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Provider for best email deliverability + issues with corporate firewalls
Hi,
We currently use Mandrill to send emails, but deliverability is not the best. Two questions:
- is Mailchannels still the top in terms of deliverability or is there something even better worth considering?
- are there any tricks of any kind to reduce the chances that a corporate firewall might block legitimate emails?
We are an event management platform and attendees to events often don't receive invites because of problems with deliverability issues with Mandrill or because some companies' firewall block emails from unknown domains or something like that.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
Comments
Perhaps Amazon's AWS SES?
We use Google Cloud and I feel stupid because I hadn't thought to check what/if they offer something for email delivery. I prefer using something independent though in case we decide to migrate from GCP to somewhere else. I am even toying with the idea to migrate to Hetzner since we run everything in Kubernetes and we don't really need the managed databases etc, so we could cut the bill.
Try oracle mail solution. Not bad at all.
I took a note to give it a try. Do you use the service?
I've had good experiences with both Mailchannels and Amazon SES. Mailbaby also seems to be well regarded, though I couldn't speak to its deliverability having not tested it.
For transactional emails, https://postmarkapp.com works very well. AWS is second best and works well for promotional emails. Mailchannels/Mailbaby fundamentally serve different purposes than being a relay for transactional emails.
But you'll have these issues wherever you go and need to partially solve this with a good UX and explain to the user that they may need to check their promo/spam folder and move it into the inbox tab. Your deliverability is also determined by your domain and how engaged your users are with you.
I use their servers in work. Ultra solid.
What about the issue with corporate firewalls? Are there any workarounds? As you may guess from what I described these are far from being spam emails at any level. These are emails people must receive to be able to join events after being invited or having purchased a ticket. So these emails are quite critical.
Cool, looks like a solid candidate. Do they have nice dashboards with all the important delivery metrics etc?
I've been using PostMark in production/work for years now on many many projects/sites - it's rock solid, and deliverability is excellent. Never really had an issue. Support are great too.
For anything else, SES MXRoute.
How about Sendgrid?
if you use G Workspace check this functionality https://support.google.com/a/answer/2956491?sjid=16302481948409270457-EU&hl=en
Sendgrid had good deliverability when we used it in 2017/18
I am not sure what issues do you refer to. Anyway, the most safe way is sending minimal HTML / no HTML at all. May look not beautiful, but not much to trigger at or break email content.
What I frequently see is just a banner "CAUTION: Email from external sender" and similar warnings.
That might not be a good idea depends on the sending volume OP might have. Google have strict limits on the SMTP relay and/or overall message limit.
It's still better to use transactional email providers. I used SendGrid before and moved to AWS SES when SendGrid got acquired by Twilio.
Mailchimp has a nice guide on how to format your emails so that they wont trigger spam checkere
alibaba directmail?