New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
signed up for Mailgun. Very responsive support staff.
Thanks for the recommendation.
I'd call it being on the defensive, which usually comes off as arrogant. They are fu@*!ing a lot of their users, including paying ones, and they know it. No apology whatsoever. No attempt at spinning this (read: no explanation for this sudden change). Somebody calculated they can do without the deadbeats and low end market and simply sent a message to that effect. It's a little sad, really, seeing all that goodwill they have built over the years, flushed down the toilet like that. Weird!
Been using Sendy with Amazon's SES, and it's been very solid (though I'm not sending out so many emails at this point, just small campaigns once in a while).
Just to note that Mailgun had a failure and missing all e-mails in queue (good things is that they are pretty open about it and giving everyone credits), but personally my trust with them has not been up to 100%, those transaction e-mails has just too important to fail.
Ive signed up with sendgrid... still havent got past the verification bit. Any other good for a small forum with free plan?
I'm sending millions of emails with SES, and they are also not perfect.
From time to time, some ISPs (even gmail) blacklist their servers, and all emails go to the spam. Also I have a system that track spam alerts (required by AWS), dead emails and sometimes it is very problematic to recover from such failures, I've developed an 'amnesty' script, that tries to remove such emails from blacklist.
Also, it is very slow and maybe expensive with attachments.
Damm- perhaps the free to paid conversion ratio wasn't high enough. I sort of expected this... It's just a cost for them to be offering 10,000 emails/ mo free when that's all most sites need. I've been using SendGrid, which is a bit cheaper https://sendgrid.com/pricing. All my emails are being delivered = perfection.
I don't mind them removing the free tier (which I used myself for small hobby projects), but my work also uses Mandrill - the paid variant - and those costs will skyrocket with this change. We're looking at 6-10x the current costs when we switch to Mailchimp.
I'm currently looking at ElasticEmail (http://elasticemail.com/), which seems inexpensive and offers things like event webhooks and inbound email (without paying a premium price like with Sendgrid), but unfortunately it's not as feature rich or configurable as Mandrill.
Does anyone have experience with ElasticEmail?
Sadly goodwill does not put food on the table, shame they did not tier it more but tbh for $20 p/month it's well worth it for me.
At least two major mail providers in Germany block amazon SES on a regular basis.
I wouldn't call amazon SES reliable.
The web design looks 'bootstrap'. Is it a big company? I would not go with provider without 24/7 team monitoring spam and abuses, like SES does.
Yeah, the interface is pretty basic, and I just noticed that their API is hosted on OVH servers, which I personally don't see as a positive sign.
I read pretty often though that SES randomly gets marked as spam though, so can't have that either. Mandrill was basically the best of both worlds, it's quite the gap they're leaving behind.
But SES team resolves this issues very fast.
Pepipost is 25000 emails per month.
mailerlite
Mate of mine is on a paid plan, but there also seems to be a free tier. Has anybody used it?
I just topped up my account a $100, already have mailgun implemented as a backup for mandrill. Guess I'll have mailgun as primary and mandrill as backup now.
So, looks like this business model is unprofitable. They failed to compete with Amazon or SendGrid (promoted by Google and M$).
Looking at sendgrid (I had a free account already) and Mailgun I think my preference is Mailgun as If I did ever go over the free messages it would only be by a tiny amount and it look like Mailgun would just charge for those messages, where as Sendgrid I'd have to pay for messages I wasn't using.
Actually, goodwill is often key to putting food on the table (read: expanding customer base and growing a business). This is assuming you are able to afford it (i.e. sustain the freebies), which dependends on your business model. Selling new companies at well over US$ 1000 a pop, we can afford lots of goodwill. Can't imagine doing anything close to that, running a VPS or email hosting business. Hence, not surprised by Mandrill's forced "upgrade", just sorry to see so much existing goodwill flushed down the toilet so abruptly, is all.
spam snip
These signifiant Mandrill Policy Changes as of yesterday (Feb. 24, 2016) will now require a paid Mailchimp account in order to use the Mandrill email transactional service. There is chaos stirring on the internet regarding this very bold decision by Mandrill yesterday. Additionally, they gave everyone a very short notice to get moved to another provider before your account will be terminated for non-compliance.
I wouldn't call 2 months' notice, almost to the day, very short notice
MailChimp's CEO posted a longer letter on the MailChimp blog. The gist I got is that the focus on general transactional email become a distraction from their core business.
As someone personally affected by this change I'm not at all thrilled by it, but I can respect when a company says "you know what, this just isn't what we wanted to be." There's a great quote their CEO used in his blog post: "culture eats strategy for breakfast."
Surprised there's no one from the Wable thread complaining about "bait and switch" here.
I didn't know them and did take a look... they are using very dubious tactics to advertise.
Just an example: https://www.behance.net/gallery/33271479/SMTP2go-Worldwide-SMTP-Server-Review
Just FYI if inbox delivery is the key rather than having to send tens of thousands of emails per hour, I would put MXroute as an even stronger service than Mandrill. I've seen emails bounce due to Mandrill's IPs being on RBLs, for example, where MailChannels will re-send from another IP instead of bouncing in such a case.
I added some stock to all but the $5/year package here if anyone needs low cost quality delivery:
https://lowendbox.com/blog/mxroute-e-mail-hosting-starting-at-5year-with-2gb-storage-in-dallas-usa/
Also suspicious, specially since they are very new and this is your first comment.
I have no problem with them saying "a bunch of free users does not make sense for us" and deciding to end the service.
But if I was writing the email, it would have gone like this:
The email they sent was mostly "on this day, we decree this will happen, and on this day, we decree that will happen, and here's details of our integration plan you won't care about, etc."
They could at least have just given a longer notice and their decision wouldn't piss us off so much. I mean free tier plan has been around for quite some time, and I think an extra two months of notice wouldn't cost them lots of money.