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Ask HN: Best provider for sending transactional emails?

20 points by ollieco ↗ HN
I am building a web app that will send SEO reports via email and I am on the lookout for a decent provider to deliver emails.

I understand that Amazon SES is the cheapest when it comes to sending emails. I am not sure how good their email deliverability is.

Other options are Postmark (somewhat pricey), Mailgun and Sendgrid. I would like to know which email providers are preferred by the HN community.

26 comments

[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 61.7 ms ] thread
boyanpro
I can't which one is the best. But we use MailGun and we are not happy with it. We will probably switch to Postmark.
bdibs
Why aren’t you happy with MailGun? I’m a customer and I haven’t had any issues with it.
newsbinator
MailGun's support is horrible. I kept emailing them to let them know about login issues, and it would take them a week to get back to me. After a couple tries, they just dropped the ball and stopped following up on the ticket. Message received.
kc10
I also never faced an issue with MailGun, though I mostly use smtp not their http api.

Is there any specific issue you ran into?

akhatri_aus
For us it takes too long for the messages to be received with mailgun.
davewasthere
You're noticing a delay between mailgun getting the email and it getting to the client?

I'm using their REST api to send emails, and I've yet to see an email take more than a couple of seconds to get to destination (gmail) while testing.

How long is too long?

dgranda
I use both on free tier and I am happier with PostMark.

I had several issues when sending to Microsoft (hotmail, msn, etc.) domains via MailGun because someone exceeded granted quota for outbound IP address and since then I balance outgoing emails using both.

As mentioned by others, MailGun support doesn't care much about queries from free tier users so I would go for PostMark if I had to pay (more intensive use) or recommend to someone.

pvsukale3
Try Spark post. Their free plan is good.
bharani_m
Stay away from Sparkpost. They will put your account on hold without any warning (and for no good reason) and then their support team takes ~2 days to reply.
RaspyRoe
We use mailgun but there are a bunch of wierdly dropped emails. Am I to hope that would change with something like Postmark if not with Sparkpost? The fact is that we always use the lowest tier of paid plan since our volume is not too big and dont feel that we are an "important" user on a lot of services.
pvsukale3
Postmark treats their free users like first class users. But they only give 25000 free emails.
tokn
Never had a problem with SES deliverability personally. You do get the odd end-user email address on the suppression list but that's not often. I've only used their SMTP set up though, no SDKs or anything like that
maxehmookau
I'm a fan of SendGrid. Never had a problem.
jst90
What volume are you looking at?
nicolaslem
I tried a few ones and decided to go with Mailgun.

All the providers mentioned are targets for spammers. So they have to somehow whitelist your account before they allow you to send at full speed.

In that regard I found Mailjet to have the worst on-boarding experience, and Mailgun to have the best.

zerni
Definitely sendgrid!
srge
Provided you can code all the necessary unsub/bounce/report modules and display logs yourself, AWS SES is the cheapest and it works well.
02thoeva
We've had quite a lot of experience using Amazon SES, as we run an email marketing platform on it. We run both our marketing and transactional emails using it for https://emailoctopus.com.

If you're already using AWS then I'd definitely look at SES. I appreciate the price may seem too cheap, but the service is now used by huge companies for their transactional emails, the likes of Netflix rely heavily on it. As long as you configure your set-up correctly with DKIM/SPF I'd be surprised if you ran into too many delivery problems. Also worth noting they now offer dedicated IPs, for a not too costly monthly fee.

gtsteve
My company (and my last one also) uses SES. It's got both a REST API and SMTP endpoint, so for most apps all you need to do is reconfigure the settings.

If you already have EC2 instances, the free tier of 62,000 messages should be comfortable for a lot of teams.

davewasthere
Mandrill, Mailgun, Sendgrid, SES... they've all got their place.

I find the deliverability comparable (although I'm least experienced with SES). Where they shine perhaps, is in reporting and tracing of issues.

Postmark do look good and perhaps with _only_ transactional email, their deliverability could be among the best.

tmaly
I have used mailgun without any issues. The free tier is nice and I was not forced to have a paid plan when I got started.
tixocloud
I've been pretty happy with Mailgun thus far. Their free tier is what got me started.
codegeek
I have gone from Mandrill to Sendgrid and back to Mandrill. Personally, we had tons of issues with Sendgrid (too many blacklisted IPs, emails being delivered late etc) but Mandrill has been rock solid.
shanecleveland
Postmark has been excellent for me. Transactional only. I believe you get 25,000 emails for free, and then very reasonable after that.
gt565k
Mandrill has the best features, but depending on your volume, their pricing might not be the best.