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>* Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email All good recommendations ! I would advise/caution AGAINST SendGrid. They have a quite the terrible reputation and

>* Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email All good recommendations ! I would advise/caution AGAINST SendGrid. They have a quite the terrible reputation and my n=1 experience is that over a weekend they suspended my production account without cause ! 1) I've been sending the EXACT same mails and number (less than 200-300 a month) to the exact same ppl on their free-tier. 2) I asked to upgraded to a PAID account to get better statistics (opens etc) They came back with saying I'm not a good fit for their org and boom disabled my account which is used in production ! Was a fun weekend switching everything over. So they were willing to send my mails for 5 years for free and after I wanted to give them money to KEEP sending the EXACT same mail, they basically said bugger off and my production systems were left without an email service ! EDIT1: After searching SendGrid on HN - seems I"m not the only one ! I can recommend PostMark - Brilliant service.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lordofgibbons 5y ago
Was your service or emails against their terms of use?
- rawoke083600 5y ago
  >Was your service or emails against their terms of use? a) Not as far as we could tell. It's "plain vanilla-transaction-emails" - think "JIRA-Like Tickets notification" but for Restaurant Maintenance ( product page: https://littlebigstats.com https://littlebigstats.com). b) We have send the 'exact' same type of emails (mostly password-resets and maintenance-ticket-notifications) through them for the last 5 years. So if we were somehow against their terms, their process for vetting/detecting is not working at all. Sidenote: Sorry I'm venting now - but was a real crappy weekend ! Trying to switch out your email provider and sign up for a new one. It's not just switching out, it's also about getting verified (100% agree with this step) by the service provider most email service provider can take 24-72 hours(I can understand why). Since it was weekend we actually had to send out a mail to our three biggest customers in Africa (KFC, PizzaHut, JavaHouse) telling them we will be offline for 48 hours :/ Even after BEGGING them to enable our account for another 24 hours while we are being verified by other providers and to get our data off, they outright refused ! We applied to a bunch of email sending services and went with the first one that approved us, which was PostMark and I had a little chat with them via support and signup-process. Was impressed from start to finish by this company and their personal. For reference AWS-SES took a little over 3 days to approve us.
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    Hope you've learned the lesson to have a disaster recovery plan, and a fallback service provider for the critical part of your business.
    - motoxpro 5y ago
      lol
    - rawoke083600 5y ago
      Yup we now have two-of-everything :P
nicoburns 5y ago
+1 for avoiding SendGrid. We haven't had this problem at work. But we have persistently hit a bug where if you send them two API requests at the same time they will return a spurious 403 error for one of them. They seem unwilling to fix it (reports go back years). We currently have a retry with random timeout configured in our system to compensate for it. I've previously had good experiences with SparkPost.
- rawoke083600 5y ago
  Yo ! Ja definitely getting a anti-customer/customer-is-always-wrong vibe !
cultofmetatron 5y ago
After Donglegate, I had already put them on my blacklist. Now I see that my suspicions that it was just the tip of the iceberg came out to be true.
- nomdep 5y ago
  Agreed, they (used to?) hire the most incompetent developer evangelists
- 0des 5y ago
  > “Somebody getting fired is pretty bad,” I said. “I know you didn’t call for him to be fired, but you must have felt pretty bad.” > “Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him, but it only goes so far. If he had Down’s syndrome and he accidently pushed someone off a subway, that would be different… I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes, I did.”
  - cultofmetatron 5y ago
    Thats the kind of lack of self awareness and disregard for other's you'd expect to hear out of a sociopath
AlbinoDrought 5y ago
In my experience, the shared SendGrid IPs have poor sender reputation too. Many bounced transactional emails because of blocklists.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
+1 for No SendGrid. I tried using their free tier just to try them out and immediately none of my emails were delivering to Gmail. Yes, maybe if I decided to go to the paid tier this would resolve, but if the free tier is that bad, I have questions for the company over why even bother offering that tier. (Gmail was actively rejecting the emails due to low sender reputation.) It left a bad taste in my mouth. We now use SparkPost.
stephenhuey 5y ago
If your business is not nefarious spamming and deliverability is important to your use case, then I highly recommend the helpful folks at Postmark over all others. Transactional email delivery can be a minefield not for the faint of heart. Seems easy at first….
- dtech 5y ago
  +1'ing this, it's a narrowly scoped API but it works extremely well.
  - tibanne 5y ago
    Second this. Postmark is amazing.
ab-dm 5y ago
+1 against Sendgrid. They were a pretty good service when we signed up with them ~5 years ago (Paid plan with private IP), but ever since the Twilio acquisition their customer support and technical reliability has gone through the floor. Postmark is a phenomenal service and I'll be using it for every transactional email service I need going forward.
subsection1h 5y ago
I also recommend against SendGrid. The first major issue we had was when emails sent to comcast.net addresses were bouncing. We were told that it was a known issue and that SendGrid was working on it. If SendGrid knew about this issue, why didn't anyone at SendGrid contact us proactively about the situation? We learned about the issue from unsatisfied customers who had not received order confirmations. To make matters worse, we never received a follow-up email informing us that the issue had been resolved. The lack of communication was unacceptable, especially given the man-hours that SendGrid allocates to the dissemination of fluff on Twitter (e.g., "Some sweet demos today from last night's hackathon"). The second major issue was even worse. Our latest invoice failed to be paid automatically for some undisclosed reason, and we didn't receive any notification regarding the issue. Again, we learned about a SendGrid issue from unsatisfied customers. To make matters worse (there's that phrase again), our customer service email address was added to the hard bounce list after our automatic payment failed. So after we manually paid our invoice, we still didn't receive emails sent to our customer service email address from our site's contact form.
lylo 5y ago
I would agree, Postmark is wonderful
KronisLV 5y ago
Genuine question: why not just have your own e-mail server with a bit of automation thrown in, something simple like https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver I can understand something like SendGrid or PostMark for the more complex use cases or larger platforms, but surely for a one man SaaS, the simple self-hosted option wouldn't be out of the question either? Interacting with a mail server shouldn't be too hard either, say, with Python or any other general purpose programming language. Provided, that the IP addresses aren't blacklisted and that a simple VPN is sufficient. Do we live in a world of walled gardens, where the smaller mail servers would just have their mail be discarded, or something?
- withinboredom 5y ago
  When you run your own email server, you run a significant risk of getting to spam folders, especially at the beginning if one of your first customers marks your email as spam. You also have to deal with abuse complaints and discovering where the form is for whichever provider is blocking your email addresses while also dealing with a customer who never got an email from you with their receipt or invoice. It’s a pita. Did it once, never again.
- lytefm 5y ago
  > Do we live in a world of walled gardens, where the smaller mail servers would just have their mail be discarded, or something? Short answer: kinda yes. Longer answer: Especially if you launch something new (new Domain, only a few dozens subscribers/ transactional mails every day), it's difficult to build up enough reputation such that your mails gets into the customer's inbox - or even delivered at all. So even if email is included at your webhoster, you'll want to use a provider with whom you can be sure that your emails make it into the inbox.
mekster 5y ago
SendGrid is such a mess, feeling more after Twillio bought it but maybe it is irrelevant. From their admin site, first time you try to login, it says "Page you're looking for cannot be found" briefly and takes you to the login screen, such a bizarre system and they're not willing to fix. It kind of tells what kind of engineers are working. They only give you 3 days worth of logs for paid customers, until you pay more for extended log option which is laughable and too late when you figure it out as you need older history and it doesn't even show much like subjects, so it's quite useless. If I try to keep reloading the activity page to see if the mail went through several times a minute, the page says I'm accessing the page too many times and throttles with a warning page... Also had weird error saying a receiving end's DNS couldn't be resolved and refused to send to a specific domain which is working perfectly except from SendGrid and the support reply is just so helpless, I gave up on that domain. And it gets worse if you're under trouble as I had an account whose payment couldn't be made in time due to a problem on our side, emails quickly stopped from being relayed and as we pay it in several days, they say the emails can no longer be sent from the spool, which means they all went in limbo with no return email or anything and that was the last of it and we switched to Postmark. Bizarre tech, helpless support and definitely not made for care to the customers.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lordofgibbons 5y ago

Was your service or emails against their terms of use?

rawoke083600 5y ago
>Was your service or emails against their terms of use? a) Not as far as we could tell. It's "plain vanilla-transaction-emails" - think "JIRA-Like Tickets notification" but for Restaurant Maintenance ( product page: https://littlebigstats.com https://littlebigstats.com). b) We have send the 'exact' same type of emails (mostly password-resets and maintenance-ticket-notifications) through them for the last 5 years. So if we were somehow against their terms, their process for vetting/detecting is not working at all. Sidenote: Sorry I'm venting now - but was a real crappy weekend ! Trying to switch out your email provider and sign up for a new one. It's not just switching out, it's also about getting verified (100% agree with this step) by the service provider most email service provider can take 24-72 hours(I can understand why). Since it was weekend we actually had to send out a mail to our three biggest customers in Africa (KFC, PizzaHut, JavaHouse) telling them we will be offline for 48 hours :/ Even after BEGGING them to enable our account for another 24 hours while we are being verified by other providers and to get our data off, they outright refused ! We applied to a bunch of email sending services and went with the first one that approved us, which was PostMark and I had a little chat with them via support and signup-process. Was impressed from start to finish by this company and their personal. For reference AWS-SES took a little over 3 days to approve us.
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  Hope you've learned the lesson to have a disaster recovery plan, and a fallback service provider for the critical part of your business.
  - motoxpro 5y ago
    lol
  - rawoke083600 5y ago
    Yup we now have two-of-everything :P

nicoburns 5y ago

+1 for avoiding SendGrid. We haven't had this problem at work. But we have persistently hit a bug where if you send them two API requests at the same time they will return a spurious 403 error for one of them. They seem unwilling to fix it (reports go back years). We currently have a retry with random timeout configured in our system to compensate for it. I've previously had good experiences with SparkPost.

rawoke083600 5y ago
Yo ! Ja definitely getting a anti-customer/customer-is-always-wrong vibe !

cultofmetatron 5y ago

After Donglegate, I had already put them on my blacklist. Now I see that my suspicions that it was just the tip of the iceberg came out to be true.

nomdep 5y ago
Agreed, they (used to?) hire the most incompetent developer evangelists
0des 5y ago
> “Somebody getting fired is pretty bad,” I said. “I know you didn’t call for him to be fired, but you must have felt pretty bad.” > “Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him, but it only goes so far. If he had Down’s syndrome and he accidently pushed someone off a subway, that would be different… I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes, I did.”
- cultofmetatron 5y ago
  Thats the kind of lack of self awareness and disregard for other's you'd expect to hear out of a sociopath

AlbinoDrought 5y ago

In my experience, the shared SendGrid IPs have poor sender reputation too. Many bounced transactional emails because of blocklists.

gjsman-1000 5y ago

+1 for No SendGrid. I tried using their free tier just to try them out and immediately none of my emails were delivering to Gmail. Yes, maybe if I decided to go to the paid tier this would resolve, but if the free tier is that bad, I have questions for the company over why even bother offering that tier. (Gmail was actively rejecting the emails due to low sender reputation.) It left a bad taste in my mouth. We now use SparkPost.

stephenhuey 5y ago

If your business is not nefarious spamming and deliverability is important to your use case, then I highly recommend the helpful folks at Postmark over all others. Transactional email delivery can be a minefield not for the faint of heart. Seems easy at first….

dtech 5y ago
+1'ing this, it's a narrowly scoped API but it works extremely well.
- tibanne 5y ago
  Second this. Postmark is amazing.

ab-dm 5y ago

+1 against Sendgrid. They were a pretty good service when we signed up with them ~5 years ago (Paid plan with private IP), but ever since the Twilio acquisition their customer support and technical reliability has gone through the floor. Postmark is a phenomenal service and I'll be using it for every transactional email service I need going forward.

subsection1h 5y ago

I also recommend against SendGrid. The first major issue we had was when emails sent to comcast.net addresses were bouncing. We were told that it was a known issue and that SendGrid was working on it. If SendGrid knew about this issue, why didn't anyone at SendGrid contact us proactively about the situation? We learned about the issue from unsatisfied customers who had not received order confirmations. To make matters worse, we never received a follow-up email informing us that the issue had been resolved. The lack of communication was unacceptable, especially given the man-hours that SendGrid allocates to the dissemination of fluff on Twitter (e.g., "Some sweet demos today from last night's hackathon"). The second major issue was even worse. Our latest invoice failed to be paid automatically for some undisclosed reason, and we didn't receive any notification regarding the issue. Again, we learned about a SendGrid issue from unsatisfied customers. To make matters worse (there's that phrase again), our customer service email address was added to the hard bounce list after our automatic payment failed. So after we manually paid our invoice, we still didn't receive emails sent to our customer service email address from our site's contact form.

lylo 5y ago

I would agree, Postmark is wonderful

KronisLV 5y ago

Genuine question: why not just have your own e-mail server with a bit of automation thrown in, something simple like https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver I can understand something like SendGrid or PostMark for the more complex use cases or larger platforms, but surely for a one man SaaS, the simple self-hosted option wouldn't be out of the question either? Interacting with a mail server shouldn't be too hard either, say, with Python or any other general purpose programming language. Provided, that the IP addresses aren't blacklisted and that a simple VPN is sufficient. Do we live in a world of walled gardens, where the smaller mail servers would just have their mail be discarded, or something?

withinboredom 5y ago
When you run your own email server, you run a significant risk of getting to spam folders, especially at the beginning if one of your first customers marks your email as spam. You also have to deal with abuse complaints and discovering where the form is for whichever provider is blocking your email addresses while also dealing with a customer who never got an email from you with their receipt or invoice. It’s a pita. Did it once, never again.
lytefm 5y ago
> Do we live in a world of walled gardens, where the smaller mail servers would just have their mail be discarded, or something? Short answer: kinda yes. Longer answer: Especially if you launch something new (new Domain, only a few dozens subscribers/ transactional mails every day), it's difficult to build up enough reputation such that your mails gets into the customer's inbox - or even delivered at all. So even if email is included at your webhoster, you'll want to use a provider with whom you can be sure that your emails make it into the inbox.

mekster 5y ago

SendGrid is such a mess, feeling more after Twillio bought it but maybe it is irrelevant. From their admin site, first time you try to login, it says "Page you're looking for cannot be found" briefly and takes you to the login screen, such a bizarre system and they're not willing to fix. It kind of tells what kind of engineers are working. They only give you 3 days worth of logs for paid customers, until you pay more for extended log option which is laughable and too late when you figure it out as you need older history and it doesn't even show much like subjects, so it's quite useless. If I try to keep reloading the activity page to see if the mail went through several times a minute, the page says I'm accessing the page too many times and throttles with a warning page... Also had weird error saying a receiving end's DNS couldn't be resolved and refused to send to a specific domain which is working perfectly except from SendGrid and the support reply is just so helpless, I gave up on that domain. And it gets worse if you're under trouble as I had an account whose payment couldn't be made in time due to a problem on our side, emails quickly stopped from being relayed and as we pay it in several days, they say the emails can no longer be sent from the spool, which means they all went in limbo with no return email or anything and that was the last of it and we switched to Postmark. Bizarre tech, helpless support and definitely not made for care to the customers.