Transactional email service: which one are you using?
Which transactional mail service are you using for your business?
Just only for transactional emails and email management. (not for newsletters etc)
- Which one?
- Why?
- How much are you paying?
Disclaimer: I own Kingmailer.co
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Using Mailchimp for rejuviamedical.com. We pay about $15 a month - works well but not many innovate features / creativity in mailchimp
Do you mean their transactional email service or sending newsletters?
transactional - limited with templates unless you know how to write html code
haven't explored sending newsletters
I use SES. The deliverability isn't the very best but it's very cheap (less than a dollar a month - I'm using it for registration confirmation and verification/reminder emails).
The thing that stops me migrating to something better is a fear of changing anything and having trouble getting it working since the emails are obviously pivotal to my application.
In 2017 when I started my email business, I was using SES, among other problems, users were complaining about not receiving important emails (like sign up confirmation emails), it was a big shame for an email company. I mean you can’t be an email l company and suck at emails... since having my own servers this problem has gone away.
I'm also using SES and have never had a problem. Did you configure it as it is supposed to?
Totally. So my point I guess is just that ease of integration would be very high on my list (the mail thing is a bit out of my comfort zone and while I looked at other solutions I couldn't see obviously how to integrate them so I've left it)
What would you need for the integration? Would SMTP credentials work?
I’m using Mailgun and spending < $1/month
Ah okay.
Probably sending less than 100 emails per month?
Switched from Mailgun to Sendgrid. Due to free tier restrictions and better backend UI
So using free version at Sendgrid?
Yes, currently Sendgrid. Usually in the free tier. It also seems to have better Delivery - but I didnt take stats
Sendgrid. It's fast, free and has been around a long time.
p.s. don't try make another email service, there are too many already.
Too bad, already did , like 3 years now ... also don’t open a new clothing store, too many already... don’t open a new restaurant, too many already, don’t become a dentist, too many already, don’t become a lawyer, too many already 🤷♂️😅
I am using mailgun (https://www.mailgun.com/) and have been quite happy with it.
Additionally I am using a self-hosted listmonk (https://listmonk.app) to manage mailing lists.
Very cool
Sendgrid but also Postmark. Postmark is better for your rich content and their delivery speeds are amazing. Sendgrid has good stack trace for figuring out why a particular email may not have arrived. Use Sendgrid for lower volume, greater importance and postmark for greater volume. I like both. Hope helpful.
I always thought it would be the other way around (lower volume for Postmark and high volume for Sendgrid).
How much is this costing you? (If I may ask)
I thought Postmark did give email log, that you can see details per email (delivered/not delivered etc)
I am using both Postmark and I send close to 30k emails every month. I am quite happy with their service. It is a bit pricey (compared to Mailgun and SES), but the delivery and support are top-notch.
I have experience with both Mailgun and SES, mails often landed in the junk folder (or not delivered at all, blocked IP)
How much is it costing you?
Postmark costs me around $35 every month. With Mailgun, sending roughly the same number of emails costs $15. But as I said before, I have found the deliverability to be much better with Postmark, so I can live with the extra $20 :)
Very great feedback and clear to me that the importance of email delivery is greater than price and some clients will go the extra mile to pay more 👊🔥
We're using Postmark. We're sending thousands of emails a month and we're paying $10. Limit on our current tier is 10K emails a month.
That's a great deal you get there
I know this is ~3 years old but what's everyone using now?
Anyone tried https://www.mailing.run/ ?
My First choice Sendgrid but had to switch to mailgun because of project need
Give Kingmailer a try bro (my project) if it’s only for transactional emails
Sure will give it a try for my next project..current project spookey.io Ghost centric & it's required mailgun..
Yeah, if it's a requirement, I understand ...
Postmark all day! They're smaller and a little pricier, but their customer support is next level and their admin dashboard is great!
How much is it costing you monthly?
Mailgun because it is/was the suggestion by the Laravel ecosystem - I'm still on a free plan
I suppose it’s free?
We use Mail Chimp for both newsletter and transactional because:
I've thought about switching several times because of certain features we see in other services that look like they'd be helpful. But the two above points is what makes MC sticky for us.
I don't hear very often MailChimp being used transactional mail service. It's nice to read some feedback about this. $150 is really pricy though.
$150 p/mo gets you around $1800 p/year.
I do understand your points that is still keeping you there.
Sorry, I want to clarify - it's not $150/month - it's $150 for 1500 emails in bulk.
And again, I acknowledge this isn't so cheap (0.10/email); but you're not forced to keep paying for example when you have low transactions one month.
Okay, understood
I rolled my own. Set up my own smtp server, and using that for delivery. Delivery is usually within seconds.
The reason I rolled my own is that I don't need any of the additional services besides transport. I have written my own library to deal with templates from within my application (see https://github.com/skyhop/mail), in a way that I can dispatch emails in a very clean and concise way.
Especially this last thing has removed the need for me to rely on an external service for transactional emails, and keeps my stack much more simple.
Very cool to hear.
It’s not easy running your own SMTP servers.
I checked the Github. Do you have any screenshots? Would be nice to see how the program looks like.
Do you pay a lot for your VPS?
Actually it's a library, meant to be consumed from within code. The reason I built it is because the boundaries between email template and business logic is usually crappy at best. I tried implementing a clear boundary which makes maintenance a lot easier.
Thankfully running your own SMTP server is not as difficult as it sounds like. I'm using https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver which gives me a full stack which includes everything you might need. Mind that no UI is included. I'm currently running it on a VPS with a bunch of other stuff so I can't tell exactly what it costs, but it seems as if you'd be able to run it on a €3/month VPS at OVH.
With the proper DNS configuration you’ll be able to deliver your emails to most providers including GMX
How do you make sure that your emails (1) get delivered and (2) don't land in spam folders?
Setting up an SMTP server might be trivial. Getting your emails delivered reliably isn't.
Ironically I have had more troubles with emails landing in spam folders with these services, than with my own SMTP server, even after all recommended configuration.
Properly configuring DMARC (SPF and DKIM) already does wonders for deliverability. There are various tools which you can use to check how spammy your emails are, and how you can improve (for example https://www.mail-tester.com/).
Besides that there are several things you can do to protect your own reputation such as adding an
List-Unsubscribeheader. I totally get that many do not want to dive into the specifics this deep, but I love the possibility to get it all up and running the way I want.Additionally, we're dealing with email, which means that once the email is gone from your SMTP server, there's nothing you can do to guarantee it's delivery. What you can do however is add a tracking pixel to see whether the email has been opened. I believe delivery checks depend on AV scanning tools to trigger some kind of pingback, which may or may not work. Regardless this is a level of tracking in which I'm not interested at all.
One side effect which is interesting are bouncing emails. The volumes of this are so low that I'm currently dealing with this manually, but wouldn't be too difficult to implement automatically later on.
Most providers don’t do a manual check and this hurt their IP reputation, even if it’s not blocked by Spamhaus, emails are landed in the junk folder.
Here at Kingmailer we do a manual check to decide if the customer is legitimate and not just a spammer
This recent discussion might be helpful.
Sorry, didn't notice at first that it was a text link, I usually browse with my phone
Which discussion?
The one he linked to ;-) :-p
Didn’t realize it was a text link :/ my eyes