HN Explorer

Which email service provider does HN use?

3 points by trevelyan ↗ HN
More specifically, what are the alternatives to Sendgrid? I write because said company has auto-disabled my account (93% reputation, 4+ years usage) simply because an occasional newsletter hit some non-public volume threshold and they didn't bother to read the mailing or view my usage history before concluding my account was compromised and shutting it down.

I'm not sure if this is a crude attempt to push me into a higher subscription tier, but my company is now offline (no new signups, etc) and this problem will last at least 16-20 hours because the only people who can deal with it (or answer support emails) are asleep, at least according to the marketing people who do work 24/7.

So what are the alternatives and what experiences does HN have with them? Just to be clear, I'm looking for a basic SMTP utility that charges a reasonable subscription fee with per-mail charges for excess volume and lets me manage user mailings and unsubscribe requests. Companies with a low tolerance for spammers obviously preferred.

4 comments

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drinkyouroj
Amazon's Simple Email Service (SES) works well for me. You can use it with any number of AWS tools, or via straight-up SMTP. Nothing fancy, and I've never had any problems with it.
davismwfl
We split transactional emails between Mandrill App (Mailchimp's transactional service) and Amazon SES for now. Never had an issue with either one, but I built the dual solution because of concerns about having an email get one line shut off. Also, for our newsletter, we use Mailchimp and not either transactional service.

When we were researching who to use Sendgrid was in the top few but my research showed they were less transparent about almost everything, which pushed us towards our current solution.

sgshawn
trevelyan, I work at SendGrid in Support. Our Support engineers are on (chat) 24/7. Sorry about the suspension. Sometimes when we detect behavior that may damage your sending reputation we put the brakes on so that we can make sure things are going as planned and/or offer advice. All email systems attract spammers. These filters allow us to continually send email reliably. No system is perfect and sometimes legit sending may look suspicious. We want to partner with you to make sure you're successful. Lifting the suspension can be done with one call, chat or email. Again, sorry if our actions were mistaken as malicious. Reach out and we'll help. https://support.sendgrid.com/hc/en-us/articles/203979566

Shawn