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I'm a little confused about the need for this service. What languages don't have decent email support at this point? I guess I've never run into this before.

ramidarigaz 15y ago
It's nice having official servers to send email from. I had a simple little app a while back that sent email via Python's SMTP module, but most of the emails I was sending were getting caught by Gmail's spam trap. Using Mailgun to send those emails worked just fine, plus their api is nice.
- maratd 15y ago
  > most of the emails I was sending were getting caught by Gmail's spam trap The solution I came up with was to simply use GMail. With their business suite, you'll be able to use your own domain and get access to their SMTP servers. This won't work if you're sending thousands of emails per day, but a few hundred should be ok.
lubos 15y ago
Mailgun also allows to receive emails, it will make http post request at your end-point. very neat stuff actually.
- jswinghammer 15y ago
  That's a very compelling feature. When having to read mail comes up it's usually out of the ordinary from whatever I'm doing but if I could just make a page to process what's in it then that would be interesting.
old-gregg 15y ago
You mean the support for MIME in stdlib, right? Based on the questions our customer support gets, quite a lot: just like we explained in the blog post. And based on the number of malformed and broken MIME we get via SMTP, even those that do aren't easy to understand for many. Based on the calls/emails I personally had to answer, things like encoding, or making sure that HTML and text parts are specified in a certain order, or the aforementioned "Bcc mystery" bite quite a lot of people. EDIT: forgot to add something: check out the "test mode" feature, you'd be amazed at how many people call us to flush up their email queue because they ran their unit tests on the production database! :)
- stephen_mcd 15y ago
  I'd love to see the actual question answered.
  - old-gregg 15y ago
    JavaScript and PHP immediately come to mind. Ruby has a few MIME libs of a poor quality. Perl and Python have excellent MIME facilities but, as I said above, many developers simply aren't interested in learning MIME to begin with. We eliminated MIME on the receiving end earlier (see our "email routing" API) and now we've taken the next logical step: we have eliminated MIME on the other end. Besides, email is huge. In includes at least 4 non-trivial network protocols, several storage formats and a sea of proprietary ESP-specific extensions is error codes. There is no such thing as an "email support" in any language, only bits and pieces of uneven quality, therefore the most honest and shortest answer would be "all of them".
- jstedfast 15y ago
  It's pretty trivial to bind MIME C-libraries like GMime for use in any language on any platform. http://spruce.sourceforge.net/gmime/ http://spruce.sourceforge.net/gmime/ It's a high-level library (unlike most other MIME libraries) which makes constructing and parsing MIME trivial.
  - defen 15y ago
    You're like the people who said Dropbox wouldn't succeed, because they had no need for it, because they could just setup rsync. Fact of the matter is that mailgun seems to have empirical proof that a lot of programmers have no clue what they're doing, and would be willing to pay for something that makes their lives easier. That's like lesson #0 of hacker news: people will pay for things that make their lives easier.

ramidarigaz 15y ago

It's nice having official servers to send email from. I had a simple little app a while back that sent email via Python's SMTP module, but most of the emails I was sending were getting caught by Gmail's spam trap. Using Mailgun to send those emails worked just fine, plus their api is nice.

maratd 15y ago
> most of the emails I was sending were getting caught by Gmail's spam trap The solution I came up with was to simply use GMail. With their business suite, you'll be able to use your own domain and get access to their SMTP servers. This won't work if you're sending thousands of emails per day, but a few hundred should be ok.

lubos 15y ago

Mailgun also allows to receive emails, it will make http post request at your end-point. very neat stuff actually.

jswinghammer 15y ago
That's a very compelling feature. When having to read mail comes up it's usually out of the ordinary from whatever I'm doing but if I could just make a page to process what's in it then that would be interesting.

old-gregg 15y ago

You mean the support for MIME in stdlib, right? Based on the questions our customer support gets, quite a lot: just like we explained in the blog post. And based on the number of malformed and broken MIME we get via SMTP, even those that do aren't easy to understand for many. Based on the calls/emails I personally had to answer, things like encoding, or making sure that HTML and text parts are specified in a certain order, or the aforementioned "Bcc mystery" bite quite a lot of people. EDIT: forgot to add something: check out the "test mode" feature, you'd be amazed at how many people call us to flush up their email queue because they ran their unit tests on the production database! :)

stephen_mcd 15y ago
I'd love to see the actual question answered.
- old-gregg 15y ago
  JavaScript and PHP immediately come to mind. Ruby has a few MIME libs of a poor quality. Perl and Python have excellent MIME facilities but, as I said above, many developers simply aren't interested in learning MIME to begin with. We eliminated MIME on the receiving end earlier (see our "email routing" API) and now we've taken the next logical step: we have eliminated MIME on the other end. Besides, email is huge. In includes at least 4 non-trivial network protocols, several storage formats and a sea of proprietary ESP-specific extensions is error codes. There is no such thing as an "email support" in any language, only bits and pieces of uneven quality, therefore the most honest and shortest answer would be "all of them".
jstedfast 15y ago
It's pretty trivial to bind MIME C-libraries like GMime for use in any language on any platform. http://spruce.sourceforge.net/gmime/ http://spruce.sourceforge.net/gmime/ It's a high-level library (unlike most other MIME libraries) which makes constructing and parsing MIME trivial.
- defen 15y ago
  You're like the people who said Dropbox wouldn't succeed, because they had no need for it, because they could just setup rsync. Fact of the matter is that mailgun seems to have empirical proof that a lot of programmers have no clue what they're doing, and would be willing to pay for something that makes their lives easier. That's like lesson #0 of hacker news: people will pay for things that make their lives easier.