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Mailgun IMAP/POP Mailbox EOL

5 points by mcnully ↗ HN
Received this from mailgun: "You are receiving this email because we have identified you as a user of Mailgun POP3/IMAP mailboxes. We've previously communicated that we will be disabling all POP3/IMAP mailboxes."

Obviously they (rackspace) can't give away something they would prefer to sell for $5/mo. Has anyone found a similar service that hasn't sold out yet and is not priced per mailbox?

5 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 19.7 ms ] thread
ferrantim
Mailgunner here. That's actually not the reason we end of life's the product. It just wasn't very popular unfortunately. If it was, we probably would have keep it. This was actually what we thought would be one of the coolest features of mailgun, but it never took off. Sorry you won't be able to use it anymore. Obviously you were a happy user. I wish there had been more! Btw, Rackspace email is $2/box not $5. Any they have reseller plans that cut cost even more. Not free but still really cheap. Good luck with your search!
glimcat
I started using Mailgun recently - and I wasn't aware that you had this as a feature, or I would have been using it.

The only use case you really market is as an API. At least that I've been exposed to, across several channels, after actively investigating which ESP I wanted to use, after actively paying attention to marketing from you and your main competitors for several years. So...yeah.

I can find documentation easily enough now that I know to check the docs for it, but maybe it's more an issue with publicizing this aspect of the service?

ferrantim
Thanks for the comments. We hid the feature for a year once we announced the end-of-life so that's probably why you didn't know about it. Before that, it was a major part of our website/marketing. This is one of the tough things about a SaaS business, figuring out where to focus. Curious how others have handled making end of life product decisions.
glimcat
That's often the best way to handle it, yeah.

I'm curious what motivated the switch-off - compared to the LTV-weighted number of users attracted or retained, was it consuming too much support time, compute resources, dev maintenance hours, team mindshare?

It seems like a case of "this isn't working for us so we need to stop having it on our list of things to think about," but maybe there were other inciting factors for the EOL decision?

mcnully
I stand corrected...lets chalk it up as an avg b/w the exchange (microsoft tax of 10/user/mo and 2/user/mo). :)

I'd love to share specific use cases that would funnel more demand your direction, but it appears that ship has sailed. Good thing you asked your users what would make that better though and they said kill it (said none of them ever).

I guess the only thing left to do is open source it and we will take it off of your hands.

Thanks!