[heydenberk]

Semi-related: If you are in the market for an email provider for transactional emails, I encourage you to use Postmark. It's a developer focused company with a simple pricing model and great documentation, and their IPs tend to have great reputation scores. I don't work for them, but I switched from one of these two and am very happy I did.

[HEHENE]

A semi-interesting story, we used Postmark at my last company. When we signed up they offered something like 50,000 free credits. Then if we setup DKIM they offered another 50,000 or so credits. Then about three months later they sent us a survey and offered us another 75,000 credits if we filled it out.

All in all before we had even launched our application they had thrown nearly 200,000 free email credits at us. We hadn't even provided a credit card yet.

Considering at launch we were sending about 2,000 emails per month on a busy month we joked that we would never have to pay these guys.

Come a year and a half later we're sending a lot more than 2k emails per month and we're just about out of credits. At this point Postmark had become so ingrained in our applications (we made heavy use of their SDKs and templates) there wasn't any easy way to switch if we wanted to.

While we thought they were the fools for giving us such an obscene amount of free credits, they ultimately won in the long game and that company is still using (and now paying) Postmark.

All of that said, Postmark IS fantastic. I use them for every project where I need to send or receive mail, and I wouldn't consider anyone else. Highly recommend them.

[codezero]

I was waiting for the bad news, it’s refreshing to see this retention tactic pay off because of the quality of the product. That’s killer. You can probably get a future discount by offering a testimonial/case study :)

[sam1r]

Great assist. Just wanted to say that I am interested in free Postmark credits.

[space_ghost]

Another (very) happy Postmark user here. Tried most of the available email APIs a few years ago, Postmark was the only one that I could reliably use to get transactional emails into all of my test inboxes.

[alehul]

Ditto here!

Spent over 1 year cruising through their free credits, now happily paying a couple hundred a month without a second thought.

It's really intuitive and easy-to-use to see errors, read text of emails, and so forth.

Side note: It's neat to see people come out of the woodwork on this thread for Postmark, which is normally one of those products consumed so quietly, and under-appreciated. I bet their team is really happy to see this. :)

[atheken]

Yes, we are. :-P

[thaeli]

Yet another happy Postmark customer here. They're the only transactional email provider I've found who keeps full text logs of your outgoing mails (for a couple weeks) - in a complex "Enterprise" environment I cannot overstate how helpful having one place that always logs the mail that actually went out to the customer is. No matter what the sending system may have logged or failed to log.

Also their deliverability is excellent and when there are deliverability issues, it's easy to find exactly why. The logs also surface the info we need to prove what actually happened during a nondelivery event. ("Here is the actual log line from your MX server rejecting the mail we sent.")

For small near-zero-budget projects, I still use Amazon SES. It's Good Enough for most uses and nobody else with even decent deliverability can touch them on price. All my hobby projects combined are billing well under $1/mo for SES usage.

SES is also decent for some very specific inbound email use cases. If you need to receive email from some system that doesn't have a real webhooks type outbound API, but does have robust email notifications, and send the body to a Lambda function that parses it and makes the API call that system ought to have just made in the first place.. SES is perfect. (And unfortunately all the major systems I work with that process inbound email are stuck needing an IMAP connection - if I was able to use an API based inbound email receipt scheme, and needed to receive mail from various domains, I'd consider Postmark for the better diagnostics and logging.)

[johns]

Mailgun's logging is great, and includes the full-text of messages.

[pascal07]

Hey everyone, I'm the product manager at Postmark, and it's great to see all these stories. I'd love to find out a bit more about how y'all use the product. I can definitely send some T-shirts and other swag your way as well. If you're interested in telling your story, reach out to support and tell them you came from this thread! https://postmarkapp.com/support

[sam1r]

Awesome how active your team is!

[fasteo]

Happy Mailgun user here. Sending 1MM+ transactional emails/month and 9MM+ marketing emails/month. Working flawlessly, given that you setup everything correctly (separate domains, dedicated IPs at least for transactional emails, SPF, DKIM)

[leesalminen]

Same here! Similar volume and same experience- it all works well. Looking forward to the new "time of day inbox placement" feature they're working on as well!

[rglover]

Second this. Postmark is hands down one of the best developer products I've ever come across (on par with Stripe in terms of quality).

[wastedhours]

They were one of the first third-party APIs I implemented when I started building things properly - very polished, very easy to onboard and I remember being extremely impressed by the simplicity once it was going.

[usaphp]

I’ve been using postmark and they’ve been amazing, never had any issues with them. I used to use sendgrid, but had lots of problems with deliverability, never had any issues wish postmark so far.

Link to postmark since it’s kind of hard to find on google: https://postmarkapp.com/

[going_to_800]

Postmark is the best in my opinion. Stay away from Sparkpost as much as you can, the worst service I encountered.

They're shutting down accounts without any notice. It doesn't matter how many emails you sent, that you have 0 spam complaints, extremely low bounce rate ... on the first issue they're banning your account.

We used them to notify our customers when new people sign up on their portal so we included details about those users, including the website. We got JUST ONE, SINGLE .tk domain in the email content and they blocked our account completely. We were also on their Premier plan.

No notice before-hand, no warning, nothing.. they simply blocked the account and haven't activated it back even after numerous requests. They couldn't point to any document that stated their policies and what rules we should follow or why they banned us.

tl;dr. Stay away from Sparkpost, they ban your account without notice.

[roseway4]

I work for SparkPost and would be happy to escalate for further review if you provide me with a ticket number or contact details.

[lfrodrigues]

Very happy with mailgun. We had the same experience with sparkpost.

Our account (that we had been using for 6 months) was locked right after we paid a bit over $200 for October.

We filled a ticket and gave them all the info they requested. Eventually the reply was a template that didn't explain anything. They also refused to refund the remaining credits.

Here the nice rejection email:

Thank you for your interest in SparkPost. We strive to offer the very best email service, and to that end, we maintain a strict anti-abuse messaging policy.

Because we cannot offer you the high deliverability you would expect from SparkPost, we must decline to provide our services. We wish you the best in your future business endeavors.

[brightball]

Last I checked they were still lacking automatic DKIM rotation. Has that been fixed? Mailgun was too fwiw.

Sendgrid and Sparkpost are the only two I know of doing this correctly at the moment.

[filt]

I used to use Postmark but switched to Mailgun. I'm very happy. What would you say is the benefit of Postmark compared to Mailgun?

[theptip]

Postmark seems to have very good diagnostics. They seem to have quite fine grained control over bounce lists too, which Sendgrid is shockingly bad at. I haven’t evaluated Mailgun in detail. Interested to know what factors led you to switch?

[nullwarp]

Been using them as my outbound processor for my self-hosted email to avoid dealing with all the reputation and it works flawlessly.

[thejosh]

Yep, used them for inbound/outbound processing and they are pretty flawless.