[jwr]

BTW, don't use SendGrid unless you intend to pay them lots of money for a dedicated IP. I've been using them for a couple of years now and it's extremely frustrating, because they are used by spammers and do not react quickly enough or simply do not care. Some of your E-mails will end up sent from IPs that landed in various anti-spam blackhole systems already and will never reach their destination.

This happens regularly and makes SendGrid totally useless for transactional E-mail (I prefer to send it myself) and problematic for things like product updates.

I complained to them about this problem many times and it is my impression that this is a way to force-upsell customers to higher plans with dedicated IPs.

[notreallyserio]

I'm not sure this is limited to SendGrid. Are there comparable email services that don't use shared IPs or that have done a consistently good job of stopping spammers? I've had moderate-to-poor luck with Mailgun (Yahoo and Microsoft don't really like them much).

[raxxorrax]

AWS SES doesn't seem to have a problem, but you have to describe your usage and verify the domain from which you will be sending.

They usually act within 24h to enable sending if you have set up everything.

[jwr]

Postmark is next on my list of services to try. They specifically say "It’s our job to provide you with great deliverability with or without dedicated IP addresses" and they allow you to separate transactional E-mails from the rest.

[crisp]

Thanks for the insight. It's the only mailer service I've used so far but seems like I gotta do some exploring.

[technothrasher]

I've been exploring lately, and the only two I've actually tried so far are SendGrid and Amazon SES. Both of them have a free tier that lets me play. Both of them have so far had pretty poor deliverability due to being in blacklists, though SendGrid has been better.

I'm just looking for something that doesn't cost an arm and a leg for the minimal email volume I send, and that has better deliverability than sending myself with a VPS, as there's usually at least one bad actor in any /24 your typical VPS will land in and that punishes your deilverability.

[npsomaratna]

Postmark works well for transactional email. We've seen consistently good deliverability over time.

[Belphemur]

I used them at the previous company I worked. They were just launching their products.

They have the best support I ever encountered, we were having weird delivery issue on some specific clients and they help us debug the whole problem.

They have more than fair pricing and actually do a manual verification when you want to start using them (and not just testing with your own domain).

Their hobbyist tier is 100 mails per month. No credit card required.

[technothrasher]

Thanks! It was on my list to check out, I guess I'll do that now :)