10 ms·

Discourage use of Mailgun as a mail provider

120 points by jsiepkes 5y ago

ganeshkrishnan 5y ago
I went from mailgun to gsuite. costs went up 3x and almost all of my emails are going to spam folders even when the contact and I have been emailing each other for ages. Would definitely recommend mailgun/sendgrid over gsuite for emails and not entirely agree with this blog post.
- zippergz 5y ago
  What are you talking about? The use cases for Mailgun and gsuite have effectively no overlap.
  - ganeshkrishnan 5y ago
    both send emails and both allow user email creation (with mailgun it was virtual email forwarded to personal email). I had to switch to gsuite because hubspot doenst allow external smtp server to send out emails and we couldnt use mailgun.
    - mikeryan 5y ago
      If you started sending Hubspot marketing or CRM emails directly from Gsuite its going to get marked as Spam, thats the whole point of using a transactional service. I've had multiple clients in the past who have decided to send "Check out my new App!" emails to their entire contact list from Gmail who shortly found out the hard way that it caused all their emails to start being marked as Spam. Don't use Gmail like this.
      - ganeshkrishnan 5y ago
        I only send out limited transactional emails via gmail and thats only because hubspot only supports sending email by connecting gmail. For some absurd reason they dont allow SMTP servers for sending emails. Since hubspot is our CRM I had to start using gsuite. The problem is is that the emails from hubspot land in the inbox. BUT the emails from my outlook that I type it out land in people's spam folder. One reason why I have zero concerns with googles overarching data privacy issue is that I can see how stupid their AI /algorithms are. And with more noise it just gets worse not better.
- niftylettuce 5y ago
  I built https://forwardemail.net https://forwardemail.net as the costs went up and I needed a cheaper alternative for my domains. Any questions feel free to email me, nick@forwardemail.net
  - ganeshkrishnan 5y ago
    I would love to use it. The only challenge for me is that hubspot only sends emails via gmail/gsuite
dioxide 5y ago
If I were mailgun, I'd be okay losing Evan as a customer.
- annoyingnoob 5y ago
  I would try to see this from Evan's perspective. Its easy to find next to useless Sales people, its harder to find a good customer. Evan is a busy guy and said please don't waste my time with a Sales call this is only for your own benefit and then got something else. And I don't want you Sales people poking around in my SaaS setup or in my data.
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    > Evan is a busy guy and said please don't waste my time Busy people don't spend hours starting internet fights. They delete spam and move on with their day.
    - annoyingnoob 5y ago
      They do for vendors that draw their ire, maybe not for your average sales email.
- boomer918 5y ago
  Agreed, this is silly.
- cyral 5y ago
  In the comments he posts another interaction with a sales-person. Read his second reply... I'd be happy losing him too. (As a business owner I understand how we get spam like this all the time, and I almost always ignore it if it is clearly not targeted. If someone goes out of their way to list some real reasons why they like my company though, I would try to be a little nicer)
hash872 5y ago
Evan, your response was needlessly rude, and if I were Mailgun I'd let you go as a customer. The idea that you'd drop a company over this is overly dramatic. I would encourage you to be nicer to relatively low-level employees, and Joe did seem reasonably knowledgeable about Mailgun's processes
- gizmo 5y ago
  You don’t fire a customer for being testy. It’s way disproportionate and if customers are unhappy you want to know this. Rude feedback is still feedback, and most businesses struggle to get honest feedback because most people are just way too nice
  - hash872 5y ago
    I run a business and I absolutely would fire a customer for being needlessly rude to an employee. If they're angry at the employee they can direct their 'feedback' to me. But yeah this 'the customer is always right' chunk of American culture needs to die- abusing employees is not 'feedback', nor is it acceptable
    - literallyWTF 5y ago
      Gotta love this entitled attitude of “I can be a dick because I’m paying you!! What do you mean you’re refusing service!!! I’m a customer!!!”
      - datavirtue 5y ago
        Sacred Customer Syndrom
    - gizmo 5y ago
      I also run a business. I’m a customer of Mailgun as well. As a business it’s not hard to enforce boundaries without going for the nuclear option. Everybody has bad days sometimes, and just as we want customers to be understanding when we have downtime we can be understanding when customers are irate. In my experience customers get rude when they are already unhappy and have been for a while. In the case of Mailgun their service is very mediocre (unreliable api, slow, etc) and I don’t think they care. Does this justify rudeness towards support staff? No, but people tend to be much nicer when they’re generally happy with the service they get for their money.
hunterb123 5y ago
I discourage using them because they never seem to be able to deliver to hotmail addresses.
xeromal 5y ago
Ugh, that salesman is a sleeze. lol
- biggestdummy 5y ago
  With the caveat that I know nothing about mailgun, so may have misunderstood parts of the conversation, it sounds, to me, like the salesman did a few very helpful things... 1. Pointed out that the user had been spending money on a service which was not actually being provided. Presumably, mailgun would correct this error. 2. Exposed that the "mail success rate" which the user was seeing might not be the full story. 3. Showed the user that he was paying for suppressed emails, so could (presumably) save some coin by cleaning up his list. (Note that the cost of cleaning might be higher than the extra payments, but good to know that there's a cost to suppressed emails so that the user can make a judgement.) This rep was honest ("it was a template"), gave a specific agenda when asked, and gave useful information. Complaining that your rep has access to your data when that's his entire job is ridiculous. Data security best practices are that data should be provided on a "need to know" basis. In order to provide the above 3 values, the rep needs access to that data.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    The other possibility, which would explain the different delivery numbers and different understanding of the dedicated IP status, is that the sales rep was confused, screwed up, and was looking at some other customer's data while thinking it was Phabricator's.
tebbers 5y ago
Sorry to say but Evan does not come across as particularly pleasant or likeable to anyone he corresponds with. Common courtesy would go a long way.
- jrockway 5y ago
  I think that it sounds harsh to say "I don't take meetings with no agenda", but is the right thing to do. Everyone wants your time, and it's the most valuable resource you possess, so being protective makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't reply to someone's email and accuse them of "low-effort sales" or whatever. I'd just say "thanks, not interested" and then be internally mad at the low effort. From the other side, I think that sales should be aware that these emails can read like "hey, we're going to shut you off unless you chat with me for 30 minutes" which is annoying. It would be nice to clarify that up front, to avoid the negative emotion associated with that prospect.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > it sounds harsh to say "I don't take meetings with no agenda", but is the right thing to do Evan's is the wrong way to do it. "I am busy–do you have specific recommendations you can share over email" is more concise, polite and to the point. (Ignoring the e-mail, or a simple not interested, are also options.) And if you want to use those words, fine, but leave off the "low effort" insults at the end.
    - hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
      Well, if you read the exchange below, it might not be an insult after all. It definitely was low-effort: he started by saying that he admires Even's work, but then admitted it's just a formula and so on. Really, if the words you use have no meaning, why to use them? He is definitely not the worst of all salesmen I met, but not particularly bright, and the effort he put into the initial email wasn't really above average.
    - kelnos 5y ago
      I think it is useful, though, to teach people that it's disrespectful to send vague meeting requests without an agenda. Using your "I am busy -- do you have specific recommendations..." response obscures the real objection. Certainly I think there's a better way of saying it than OP did, though: perhaps, "before we schedule anything, can you propose an agenda so we can both be sure a meeting is the best use of our time?" or something like that.
dewey 5y ago
I was expecting something worse. Could the sales outreach be done better? Sure, but I've seen a lot worse and I feel like the initial email setting the tone with "This request is so vague and nonspecific..." was already more passive aggressive than it has to be and set the tone for the rest of the thread.
- yuubi 5y ago
  Interesting that you don't see the low-effort sales template message as the initial message that set the tone, but the reply to it.
  - dewey 5y ago
    Sales people, just like recruiters have a job to do. I just recognise there's another person on the other end doing their job, so there's ways to tell them in a friendly way that you are not interested without being overly rude or smug about it.
    - corpdronejuly 5y ago
      Then they can do their job with professionalism and courtesy for those they contact.
napsterbr 5y ago
I thought Evan had stopped working on Phab. Does anyone know Phabricator's status? Is it still under active development?
- JamesCoyne 5y ago
  This work is "Bonus Content" https://secure.phabricator.com/w/changelog/ https://secure.phabricator.com/w/changelog/
  - napsterbr 5y ago
    Thanks! It was quite sad to read the announcement that development had stopped. Phabricator provided me with one of the best development experiences I've ever had. I guess Github + Gitlab won, and it became insanely difficult for the smaller players to make a dent. I'm keeping an eye on SourceHut, though.
mikeryan 5y ago
I kind of dislike everyone in the email exchange.
imwillofficial 5y ago
I came in against mailgun, and came out astonished at how poor Evan’s behavior was. I’ll never touch any project he is involved with.
bjt2n3904 5y ago
Interesting read. While the general consensus on the comments here so far are "why be so rude" -- I don't think this was rude at all. I'd be similarly upset if I was treated this way by someone from marketing. Edit: From a second read, I really don't see any of this as rude. You know how it's poor etiquette to start a chat message with "Hey, do you have a moment?", And it's much better to just write the question and wait for a response? This is the email equivalent. "Request too vague, I don't want to meet. Please specify further, unless this is a sales pitch, in which case, preemptively not interested." It's not passive aggressive, it's just business. If I had received, "You're right, this is a low effort sales pitch, and it works", I don't think I'd bother replying. That is an extremely passive aggressive response.
- jacobr1 5y ago
  > You know how it's poor etiquette to start a chat message with "Hey, do you have a moment?" I think this is the difference. For plenty of people, this is a NOT a widely held norm. It really IS ok to just start a chat or email with a "Hey, do you have a moment?" That doesn't mean it should be ok. We probably all would be better off providing more context for more effective communication. But standards here seem to vary widely.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
kelnos 5y ago
The only thing questionable I see here is that random sales employees seem to have access to customer information. It's not clear to me that the information they have access to is actually all that sensitive, though. Delivery rates and whether or not they've purchased a dedicated IP address? Eh, not sure that's a big deal. Of course, we have no idea what other customer information this sales guy might have access to. And it's concerning that the information he had access to was incorrect, or he was somehow very badly misinterpreting it. Or, worse, he was confused and actually looking at another customer's dashboard, which, if true, would be pretty concerning. These things are perhaps worrisome, but it's not clear what was actually going on here. I agree that the sales guy was more pushy than he should have been, seems like he was poorly-trained and not good at his job, and I too hate vague requests for agenda-less meetings, but this whole thing seems like an overreaction.
- closewith 5y ago
  I don't think I'd be happy if sales people had access to the recipient domains of my outbound emails, which seems to be suggested?
  - jasonlotito 5y ago
    Except in this case, Mailgun is supposed to have access to this information. This is what they are used for. This sort of email from Mailgun is one of the reason you use them as a service. This comment[1] explains more, but the tl;dr is that the issues the person was emailing about are things they should be emailing about. It's actually more concerning that Evan doesn't understand what he's paying for. If he was really concerned about customer data, none of this would be a surprise. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29544319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29544319
    - closewith 5y ago
      I read that comment and am very aware that an ESP has access to all the information you give them. It comes down to internal controls. If the email in the OP is actually an approach from a compliance or customer management department, it's a clumsy attempt. To me, it reads as a sales pitch. If so, my opinion remains unchanged - I don't think I'd be happy if sales people had access to the recipient domains of my outbound emails. Edit: Re-reading the post, the Mailgun employee says in their reply: > First, you're right, it is a low effort sales template. It does work. That really does suggest that this was an attempt at an upsell from a sales person.
stavros 5y ago
Everyone here is talking about Evan's response, so I may be misunderstanding something, but... If I'm billed for a dedicated email for years and it hasn't been provisioned for me, isn't that a major problem with the service?
- davidcuddeback 5y ago
  > If I'm billed for a dedicated email for years and it hasn't been provisioned for me, isn't that a major problem with the service? If that's true, yes. But it sounds plausible that the salesman was in error (also a problem, but less severe IMO): > (Mail headers show the dedicated IP is functioning correctly, see "headers.png", where the outbound route matches the dedicated IP in the web interface.)
  - stavros 5y ago
    Ah, I missed that, thanks.
me_me_mu_mu 5y ago
I agree with the sentiment, though not the execution. Time is certainly the most valuable asset, and if someone is wasting my time/energy then I just ignore them. If I see an email that's coming from a random sales-related channel and not from my support rep, I'm ignoring it. If I'm using a service incorrectly, and the email is vague and gives the same vibe when someone asks "Can I ask you a question?" on slack and waits for a response, then I'm not going to bother replying. Waste your time, but don't expect the same from me.
mparnisari 5y ago
> This request is so vague and nonspecific ("Let's take a look"?) that it feels kind of like a low-effort template sales email. If it is, and your primary goal in sending me this email is to get me to purchase more Mailgun services, please do not send me any more emails like this. This entire sentence was unnecessary.. > Mailgun's hiring or training process for sales employees doesn't seem to be very good: Joe didn't seem to understand the Mailgun system. Beyond not needing it, I also don't think it is acceptable for staff who can not consistently demonstrate a high level of competence to have access to customer data. He blames the training AND the hiring, lol
literallyWTF 5y ago
Lol why does this guy complaining of a salesperson emailing them end up on top page of HN? Like honestly, who the duck cares?
jonathonf 5y ago
I'm surprised by the other comments here that I'm in the minority thinking that the sales approach was pretty terrible. You're trying to sell something you don't understand to a company you don't understand. Why? If you actually want to "help" a company (by selling them your product... not really sure how that's "helping", but...) then at least do some research into the company and provide something that looks useful rather than some crappy "Hi, I like you, let's chat!" In this specific case, someone somewhere is lying about services being provided. If that's sales then that's not great. If that's accounts/billing then that's probably worse. In any case it's a pretty terrible look for the company concerned, and understandably results in an erosion of trust.
- boc 5y ago
  Counterpoint is that Mailgun likely had flagged the account (80% deliverability is bad) and wanted to open a line of communication without coming across as hostile. It wasn't a sales opportunity, it was a "you need to improve" email wrapped in a friendly opening. Evan then replied taking a hostile footing, which resulted in the sale rep backing up his opening with a list of agenda items (list cleaning, dedicated IP address, etc). At this point it became a purely defensive line-by-line encounter because egos got involved once the Mailgun rep listed the real reasons he was writing. IMO this is a massive overreaction and not a good look for the blog author.
  - davidcuddeback 5y ago
    > It wasn't a sales opportunity Yes, it was. In the salesman's own words: "First, you're right, it is a low effort sales template. It does work." > not a good look for the blog author The OP isn't a blog. It's a task that Evan filed for himself to migrate away from Mailgun.
  - jonathonf 5y ago
    Was it 80%* or 96%? Was Phacility paying for a dedicated IP or not? If someone from a company is lying to you then is this really an overreaction? (*Was 80% cherry-picked from a particular domain and so used in a purposefully misleading way? Should a sales rep have access to that sort of data anyway?)
cpressland 5y ago
Well, we use Mailgun at work and it’s pretty great. I’ve only ever had one issue with it and it and their support was outstanding. As somebody who used to work in enterprise support, I don’t see them as having done anything wrong here. It’s just somebody reaching out to do their job.
jqcoffey 5y ago
From the comments it seems like there's a bit of an information gap in terms of how email service providers (ESPs) like Mailgun operate, what data they must have routine access to, and how the space evolved to make money (this last part of my info is dated as I left the space about a decade ago). First, ESPs send email on a client's behalf. One of the primary benefits of using an ESP is co-opting their email reputation and their contacts with real time blacklist (RBL) operators, postmaster organizations at major email providers and third party email reputation groups. A good reputation keeps a sender's email out of the junk folder (or worse refused/dropped on the floor) and is really all most folks care about (especially at an API driven company like Mailgun). In order to do all of the above, an ESP needs access to the details of the email that's being sent, including recipient email addresses and the contents of the message being sent. This is because both of those things can potentially be dangerous and the ESP is the ultimate responsible party in the eyes of the receiving email provider (i.e. Google holds Mailgun as the responsible party for what Phabricator sends). Now, as to this sales call, sometime ago (circa ~2004 I guess) it became apparent that ESPs could work with their problematic clients to improve their sending habits, thereby improving their reputation and collect more money from the client in the process (via either direct consulting fees or increased sending volume). This kind of win-win made a lot of sense, but as the price-per-email sent was dropping ESPs were looking for ways to reliably generate more revenue and, well, "deliverability consulting" became a thing. My guess is that this is what this email exchange was about, and like any consulting effort, it's only as good as the last interaction and here I agree with Evan that "Joe" fumbled the ball fairly badly. Personally, I would have just reached out to Mailgun support and asked what's up with the incorrect billing and Joe's problematic responses, but that doesn't appear to have been Evan's first choice. Source for the industry insider info is that I used to run the technical side of a small ESP from about 2003 to 2009, was an active participant in MAAWG and generally had to work with my peers across orgs to navigate deliverability problems regularly.
nathias 5y ago
what is the male equivalent of Karen?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- literallyWTF 5y ago
  A decent chunk of HN commentators?
  - dang 5y ago
    "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 5y ago
  Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? It's not what this site is for, we ban accounts that do it repeatedly, and I just had to ask you about this elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29539111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29539111). Moreover, we've had to ask you about it repeatedly in the past before this. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
JustARandomGuy 5y ago
> Despite the incident in 2018, Mailgun appears to be giving an excessive level of access to customer data to employees who do not need it in 2020: Joe had access to specific customer domain information, and didn't hesitate to use it purely to try to sell me something. From this, I infer that it is likely routine that sales staff examine customer data without any kind of control or approval. I don't think this is acceptable. Same thing happened with me on GoDaddy. I used GoDaddy's domain purchase system to negotiate and buy a domain, and transferred it to Cloudflare. A few years later, a GoDaddy buyer contacted me about buying the domain. The only way they could have gotten my email is to trawl through their past purchase records since the domain wasn't using any GoDaddy systems (DNS, email, etc) after it was transferred out. I sent a very unhappy email back to them and I've been transferring my domains out to other registrars. I no longer recommend GoDaddy.
- jiveturkey 5y ago
  Of course GoDaddy is scummy, but this is not the only way your information could have been obtained. During the transfer out period, you must provide unmasked contact info. There are services that crawl this info and provide a full historical ownership history. So if your information was ever available in whois, including during the short transfer window, it has been crawled. That said GoDaddy has never been a good registrar anyway. I'm just going by what you are saying: that not using GoDaddy email means they couldn't have contacted you. Not using GoDaddy email service is irrelevant and your mention of it at all implies you aren't aware of how your information can get out. It's certainly possible to prevent it but you're not giving the vibe that you understand this.
  - JustARandomGuy 5y ago
    Perhaps I should have been more explicit. What I meant is when Godaddy contacted me to purchase my domain name, that domain name was in no way mapped to my account - it was not using any GoDaddy services at all. The only way they could have gotten my personal email address was to (1) get the info from WHOIS which Cloudflare blocks - they have a contact form instead of showing the email address or (2) get my email from the past purchase forms. And in fact they did get my email from the past purchase because I use separate email accounts for my domain registrations and a separate account for domain purchases.
yawnxyz 5y ago
I was kind of expecting the complaint to be about how the API only allows a single API key (which is terrible for multiple projects), and doesn't allow generating multiple API keys w/ multiple types of access (kind of like what Cloudflare's API allows you to do)
- manquer 5y ago
  You can use SMTP [1] if you need something like that . While SMTP technically slower than REST, practically it doesn't matter if your application processes mailjobs in forked background threads or a queue, also most ESPs would rate limit outgoing email after it reaches their system to prevent abuse. the benefit is also no custom code or needing to add their SDK, you can replace the service by simply replacing the credentials, probably without even a code deployment if you store credentials in env. [1] https://help.mailgun.com/hc/en-us/articles/203409084-How-do-I-create-additional-SMTP-credentials- https://help.mailgun.com/hc/en-us/articles/203409084-How-do-...
evan_ 5y ago
I laughed out loud when I saw the last email on the page misspells Evan's name as "Even"- as someone named Evan who gets people misspelling my name that way constantly.
- U8dcN7vx 5y ago
  Auto-correct seems plausible for some if not most cases.
make_it_sure 5y ago
This Evan guy reminds me of the worst customers I have: rude, know-it all, overreacting. Just because you're a customer you're not entitled to be an ass. Of course they have data about the customer performance, it's part of their job, it doesn't mean it has access to private data.
JohnTHaller 5y ago
As possible explanation of the initial response, I understand the frustration as I get dozens of these 'how does Tuesday at 3', 'time for a call next week?', etc emails every week as part of sleazy companies' spam email drip campaigns to more than one of my email accounts. That said, continuing to send email to 30,000 suppressed email addresses means you need to spend some time cleaning out old emails from your list. I do this semi-regularly for the confirmed opt-in list for PortableApps.com which is sent via mailgun.
AtNightWeCode 5y ago
Does not admire Evans. Unclear axe wielding. If you really want help be specific. Mailgun is not a very good service in general from my experience but it works. A good alternative if price is relevant.
snowwrestler 5y ago
I don’t know, this interaction kind of makes me like Mailgun. Sounds like they were seeing some weird stuff with a customer and reached out to see what was up. That’s what I want out of an email infrastructure provider. It’s hard to maintain high deliverability if you don’t keep careful tabs on things.

120 points by jsiepkes 5y ago

I went from mailgun to gsuite. costs went up 3x and almost all of my emails are going to spam folders even when the contact and I have been emailing each other for ages. Would definitely recommend mailgun/sendgrid over gsuite for emails and not entirely agree with this blog post.

zippergz 5y ago
What are you talking about? The use cases for Mailgun and gsuite have effectively no overlap.
- ganeshkrishnan 5y ago
  both send emails and both allow user email creation (with mailgun it was virtual email forwarded to personal email). I had to switch to gsuite because hubspot doenst allow external smtp server to send out emails and we couldnt use mailgun.
  - mikeryan 5y ago
    If you started sending Hubspot marketing or CRM emails directly from Gsuite its going to get marked as Spam, thats the whole point of using a transactional service. I've had multiple clients in the past who have decided to send "Check out my new App!" emails to their entire contact list from Gmail who shortly found out the hard way that it caused all their emails to start being marked as Spam. Don't use Gmail like this.
    - ganeshkrishnan 5y ago
      I only send out limited transactional emails via gmail and thats only because hubspot only supports sending email by connecting gmail. For some absurd reason they dont allow SMTP servers for sending emails. Since hubspot is our CRM I had to start using gsuite. The problem is is that the emails from hubspot land in the inbox. BUT the emails from my outlook that I type it out land in people's spam folder. One reason why I have zero concerns with googles overarching data privacy issue is that I can see how stupid their AI /algorithms are. And with more noise it just gets worse not better.
niftylettuce 5y ago
I built https://forwardemail.net https://forwardemail.net as the costs went up and I needed a cheaper alternative for my domains. Any questions feel free to email me, nick@forwardemail.net
- ganeshkrishnan 5y ago
  I would love to use it. The only challenge for me is that hubspot only sends emails via gmail/gsuite

dioxide 5y ago

If I were mailgun, I'd be okay losing Evan as a customer.

annoyingnoob 5y ago
I would try to see this from Evan's perspective. Its easy to find next to useless Sales people, its harder to find a good customer. Evan is a busy guy and said please don't waste my time with a Sales call this is only for your own benefit and then got something else. And I don't want you Sales people poking around in my SaaS setup or in my data.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  > Evan is a busy guy and said please don't waste my time Busy people don't spend hours starting internet fights. They delete spam and move on with their day.
  - annoyingnoob 5y ago
    They do for vendors that draw their ire, maybe not for your average sales email.
boomer918 5y ago
Agreed, this is silly.
cyral 5y ago
In the comments he posts another interaction with a sales-person. Read his second reply... I'd be happy losing him too. (As a business owner I understand how we get spam like this all the time, and I almost always ignore it if it is clearly not targeted. If someone goes out of their way to list some real reasons why they like my company though, I would try to be a little nicer)

hash872 5y ago

Evan, your response was needlessly rude, and if I were Mailgun I'd let you go as a customer. The idea that you'd drop a company over this is overly dramatic. I would encourage you to be nicer to relatively low-level employees, and Joe did seem reasonably knowledgeable about Mailgun's processes

gizmo 5y ago
You don’t fire a customer for being testy. It’s way disproportionate and if customers are unhappy you want to know this. Rude feedback is still feedback, and most businesses struggle to get honest feedback because most people are just way too nice
- hash872 5y ago
  I run a business and I absolutely would fire a customer for being needlessly rude to an employee. If they're angry at the employee they can direct their 'feedback' to me. But yeah this 'the customer is always right' chunk of American culture needs to die- abusing employees is not 'feedback', nor is it acceptable
  - literallyWTF 5y ago
    Gotta love this entitled attitude of “I can be a dick because I’m paying you!! What do you mean you’re refusing service!!! I’m a customer!!!”
    - datavirtue 5y ago
      Sacred Customer Syndrom
  - gizmo 5y ago
    I also run a business. I’m a customer of Mailgun as well. As a business it’s not hard to enforce boundaries without going for the nuclear option. Everybody has bad days sometimes, and just as we want customers to be understanding when we have downtime we can be understanding when customers are irate. In my experience customers get rude when they are already unhappy and have been for a while. In the case of Mailgun their service is very mediocre (unreliable api, slow, etc) and I don’t think they care. Does this justify rudeness towards support staff? No, but people tend to be much nicer when they’re generally happy with the service they get for their money.

hunterb123 5y ago

I discourage using them because they never seem to be able to deliver to hotmail addresses.

xeromal 5y ago

Ugh, that salesman is a sleeze. lol

biggestdummy 5y ago
With the caveat that I know nothing about mailgun, so may have misunderstood parts of the conversation, it sounds, to me, like the salesman did a few very helpful things... 1. Pointed out that the user had been spending money on a service which was not actually being provided. Presumably, mailgun would correct this error. 2. Exposed that the "mail success rate" which the user was seeing might not be the full story. 3. Showed the user that he was paying for suppressed emails, so could (presumably) save some coin by cleaning up his list. (Note that the cost of cleaning might be higher than the extra payments, but good to know that there's a cost to suppressed emails so that the user can make a judgement.) This rep was honest ("it was a template"), gave a specific agenda when asked, and gave useful information. Complaining that your rep has access to your data when that's his entire job is ridiculous. Data security best practices are that data should be provided on a "need to know" basis. In order to provide the above 3 values, the rep needs access to that data.
- kelnos 5y ago
  The other possibility, which would explain the different delivery numbers and different understanding of the dedicated IP status, is that the sales rep was confused, screwed up, and was looking at some other customer's data while thinking it was Phabricator's.

tebbers 5y ago

Sorry to say but Evan does not come across as particularly pleasant or likeable to anyone he corresponds with. Common courtesy would go a long way.

jrockway 5y ago
I think that it sounds harsh to say "I don't take meetings with no agenda", but is the right thing to do. Everyone wants your time, and it's the most valuable resource you possess, so being protective makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't reply to someone's email and accuse them of "low-effort sales" or whatever. I'd just say "thanks, not interested" and then be internally mad at the low effort. From the other side, I think that sales should be aware that these emails can read like "hey, we're going to shut you off unless you chat with me for 30 minutes" which is annoying. It would be nice to clarify that up front, to avoid the negative emotion associated with that prospect.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > it sounds harsh to say "I don't take meetings with no agenda", but is the right thing to do Evan's is the wrong way to do it. "I am busy–do you have specific recommendations you can share over email" is more concise, polite and to the point. (Ignoring the e-mail, or a simple not interested, are also options.) And if you want to use those words, fine, but leave off the "low effort" insults at the end.
  - hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
    Well, if you read the exchange below, it might not be an insult after all. It definitely was low-effort: he started by saying that he admires Even's work, but then admitted it's just a formula and so on. Really, if the words you use have no meaning, why to use them? He is definitely not the worst of all salesmen I met, but not particularly bright, and the effort he put into the initial email wasn't really above average.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    I think it is useful, though, to teach people that it's disrespectful to send vague meeting requests without an agenda. Using your "I am busy -- do you have specific recommendations..." response obscures the real objection. Certainly I think there's a better way of saying it than OP did, though: perhaps, "before we schedule anything, can you propose an agenda so we can both be sure a meeting is the best use of our time?" or something like that.

dewey 5y ago

I was expecting something worse. Could the sales outreach be done better? Sure, but I've seen a lot worse and I feel like the initial email setting the tone with "This request is so vague and nonspecific..." was already more passive aggressive than it has to be and set the tone for the rest of the thread.

yuubi 5y ago
Interesting that you don't see the low-effort sales template message as the initial message that set the tone, but the reply to it.
- dewey 5y ago
  Sales people, just like recruiters have a job to do. I just recognise there's another person on the other end doing their job, so there's ways to tell them in a friendly way that you are not interested without being overly rude or smug about it.
  - corpdronejuly 5y ago
    Then they can do their job with professionalism and courtesy for those they contact.

napsterbr 5y ago

I thought Evan had stopped working on Phab. Does anyone know Phabricator's status? Is it still under active development?

JamesCoyne 5y ago
This work is "Bonus Content" https://secure.phabricator.com/w/changelog/ https://secure.phabricator.com/w/changelog/
- napsterbr 5y ago
  Thanks! It was quite sad to read the announcement that development had stopped. Phabricator provided me with one of the best development experiences I've ever had. I guess Github + Gitlab won, and it became insanely difficult for the smaller players to make a dent. I'm keeping an eye on SourceHut, though.

mikeryan 5y ago

I kind of dislike everyone in the email exchange.

imwillofficial 5y ago

I came in against mailgun, and came out astonished at how poor Evan’s behavior was. I’ll never touch any project he is involved with.

bjt2n3904 5y ago

Interesting read. While the general consensus on the comments here so far are "why be so rude" -- I don't think this was rude at all. I'd be similarly upset if I was treated this way by someone from marketing. Edit: From a second read, I really don't see any of this as rude. You know how it's poor etiquette to start a chat message with "Hey, do you have a moment?", And it's much better to just write the question and wait for a response? This is the email equivalent. "Request too vague, I don't want to meet. Please specify further, unless this is a sales pitch, in which case, preemptively not interested." It's not passive aggressive, it's just business. If I had received, "You're right, this is a low effort sales pitch, and it works", I don't think I'd bother replying. That is an extremely passive aggressive response.

jacobr1 5y ago
> You know how it's poor etiquette to start a chat message with "Hey, do you have a moment?" I think this is the difference. For plenty of people, this is a NOT a widely held norm. It really IS ok to just start a chat or email with a "Hey, do you have a moment?" That doesn't mean it should be ok. We probably all would be better off providing more context for more effective communication. But standards here seem to vary widely.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

kelnos 5y ago

The only thing questionable I see here is that random sales employees seem to have access to customer information. It's not clear to me that the information they have access to is actually all that sensitive, though. Delivery rates and whether or not they've purchased a dedicated IP address? Eh, not sure that's a big deal. Of course, we have no idea what other customer information this sales guy might have access to. And it's concerning that the information he had access to was incorrect, or he was somehow very badly misinterpreting it. Or, worse, he was confused and actually looking at another customer's dashboard, which, if true, would be pretty concerning. These things are perhaps worrisome, but it's not clear what was actually going on here. I agree that the sales guy was more pushy than he should have been, seems like he was poorly-trained and not good at his job, and I too hate vague requests for agenda-less meetings, but this whole thing seems like an overreaction.

closewith 5y ago
I don't think I'd be happy if sales people had access to the recipient domains of my outbound emails, which seems to be suggested?
- jasonlotito 5y ago
  Except in this case, Mailgun is supposed to have access to this information. This is what they are used for. This sort of email from Mailgun is one of the reason you use them as a service. This comment[1] explains more, but the tl;dr is that the issues the person was emailing about are things they should be emailing about. It's actually more concerning that Evan doesn't understand what he's paying for. If he was really concerned about customer data, none of this would be a surprise. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29544319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29544319
  - closewith 5y ago
    I read that comment and am very aware that an ESP has access to all the information you give them. It comes down to internal controls. If the email in the OP is actually an approach from a compliance or customer management department, it's a clumsy attempt. To me, it reads as a sales pitch. If so, my opinion remains unchanged - I don't think I'd be happy if sales people had access to the recipient domains of my outbound emails. Edit: Re-reading the post, the Mailgun employee says in their reply: > First, you're right, it is a low effort sales template. It does work. That really does suggest that this was an attempt at an upsell from a sales person.

stavros 5y ago

Everyone here is talking about Evan's response, so I may be misunderstanding something, but... If I'm billed for a dedicated email for years and it hasn't been provisioned for me, isn't that a major problem with the service?

davidcuddeback 5y ago
> If I'm billed for a dedicated email for years and it hasn't been provisioned for me, isn't that a major problem with the service? If that's true, yes. But it sounds plausible that the salesman was in error (also a problem, but less severe IMO): > (Mail headers show the dedicated IP is functioning correctly, see "headers.png", where the outbound route matches the dedicated IP in the web interface.)
- stavros 5y ago
  Ah, I missed that, thanks.

me_me_mu_mu 5y ago

I agree with the sentiment, though not the execution. Time is certainly the most valuable asset, and if someone is wasting my time/energy then I just ignore them. If I see an email that's coming from a random sales-related channel and not from my support rep, I'm ignoring it. If I'm using a service incorrectly, and the email is vague and gives the same vibe when someone asks "Can I ask you a question?" on slack and waits for a response, then I'm not going to bother replying. Waste your time, but don't expect the same from me.

mparnisari 5y ago

> This request is so vague and nonspecific ("Let's take a look"?) that it feels kind of like a low-effort template sales email. If it is, and your primary goal in sending me this email is to get me to purchase more Mailgun services, please do not send me any more emails like this. This entire sentence was unnecessary.. > Mailgun's hiring or training process for sales employees doesn't seem to be very good: Joe didn't seem to understand the Mailgun system. Beyond not needing it, I also don't think it is acceptable for staff who can not consistently demonstrate a high level of competence to have access to customer data. He blames the training AND the hiring, lol

literallyWTF 5y ago

Lol why does this guy complaining of a salesperson emailing them end up on top page of HN? Like honestly, who the duck cares?

jonathonf 5y ago

I'm surprised by the other comments here that I'm in the minority thinking that the sales approach was pretty terrible. You're trying to sell something you don't understand to a company you don't understand. Why? If you actually want to "help" a company (by selling them your product... not really sure how that's "helping", but...) then at least do some research into the company and provide something that looks useful rather than some crappy "Hi, I like you, let's chat!" In this specific case, someone somewhere is lying about services being provided. If that's sales then that's not great. If that's accounts/billing then that's probably worse. In any case it's a pretty terrible look for the company concerned, and understandably results in an erosion of trust.

boc 5y ago
Counterpoint is that Mailgun likely had flagged the account (80% deliverability is bad) and wanted to open a line of communication without coming across as hostile. It wasn't a sales opportunity, it was a "you need to improve" email wrapped in a friendly opening. Evan then replied taking a hostile footing, which resulted in the sale rep backing up his opening with a list of agenda items (list cleaning, dedicated IP address, etc). At this point it became a purely defensive line-by-line encounter because egos got involved once the Mailgun rep listed the real reasons he was writing. IMO this is a massive overreaction and not a good look for the blog author.
- davidcuddeback 5y ago
  > It wasn't a sales opportunity Yes, it was. In the salesman's own words: "First, you're right, it is a low effort sales template. It does work." > not a good look for the blog author The OP isn't a blog. It's a task that Evan filed for himself to migrate away from Mailgun.
- jonathonf 5y ago
  Was it 80%* or 96%? Was Phacility paying for a dedicated IP or not? If someone from a company is lying to you then is this really an overreaction? (*Was 80% cherry-picked from a particular domain and so used in a purposefully misleading way? Should a sales rep have access to that sort of data anyway?)

cpressland 5y ago

Well, we use Mailgun at work and it’s pretty great. I’ve only ever had one issue with it and it and their support was outstanding. As somebody who used to work in enterprise support, I don’t see them as having done anything wrong here. It’s just somebody reaching out to do their job.

jqcoffey 5y ago

From the comments it seems like there's a bit of an information gap in terms of how email service providers (ESPs) like Mailgun operate, what data they must have routine access to, and how the space evolved to make money (this last part of my info is dated as I left the space about a decade ago). First, ESPs send email on a client's behalf. One of the primary benefits of using an ESP is co-opting their email reputation and their contacts with real time blacklist (RBL) operators, postmaster organizations at major email providers and third party email reputation groups. A good reputation keeps a sender's email out of the junk folder (or worse refused/dropped on the floor) and is really all most folks care about (especially at an API driven company like Mailgun). In order to do all of the above, an ESP needs access to the details of the email that's being sent, including recipient email addresses and the contents of the message being sent. This is because both of those things can potentially be dangerous and the ESP is the ultimate responsible party in the eyes of the receiving email provider (i.e. Google holds Mailgun as the responsible party for what Phabricator sends). Now, as to this sales call, sometime ago (circa ~2004 I guess) it became apparent that ESPs could work with their problematic clients to improve their sending habits, thereby improving their reputation and collect more money from the client in the process (via either direct consulting fees or increased sending volume). This kind of win-win made a lot of sense, but as the price-per-email sent was dropping ESPs were looking for ways to reliably generate more revenue and, well, "deliverability consulting" became a thing. My guess is that this is what this email exchange was about, and like any consulting effort, it's only as good as the last interaction and here I agree with Evan that "Joe" fumbled the ball fairly badly. Personally, I would have just reached out to Mailgun support and asked what's up with the incorrect billing and Joe's problematic responses, but that doesn't appear to have been Evan's first choice. Source for the industry insider info is that I used to run the technical side of a small ESP from about 2003 to 2009, was an active participant in MAAWG and generally had to work with my peers across orgs to navigate deliverability problems regularly.

nathias 5y ago

what is the male equivalent of Karen?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
literallyWTF 5y ago
A decent chunk of HN commentators?
- dang 5y ago
  "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dang 5y ago
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? It's not what this site is for, we ban accounts that do it repeatedly, and I just had to ask you about this elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29539111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29539111). Moreover, we've had to ask you about it repeatedly in the past before this. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

JustARandomGuy 5y ago

> Despite the incident in 2018, Mailgun appears to be giving an excessive level of access to customer data to employees who do not need it in 2020: Joe had access to specific customer domain information, and didn't hesitate to use it purely to try to sell me something. From this, I infer that it is likely routine that sales staff examine customer data without any kind of control or approval. I don't think this is acceptable. Same thing happened with me on GoDaddy. I used GoDaddy's domain purchase system to negotiate and buy a domain, and transferred it to Cloudflare. A few years later, a GoDaddy buyer contacted me about buying the domain. The only way they could have gotten my email is to trawl through their past purchase records since the domain wasn't using any GoDaddy systems (DNS, email, etc) after it was transferred out. I sent a very unhappy email back to them and I've been transferring my domains out to other registrars. I no longer recommend GoDaddy.

jiveturkey 5y ago
Of course GoDaddy is scummy, but this is not the only way your information could have been obtained. During the transfer out period, you must provide unmasked contact info. There are services that crawl this info and provide a full historical ownership history. So if your information was ever available in whois, including during the short transfer window, it has been crawled. That said GoDaddy has never been a good registrar anyway. I'm just going by what you are saying: that not using GoDaddy email means they couldn't have contacted you. Not using GoDaddy email service is irrelevant and your mention of it at all implies you aren't aware of how your information can get out. It's certainly possible to prevent it but you're not giving the vibe that you understand this.
- JustARandomGuy 5y ago
  Perhaps I should have been more explicit. What I meant is when Godaddy contacted me to purchase my domain name, that domain name was in no way mapped to my account - it was not using any GoDaddy services at all. The only way they could have gotten my personal email address was to (1) get the info from WHOIS which Cloudflare blocks - they have a contact form instead of showing the email address or (2) get my email from the past purchase forms. And in fact they did get my email from the past purchase because I use separate email accounts for my domain registrations and a separate account for domain purchases.

yawnxyz 5y ago

I was kind of expecting the complaint to be about how the API only allows a single API key (which is terrible for multiple projects), and doesn't allow generating multiple API keys w/ multiple types of access (kind of like what Cloudflare's API allows you to do)

manquer 5y ago
You can use SMTP [1] if you need something like that . While SMTP technically slower than REST, practically it doesn't matter if your application processes mailjobs in forked background threads or a queue, also most ESPs would rate limit outgoing email after it reaches their system to prevent abuse. the benefit is also no custom code or needing to add their SDK, you can replace the service by simply replacing the credentials, probably without even a code deployment if you store credentials in env. [1] https://help.mailgun.com/hc/en-us/articles/203409084-How-do-I-create-additional-SMTP-credentials- https://help.mailgun.com/hc/en-us/articles/203409084-How-do-...

evan_ 5y ago

I laughed out loud when I saw the last email on the page misspells Evan's name as "Even"- as someone named Evan who gets people misspelling my name that way constantly.

U8dcN7vx 5y ago
Auto-correct seems plausible for some if not most cases.

make_it_sure 5y ago

This Evan guy reminds me of the worst customers I have: rude, know-it all, overreacting. Just because you're a customer you're not entitled to be an ass. Of course they have data about the customer performance, it's part of their job, it doesn't mean it has access to private data.

JohnTHaller 5y ago

As possible explanation of the initial response, I understand the frustration as I get dozens of these 'how does Tuesday at 3', 'time for a call next week?', etc emails every week as part of sleazy companies' spam email drip campaigns to more than one of my email accounts. That said, continuing to send email to 30,000 suppressed email addresses means you need to spend some time cleaning out old emails from your list. I do this semi-regularly for the confirmed opt-in list for PortableApps.com which is sent via mailgun.

AtNightWeCode 5y ago

Does not admire Evans. Unclear axe wielding. If you really want help be specific. Mailgun is not a very good service in general from my experience but it works. A good alternative if price is relevant.

snowwrestler 5y ago

I don’t know, this interaction kind of makes me like Mailgun. Sounds like they were seeing some weird stuff with a customer and reached out to see what was up. That’s what I want out of an email infrastructure provider. It’s hard to maintain high deliverability if you don’t keep careful tabs on things.