Sparkpost.com from sendgrid [very bad experience]

[dave_walko]

We left Mandrill for the same reasons everyone else did. We migrated to sendgrid but then their formatting of our emails was quite odd. We pushed through but after a few months, decided it was too much overhead (emails going as plain text and html when only wanting text)

We signed up with sparkpost yesterday around 9am. Purchased the 100k account and our own IP. Email sent was only about 11k emails which are just notification emails to the same 10-15 people. 4am I wake up to an email that says account was downgraded per our request. I wake up and go look at my terminal and our account was suspended. Suspended for sending emails using an email service? I immediately wrote them but as of yet, have not heard a peep. No warning, just poof.. account suspended. When I goto my billing tab in the account it says the account was terminated. I am posting this as a message for people to be aware.

I already have a mailgun account and will start using that unless I hear back from sparkpost. If I do, I will update this post, actually, I will update it either way in the next 24 hours.

[ianhawes]

I had the exact same experience with Sparkpost. They were used to send receipts for purchases and not any sort of email marketing.

We started out on their free plan. While it wasn't as great as Mandrill (couldn't view outgoing content, for example) they didn't mess up the email format or inject any weird links.

We expanded to their paid plan as a result of our volume about a month later. Roughly 2-3 weeks after that, we received an automated notice at 1 AM on a Friday that our account had been suspended and that we should contact the abuse group and that they would reply within "2 days".

Not only did they stop our outgoing emails, but they didn't even bother queueing the ones our app was sending them. In fact, the worst part was that their API was returning 200 OK for emails that weren't sent, so our system didn't bother putting them in our failed jobs DB.

I emailed just about everyone in that company that I could find to no avail. The "abuse team" replied at around 4pm that day that our account was suspended for "multiple complaints" and that they were willing to give us "another chance" and subsequently reinstated us.

We started a migration back to Mandrill.

[posabsolute]

I'm surprised so many people only send to 1 Email Service. These services sometimes go down, sometimes slow down, having 2 active account and having an easy way to switch in between (read even automatic) should be an applied best practice.

[tbrooks]

Why go back to Mandrill? Why not go to SES?

[andwur]

Assuming I'm understanding you correctly you sent 11,000 emails in under 24 hours to 10-15 people? For a newly created account I could understand that raising a few red flags. Though that doesn't justify their support staff failing to respond to queries nor the immediate account termination.

I get the feeling they're having trouble with their sender reputation; one of our larger clients was recently switched to SparkPost from Mandrill ("it's too expensive!") and it's now a continual battle with delayed deliveries and mail being marked as spam. The issue never arose with Mandrill. (and yes, SPF and DKIM are correct)

[posabsolute]

I must say I agree,

I'm surprised OP is not aware that's the kind of sending that can raise a lot of red flags, before doing something like this on a new account I would have contacted support to make them aware of this situation.

Specially on smaller senders, reputation is everything.

[codegeek]

I moved away from mandrill but had to come back to them. Sendgrid sucked big time. Email delays all the time. Go check their status page and u will know what I mean. Also, they don't show email content like mandrill which is a big issue for troubleshooting. So even though mandrill screwed with pricing and last min change, they have been most stable for us. I don't even want to bother with sparkpost or mailgun at this time. My 2 cents.

[gondo]

with mandrill you are never sure if your email was delivered. mandrill does mark all emails by default as delivered until they decide otherwise later. so you can very well see 100% deliverability and later check the same stats and realize that it is actually 70%. the worse is, that you have to do it manually, one per email bases. and mandrill as a company is aware of this for couple of years and cosider this "normal" totally useless.

[codegeek]

It may have happened to you but we never had issues with Mandrill in terms of deliverability for 2+ years. With Sendgrid, we have issues almost every week. Just yesterday, sendgrid had an issue and the CTO himself had to jump in with a post mortem. We had no choice but to go back to Mandrill because we cannot play with the critical transactional emails. Damn, email delivery is such a hard problem.

[gondo]

you might just not noticed but i would almost bet that it did happened to you as well. we noticed it after 1.5years of using mandrill. and only because one our user contacted us directly and was patient to cooperate with tracking the problem. after that we discovered plenty other cases. and communicating with mandrill revealed that it is how their system in fact works. anyways if you are happy with Mandrill good for you, but remember my warning: you are living in a dream that all the emails marked by mandrill as delivered are in fact delivered.

[dave_walko]

UPDATE [2 hours after initial post] I heard from compliance who asked a ton of questions and said our email was flagged as spam by their system. Keep in mind, we send to the same 10-15 people and not a single spam or bounce. I wrote back immediately with the info they wanted. As I mentioned, I will update as this progresses.

UPDATE [3 hours after initial post] Thank you for that information. I have re-activated your account.

So it looks like a response time of about 5 hours. I find that response time more than effective. The issue I still have is the automated block on a paid account + static IP at 4am. It was inconvenient considering we had been sending for almost a full day. I am still looking at staying with mailgun as you all seem to really like them and from what I can see after my tests with them, are quite nice.

So 1 day of usage of a service you are paying for on Sparkpost could get your account suspended. My feeling is if they are going to be THAT overly sensitive, they should do some initial questions prior to signing someone up to a paid account. Not that a paid account should be exempt but it should certainly grant some warning with a few hours before they just block your account. They could easily throttle the paid account for 12 hours with an email that the client needs to email them with info. Atleast email would still be going out even if its slower...

Since YC has slowed my comment down, I wanted to check on speed. I am really really surprised at how slow sparknews is. We are using smtp but here are some stats: # in outgoing queue Time checked 2848 (starting point) @ 8:45 am 2849 @ 9:01 am 2830 @ 9:19 am 2823 @ 9:25 am 2816 @ 9:30 am

[spdustin]

I'm going to throw in my recommendation for Postmark (postmarkapp.com) for transactional mail. Solid, reliable service for us.

[jonnyrockit]

+1 Been using them for 8 years without any trouble

[lyime]

+1

[scosman]

If you're sending high volume, consider AWS SES. It doesn't have the fancy tempting of Mandrill/Sendgrid/etc, but it's a fraction of the cost and the deliverability has been excellent. We migrated 98% of our emails off Mandrill when they decided to screw all their customers and saved a ton of money.

[codegeek]

Except that SES does not offer dedicated IPs. So you are at the mercy of shared IPs which can be a disaster in case one of those IPs get blocked due to someone else's spam.

[andmarios]

You could wait a couple days before making this public.

This post seems like you are seeking social justice and gives sparkpost the chance to escape a bad review relatively unscathed.

Now even if they fix your issue, we will never know if it is due to good service or fear of the pitchforks.

[erlendstromsvik]

Not sending mail for a couple of days is probably not an option - which would be the case if SparkPost was your mail delivery agent. SparkPost should be the one taking it's time.

We also had a funny experience with SparkPost. Sent millions of mails with them. Suddenly one day 1(!) mail go through, which actually is a notification mail to one of our site admins, asking if he want to allow a comment on a page - a spam comment in this case, and SparkPost suspends our account.

[dave_walko]

No, I will update the post accordingly. As I just did since they wrote back. I have no issue to give an unwarranted bad review. I think its shady to block an account at 3am after it was being used all day.

[techcorner]

Like Mandrill, most (all?) of these companies have some warmup period. Start sending low volumes, then once you have enough reputation go to higher volumes.

I don't belong to any of these companies but as a client, use their services heavily. Imagine a spammer signing up with them and sending several thousands mails in a day. They deal with such notorious people on a daily basis.

I am not saying you may have done anything wrong but probably their system flagged you when you sent 11k emails to 10-15 people.

In any case here is my rec for you in order- 1. PostMark - They do strictly transactional email. 2. Mailgun 3. SparkPost 4. SES

[nrjames]

We moved to Sparkpost and hit a few bumps at first. However, after working through those and paying for a dedicated IP address, the service has been reliable and suits our use case. I do have the sense, however, that they need to hire more support personnel.

I'm not sure if you found it, but I believe that Sparkpost has a "public" support group on Slack. That's where I finally was able to get messages through when we ran into problems. They were fixed promptly.

[AdamN]

I used to love Sendgrid but they seem to be slowing down development these days. Their interface hasn't changed much in the past few years and their Python libs/docs are ok but not great.

If I were sending lots of email like I used to I would consider SES but for the small volumes I'm doing now it seems like Sendgrid and Mailgun are good enough. Postmark.app gets some positive reviews in the comments so maybe people should give them a shot.

[timvdalen]

We've been very happy with Mailgun. Just last week I sent out ~10k emails/day within a week of setting up a new account (though to 10k different people).

[jpmw]

Wow that sucks!

I moved to mailgun yesterday. I run an alert system for Google Analytics, so I can't afford delays of more than a minute, and even then...

So far so good with mailgun!

Thanks for the info on Sparkpost, definitely not tempted to move there ;)

[stevekemp]

Regardless of which sender you use, you must remember that email often appears "instant", but it really really isn't.

If you absolutely need to send notifications to users with "zero delay" then email is not for you, and SMS is probably not sufficient either.

[dave_walko]

No and honestly after using mailgun for about 3 hours now, I will not go back to sparkpost. I will be requesting a full refund since service was never rendered and if that is not answered, I guess chargeback.

[nbevans]

Mailgun has proved reliable for us. Sparkpost came across a bit desperate and opportunistic on Twitter in the immediate Mandrill aftermath so I avoided them.

[tmaly]

Thanks for the info on sparkpost.

I shut off my Mandrill account, but I still need to migrate to something that works.

Are there any things you do not like about mailgun?

[dave_walko]

I really like the fact their reporting is more granular. I am waiting to get a static IP which hopefully won't take to long as I need to have it whitelisted at one of our clients mail servers. Set up was very easy as I did it at 430AM lol

[pentium10]

What's your email about? That could be your problem! Share a screenshot.

[dave_walko]

No its not my email. They are system updates to the same people. None of them complain as they need these updates.

[michaelt]

It sounds like a reasonable call on sparkpost's part. 99.9% of the time, sending 10,000 e-mails to 10 recipients is a sign some of your code has gone wrong, like an e-mail sending loop getting stuck.

[flippyhead]

mailgun has worked pretty well for us