reported it to SendGrid and their only option was to upgrade to their $89.95 plan to get a dedicated IP. That plan comes with 100K monthly sends and we are nowhere near that. So, the choice was to have a significant portion of important transactional emails, like registration, not go through or overpay for a plan that is wildly overmatched for us. Email is hard, but this borders on unethical. Customers pay for and integrate a service that simply doesn't work as advertised. They make no offer to mitigate (e.g. change to a new shared IP). It's just "oh yeah, if you want the service to actually work reliably, you need to pay us 6X more".
- rsoto 5y ago
  Same story here, but being a Sendgrid customer for 6+ years, suddenly the shared IP is blocked as well. After opening a lot of support tickets and getting no response, I had to nag someone here in HN who mentioned working for Sendgrid, he escalated but the response was the same: pay a lot more to get what you used to have. Migrated to Postmark right away and we've been a happy customer for 2+ years now.
  - muppetman 5y ago
    Off topic: What does "he scaled" mean in this context?
    - unclebucknasty 5y ago
      I'd guess "escalated", meaning engaged someone higher up in the company with more authority.
  - unclebucknasty 5y ago
    Yeah, I'd used SendGrid's higher tier on other projects for years, as the send volume justified it. So, generally had the dedicated IP address. They need to do a better job of managing their shared IP pool. As it is, they are offering paid plans that are unsuitable for many common use cases. Really, unless you have control of all possible receiving domains (e.g you're using it for an internal app), you're rolling the dice. Else, at a minimum, they should disclose deliverability metrics on their various plans so customers can make informed choices. As it is, their marketing is deliberately misleading. Thanks for the feedback on Postmark. I'll have another look at them. EDIT: Just glanced at Postmark and they're already looking much stronger than SendGrid, and with much better pricing. The "deliverability without a dedicated IP" language seems to be directly aimed at providers like SendGrid. Are they able to live up to that promise? Also like their policy around content retention. Will be exploring switching costs.
hericium 5y ago
> What's the advantage here over SendGrid? I am not familiar with products mentioned above but SendGrid is often discussed as a source of spoofed messages. They allow sending as 3rd party domains, or at least allowed it until recently. I suspect that this may be affecting their deliverability.
jjeaff 5y ago
To me, there is one big difference with postmark. Their focus is on transactional emails. Not marketing emails. I believe they have a separate service now for marketing emails, but the big reason I chose them is that they are very focused on keeping their IP addresses clean. One way they do this is by only allowing users of their service to send transactional emails like invoices, password resets, or thing that have been specifically requested by users. I assume they keep all that on IP addresses reserved only for that. Most people won't mark a password reset email as spam. But they will frequently mark recurring marketing emails as such. I use Postmark for everything that is very important that it gets through. I actually use mailgun for mass emails, marketing, announcements, etc.
theptip 5y ago
Postmark has way better visibility into what is being sent. You get per-email history/status, so you can easily tell if something is queued or bouncing. Trying to debug errors on Sendgrid is less fun. On the other hand, postmark is a bit more flaky - I track delivery RTT and had had a few cases in my first year with them where Postmark had > 30m delays (and no outage reported). Sendgrid has always been bombproof on delivery times over many years of usage. I still prefer Postmark on balance.
- pascal07 5y ago
  > On the other hand, postmark is a bit more flaky - I track delivery RTT and had had a few cases in my first year with them where Postmark had > 30m delays Postmark product manager here... I'd love to know more about this. We publish our Time To Inbox on our status page: https://status.postmarkapp.com/ https://status.postmarkapp.com/ The only time emails might sit for longer than a few seconds is if there is some issue with the account (such a accidental spam being sent due to form abuse). If you have specific examples, can you please email support@postmarkapp.com and we'll look into it for you?
petercooper 5y ago
Heavy SG user here and while it's still pretty functional and not problematic enough to move away from, it's not as good as it used to be. Before being acquired, SG's support was fantastic. There are also various oddities that have cropped up, such as how they're currently hitting our webhook endpoint with the same event every 20 seconds for the past 8 days (a similar problem occurred last year too). They also seem to have suffered some dings to their IP reputation in numerous places due to, I assume, this: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/08/sendgrid-under-siege-from-hacked-accounts/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/08/sendgrid-under-siege-fro... .. I continue to encounter numerous systems that flat out refuse any email from any IP I can muster at Sendgrid and we have a bunch on different subnets. So anyone who works at Red Hat, Packt, Akqa, Zendesk, etc.. they're not getting our mail. We use Postmark as a fallback for users when we get the inevitable error messages back, and they have been pretty good, although I find their API a little too slow to move everything over to them and SG has a fantastic "delayed send" feature which is a must for deliverability to iCloud addresses. Pragmatically I prefer Sendgrid, but Postmark is very good and feels somewhat more wholesome to use, particularly if your levels are low. I'd use Postmark for the same reason I'd rather use a local bakery than buy presliced at a supermarket.
- pascal07 5y ago
  > although I find their API a little too slow to move everything over to them Postmark product manager here... I'd love to know more about this. We publish our API response times on our status page (https://status.postmarkapp.com/ https://status.postmarkapp.com/), so this is a surprising comment. Can you email support@postmarkapp.com with your account details and we'll look into this for you?
  - petercooper 5y ago
    To clarify for the benefit of any onlookers, I do not mean to say that Postmark's API is slow absolutely, but that it is slow(er) for how we use an email sending API relative to SG. Our email system is custom and does all of its own merging on a per subscriber basis, so we send a distinct request for every email, so even an otherwise minor difference between a 30ms and 85ms round trip "feels" slow at scale. I believe PM has a "batch" call available, but this requires some extra dev time at our end if it would resolve our issues (and it may!) I will get in touch, though, in case there are ways to help mitigate this problem or if the batch mechanism will solve it all. We have previously encountered similar performance issues with SG from time to time due to DNS sending us to unsuitable endpoints, etc. so it can be a universal problem to some extent based on how we've approached the problem. (Edit: Actually, that status page maybe demonstrates what I'm talking about, since the average API response time shown is 437ms. Even with 5 concurrent threads that would take 2.42 hrs to send 100,000 emails - so I am guessing the batch API is the way to go with PM :-))
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

aledalgrande 5y ago

I opened an account with Sendgrid for a new project the other week. Account got banned right away, didn't even log in one time and they said to contact support to get it unblocked. Only issue is to contact support you have to be logged in and their alternative form also wants you to log in. Sendgrid is not friendly.

prophesi 5y ago
Cool, a highly unlikely anomaly that can't be proven.
maxk42 5y ago
Are you using linux, by chance? Recently I've noticed Amazon, Google, and others reporting my logins from linux as "suspicious activity". I've never logged-in from another OS, so I'm wondering if they're all relying on some third-party service that automatically equates linux with "suspicious".
- j45 5y ago
  It could be that Linux drive spam bots are using their system.
  - sodality2 5y ago
    Spoofing the user agent is probably the first thing these spam bots would do.
- aledalgrande 5y ago
  I am on Mac OS on a residential IP ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  Yet Amazon, Google, and others all use, produce and offer Linux themselves. How can logging into a server running Linux from a desktop/laptop/handheld computer running Linux be "suspicious" activity. Is Android not Linux.

nyolfen 5y ago

i use sendgrid for a small project because it's free and has template support, but the site is unbelievably unresponsive. it takes 30+ seconds for anything to load. we have a paid account at work and it's exactly the same, so it's not my connection or the free tier. my assumption is that twilio has left it on autopilot.

unclebucknasty 5y ago

Recently opened a SendGrid account on their $14.95 tier for a new project and found the shared IP blocked by MS domains (outlook.com, live.com, hotmail.com). MS servers confirmed the reason in the SMTP negotiaton as owed to the IP/provider. We reported it to SendGrid and their only option was to upgrade to their $89.95 plan to get a dedicated IP. That plan comes with 100K monthly sends and we are nowhere near that. So, the choice was to have a significant portion of important transactional emails, like registration, not go through or overpay for a plan that is wildly overmatched for us. Email is hard, but this borders on unethical. Customers pay for and integrate a service that simply doesn't work as advertised. They make no offer to mitigate (e.g. change to a new shared IP). It's just "oh yeah, if you want the service to actually work reliably, you need to pay us 6X more".

rsoto 5y ago
Same story here, but being a Sendgrid customer for 6+ years, suddenly the shared IP is blocked as well. After opening a lot of support tickets and getting no response, I had to nag someone here in HN who mentioned working for Sendgrid, he escalated but the response was the same: pay a lot more to get what you used to have. Migrated to Postmark right away and we've been a happy customer for 2+ years now.
- muppetman 5y ago
  Off topic: What does "he scaled" mean in this context?
  - unclebucknasty 5y ago
    I'd guess "escalated", meaning engaged someone higher up in the company with more authority.
- unclebucknasty 5y ago
  Yeah, I'd used SendGrid's higher tier on other projects for years, as the send volume justified it. So, generally had the dedicated IP address. They need to do a better job of managing their shared IP pool. As it is, they are offering paid plans that are unsuitable for many common use cases. Really, unless you have control of all possible receiving domains (e.g you're using it for an internal app), you're rolling the dice. Else, at a minimum, they should disclose deliverability metrics on their various plans so customers can make informed choices. As it is, their marketing is deliberately misleading. Thanks for the feedback on Postmark. I'll have another look at them. EDIT: Just glanced at Postmark and they're already looking much stronger than SendGrid, and with much better pricing. The "deliverability without a dedicated IP" language seems to be directly aimed at providers like SendGrid. Are they able to live up to that promise? Also like their policy around content retention. Will be exploring switching costs.

hericium 5y ago

> What's the advantage here over SendGrid? I am not familiar with products mentioned above but SendGrid is often discussed as a source of spoofed messages. They allow sending as 3rd party domains, or at least allowed it until recently. I suspect that this may be affecting their deliverability.

jjeaff 5y ago

To me, there is one big difference with postmark. Their focus is on transactional emails. Not marketing emails. I believe they have a separate service now for marketing emails, but the big reason I chose them is that they are very focused on keeping their IP addresses clean. One way they do this is by only allowing users of their service to send transactional emails like invoices, password resets, or thing that have been specifically requested by users. I assume they keep all that on IP addresses reserved only for that. Most people won't mark a password reset email as spam. But they will frequently mark recurring marketing emails as such. I use Postmark for everything that is very important that it gets through. I actually use mailgun for mass emails, marketing, announcements, etc.

theptip 5y ago

Postmark has way better visibility into what is being sent. You get per-email history/status, so you can easily tell if something is queued or bouncing. Trying to debug errors on Sendgrid is less fun. On the other hand, postmark is a bit more flaky - I track delivery RTT and had had a few cases in my first year with them where Postmark had > 30m delays (and no outage reported). Sendgrid has always been bombproof on delivery times over many years of usage. I still prefer Postmark on balance.

pascal07 5y ago
> On the other hand, postmark is a bit more flaky - I track delivery RTT and had had a few cases in my first year with them where Postmark had > 30m delays Postmark product manager here... I'd love to know more about this. We publish our Time To Inbox on our status page: https://status.postmarkapp.com/ https://status.postmarkapp.com/ The only time emails might sit for longer than a few seconds is if there is some issue with the account (such a accidental spam being sent due to form abuse). If you have specific examples, can you please email support@postmarkapp.com and we'll look into it for you?

petercooper 5y ago

Heavy SG user here and while it's still pretty functional and not problematic enough to move away from, it's not as good as it used to be. Before being acquired, SG's support was fantastic. There are also various oddities that have cropped up, such as how they're currently hitting our webhook endpoint with the same event every 20 seconds for the past 8 days (a similar problem occurred last year too). They also seem to have suffered some dings to their IP reputation in numerous places due to, I assume, this: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/08/sendgrid-under-siege-from-hacked-accounts/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/08/sendgrid-under-siege-fro... .. I continue to encounter numerous systems that flat out refuse any email from any IP I can muster at Sendgrid and we have a bunch on different subnets. So anyone who works at Red Hat, Packt, Akqa, Zendesk, etc.. they're not getting our mail. We use Postmark as a fallback for users when we get the inevitable error messages back, and they have been pretty good, although I find their API a little too slow to move everything over to them and SG has a fantastic "delayed send" feature which is a must for deliverability to iCloud addresses. Pragmatically I prefer Sendgrid, but Postmark is very good and feels somewhat more wholesome to use, particularly if your levels are low. I'd use Postmark for the same reason I'd rather use a local bakery than buy presliced at a supermarket.

pascal07 5y ago
> although I find their API a little too slow to move everything over to them Postmark product manager here... I'd love to know more about this. We publish our API response times on our status page (https://status.postmarkapp.com/ https://status.postmarkapp.com/), so this is a surprising comment. Can you email support@postmarkapp.com with your account details and we'll look into this for you?
- petercooper 5y ago
  To clarify for the benefit of any onlookers, I do not mean to say that Postmark's API is slow absolutely, but that it is slow(er) for how we use an email sending API relative to SG. Our email system is custom and does all of its own merging on a per subscriber basis, so we send a distinct request for every email, so even an otherwise minor difference between a 30ms and 85ms round trip "feels" slow at scale. I believe PM has a "batch" call available, but this requires some extra dev time at our end if it would resolve our issues (and it may!) I will get in touch, though, in case there are ways to help mitigate this problem or if the batch mechanism will solve it all. We have previously encountered similar performance issues with SG from time to time due to DNS sending us to unsuitable endpoints, etc. so it can be a universal problem to some extent based on how we've approached the problem. (Edit: Actually, that status page maybe demonstrates what I'm talking about, since the average API response time shown is 437ms. Even with 5 concurrent threads that would take 2.42 hrs to send 100,000 emails - so I am guessing the batch API is the way to go with PM :-))

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]