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by bobflorian 1952 days ago
I actively work with and set up ~100 domains in SendGrid, and Yahoo and AOL are still, have have been, THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE since I started working at this job 8 years ago. It's always been a black hole into any type of support. I always get the same answer back... "If you don't want to be seen as a spam bot, don't act like one".... OK, I'll just tell my client they can't send their 20k emails when they want (with a non insignificant going to Yahoo/AOL still). Honestly I don't know what else we can do better. We don't send newsletters and such, we only send transnational emails.
3 comments

PSA: Don’t accept job as mail sysadmin.
We are a small SaaS start-up with 4 engineers in total, I'm one of them. Being a senior person, I've to deal with all kinds of crap; SFP, DKIM, domain validation and what not.

Just when I relax content that things are in control I get a folder full of files which contain spaces in the file names that need to be processed.

The struggle is real. I found Mailgun to be pretty reliable for yahoo/aol/verizon domains, but my volume isn’t crazy big.
I tried Mailgun about 5 years ago. I had a short term, low-volume need, but found that their free tier servers had poor reputations and I remember that Yahoo in particular would not deliver their email. Maybe that's to be expected: any free email sending service is going to be abused by spammers. But it wasn't a great first impression.
Mandrill has been reliable, but more expensive, when it comes to AOL Yahoo Hotmail and Outlook. (I work at an agency, we recently migrated off sendgrid to mandrill for all our clients due to deliverability issues)