I'm surprised by the other comments here that I'm in the minority thinking that the sales approach was pretty terrible. You're trying to sell something you don't understand to a company you don't understand. Why? If you actually want to "help" a company (by selling them your product... not really sure how that's "helping", but...) then at least do some research into the company and provide something that looks useful rather than some crappy "Hi, I like you, let's chat!"
In this specific case, someone somewhere is lying about services being provided. If that's sales then that's not great. If that's accounts/billing then that's probably worse. In any case it's a pretty terrible look for the company concerned, and understandably results in an erosion of trust.
Counterpoint is that Mailgun likely had flagged the account (80% deliverability is bad) and wanted to open a line of communication without coming across as hostile. It wasn't a sales opportunity, it was a "you need to improve" email wrapped in a friendly opening.
Evan then replied taking a hostile footing, which resulted in the sale rep backing up his opening with a list of agenda items (list cleaning, dedicated IP address, etc).
At this point it became a purely defensive line-by-line encounter because egos got involved once the Mailgun rep listed the real reasons he was writing.
IMO this is a massive overreaction and not a good look for the blog author.
If someone from a company is lying to you then is this really an overreaction?
(*Was 80% cherry-picked from a particular domain and so used in a purposefully misleading way? Should a sales rep have access to that sort of data anyway?)
I would disagree with this read based on the opening email from Mailgun. Especially for an "out of the blue" email, without further context I would personally just delete such an email and forget about it as I really have trouble giving a good faith reading to such a vague email.
The Subject and the content really lack actual content, and the points that I find ineffective are:
- Unclear/seemingly random subject; the goal I suppose is to evoke a response based on curiosity, but looking at my spam folder on gmail, I lump such a subject line in with emails like "what're you doing tonight?" "I'm lonely, can you save me?" (I'm cleaning up the titles a bit...) I read it as just fishing for some response and hoping that someone bites
- The email itself hints at a concern by citing a specific number, but then says "or more"; this strikes me as odd that they'd land on specific number but then add some open ended qualifier. To me, I read this as again a way to try to catch my attention and either misdirect me to the fact that the person hasn't really researched anything in my profile for us to talk about and instead just wants to get me on a call. It's "specifically vague", and I get the goal is to provoke a conversation, but I feel that this is very transparently a frustrating sales tactic, and another reason I would have just binned the email in the first place
- "See how Mailgun can help you succeed" to me this says that they have no specific strategy in mind and just want to propose some new offers/features. This in and of itself is fine, but like the author, I actually would just prefer they be upfront about this and mention what features they're interested in upselling. Maybe I do want one, but I don't want to learn about it from a meeting I can't prepare for.
- The "let's meet on Wednesday" part without offering up any of their available times is more of a personal pet peeve as I don't like going back and forth like that; if you want to meet with me, please just tell me when you're available and if it doesn't work __and__ I'm interested, I'll tell you.
The first email really does read just like a spam email in every way, and sure, it probably works.
The author's response is mostly fine in my opinion, though I must admit the last line reads more like someone's fantasy on what they wish they wrote to people, but for convenience I'll assume the author actually wrote that.
The next email from Mailgun though really surprises me if it's true:
> First, you're right, it is a low effort sales template. It does work.
I actually don't understand why they even include the "It does work" part or why they admit it's a low effort template. I feel like the sales person maybe thought they were building rapport and that a small 'mea culpa' would be a common ground to discuss, but personally I find this a very wrong read of the author's initial response, and a fairly low effort attempt to get the conversation going.
The rest of the email and subsequent ones I'm not going to break down point by point, but I have the same problem I had with the first "specifically vague" points; I actually share the author's concern about why the employee would have this knowledge and access (I don't deal with email at all for my company like this, so I have no idea if such access for the mail providers is normal; I assume likely it is for troubleshooting purposes, but if that's the case, I'd expect that such concerns are explained more clearly and why it's an issue, and that there are better answers to the inevitable follow up questions.
Basically, I see a failed attempt at a Sales person that basically raised suspicion in the part of a customer. The author I think had an absolute right to be a bit angry that the sales person basically said "oh looks like we've been charging you for a service that you didn't actually get to use" and then completely ignore the issue. If it was another rouse to get a conversation, I think it's a really offensive way to do so personally, implying that the company was billing me for a service I wasn't getting and not acknowledging "Oh wait, that's really wrong of us as a company" or at least looking into this further.
"It's their job" only goes so far; for me, the Mailgun rep really created a huge amount of discomfort and distrust to the point that they basically said the customer was being charged for a service not being applied to their account, and the sales rep did not even seem to care.
I absolutely would have driven far further and I too would share the same distrust. I'm not sure I'd write such a call to action like the customer, but I definitely would know that I would be looking to talk to anyone else at Mailgun about the entire incident.
The situation got heated as did the author, and frankly I have trouble blaming them. I don't see the author's responses as hostile or abusive; I do see the author as suddenly very concerned while considering that this might just be a bad sales person creating concern/worry for no reason, which I would personally be pretty angry about.
I guess it's all about your perspective on how to interact with strangers via email. For me, I think it's best to keep an open mind and have empathy with someone reaching out instead of demeaning them for a strategy that they personally didn't craft. The rep saying "You're right, it's a low effort sales template" was his way of saying that it's not his preferred choice either, but he has his hands tied and this is how he puts food on the table.
It just seems really weird to take all of that and then jump to a massive conclusion that everyone should stop using Mailgun as a mail provider. The author took an innocuous email, created a battle which he won, and then decided to start a war.
I'm less taking issue with the absolute specifics of the email and more with the decision to turn this into something I'm reading about on the front page of HN.
Evan, your response was needlessly rude, and if I were Mailgun I'd let you go as a customer. The idea that you'd drop a company over this is overly dramatic. I would encourage you to be nicer to relatively low-level employees, and Joe did seem reasonably knowledgeable about Mailgun's processes
You don’t fire a customer for being testy. It’s way disproportionate and if customers are unhappy you want to know this. Rude feedback is still feedback, and most businesses struggle to get honest feedback because most people are just way too nice
I run a business and I absolutely would fire a customer for being needlessly rude to an employee. If they're angry at the employee they can direct their 'feedback' to me. But yeah this 'the customer is always right' chunk of American culture needs to die- abusing employees is not 'feedback', nor is it acceptable
I also run a business. I’m a customer of Mailgun as well. As a business it’s not hard to enforce boundaries without going for the nuclear option. Everybody has bad days sometimes, and just as we want customers to be understanding when we have downtime we can be understanding when customers are irate.
In my experience customers get rude when they are already unhappy and have been for a while. In the case of Mailgun their service is very mediocre (unreliable api, slow, etc) and I don’t think they care. Does this justify rudeness towards support staff? No, but people tend to be much nicer when they’re generally happy with the service they get for their money.
Calling out aggressive and uninvited outreach from a vendor is extremely different from "the customer is always right" mentality. The two things are not the same.
Rudeness is often just a mask for something else. Look behind the rudeness and you find frustration and a need to be heard. Emotion is a bit like a pendulum, one side is anger, the other is happiness, and in the middle is neutral. If you just listen and try and genuinely connect, the pendulum can swing back. In my experience some of the rudest customers became our biggest advocates. It's the neutral customers that you never hear from that can be the most difficult because they just churn away without any actionable feedback.
Specifically to the sales tactic, hopefully everyone knows it's a tactic, and it works because it elicits responses. People crave genuine connection and disingenuous emails like this can be trigger points, but alas the incentive structure of inside sales teams is often to elicit any response. It's the modern day "calling at dinner time because you know someone will be home" trick.
Trying to sell something [they should have already had] by framing it as technical support outreach is spam.
Obfuscating that behind generic "meetings" (read: let me pitch) is just disrespectful. If you want time with buyer, come loaded, explain what you can deliver, explain why an email won't suffice and you might pique my interest.
1. My time is valuable to me. Low effort sales templates are offensive in this light.
2. Joe never answered about why he has different metrics than Evan. You're just going to waltz past that point? Someone in mailgun is lying.
3. Nothing about this was rude or dramatic. Send me an email chain like this, I'd be happy to demonstrate what rude looks like. Waste my time at your own peril
Which of the two responses do you find needlessly rude? To me they come off as curt certainly (which is a reasonable response to unsolicited mail), but not rude.
Everyone here is talking about Evan's response, so I may be misunderstanding something, but... If I'm billed for a dedicated email for years and it hasn't been provisioned for me, isn't that a major problem with the service?
> If I'm billed for a dedicated email for years and it hasn't been provisioned for me, isn't that a major problem with the service?
If that's true, yes. But it sounds plausible that the salesman was in error (also a problem, but less severe IMO):
> (Mail headers show the dedicated IP is functioning correctly, see "headers.png", where the outbound route matches the dedicated IP in the web interface.)
The only thing questionable I see here is that random sales employees seem to have access to customer information. It's not clear to me that the information they have access to is actually all that sensitive, though. Delivery rates and whether or not they've purchased a dedicated IP address? Eh, not sure that's a big deal.
Of course, we have no idea what other customer information this sales guy might have access to. And it's concerning that the information he had access to was incorrect, or he was somehow very badly misinterpreting it. Or, worse, he was confused and actually looking at another customer's dashboard, which, if true, would be pretty concerning. These things are perhaps worrisome, but it's not clear what was actually going on here.
I agree that the sales guy was more pushy than he should have been, seems like he was poorly-trained and not good at his job, and I too hate vague requests for agenda-less meetings, but this whole thing seems like an overreaction.
Except in this case, Mailgun is supposed to have access to this information. This is what they are used for. This sort of email from Mailgun is one of the reason you use them as a service. This comment[1] explains more, but the tl;dr is that the issues the person was emailing about are things they should be emailing about. It's actually more concerning that Evan doesn't understand what he's paying for. If he was really concerned about customer data, none of this would be a surprise.
I read that comment and am very aware that an ESP has access to all the information you give them.
It comes down to internal controls. If the email in the OP is actually an approach from a compliance or customer management department, it's a clumsy attempt.
To me, it reads as a sales pitch. If so, my opinion remains unchanged - I don't think I'd be happy if sales people had access to the recipient domains of my outbound emails.
Edit: Re-reading the post, the Mailgun employee says in their reply:
> First, you're right, it is a low effort sales template. It does work.
That really does suggest that this was an attempt at an upsell from a sales person.
I’m not sure sales should have access to that information rather than support. Of course someone needs access to that information to make sure the service is working, but using that info in a sales pitch seems wrong.
I would try to see this from Evan's perspective. Its easy to find next to useless Sales people, its harder to find a good customer. Evan is a busy guy and said please don't waste my time with a Sales call this is only for your own benefit and then got something else.
And I don't want you Sales people poking around in my SaaS setup or in my data.
In the comments he posts another interaction with a sales-person. Read his second reply... I'd be happy losing him too. (As a business owner I understand how we get spam like this all the time, and I almost always ignore it if it is clearly not targeted. If someone goes out of their way to list some real reasons why they like my company though, I would try to be a little nicer)
I agree with the sentiment, though not the execution.
Time is certainly the most valuable asset, and if someone is wasting my time/energy then I just ignore them.
If I see an email that's coming from a random sales-related channel and not from my support rep, I'm ignoring it. If I'm using a service incorrectly, and the email is vague and gives the same vibe when someone asks "Can I ask you a question?" on slack and waits for a response, then I'm not going to bother replying.
Waste your time, but don't expect the same from me.
Interesting read. While the general consensus on the comments here so far are "why be so rude" -- I don't think this was rude at all.
I'd be similarly upset if I was treated this way by someone from marketing.
Edit: From a second read, I really don't see any of this as rude. You know how it's poor etiquette to start a chat message with "Hey, do you have a moment?", And it's much better to just write the question and wait for a response?
This is the email equivalent. "Request too vague, I don't want to meet. Please specify further, unless this is a sales pitch, in which case, preemptively not interested." It's not passive aggressive, it's just business.
If I had received, "You're right, this is a low effort sales pitch, and it works", I don't think I'd bother replying. That is an extremely passive aggressive response.
> You know how it's poor etiquette to start a chat message with "Hey, do you have a moment?"
I think this is the difference. For plenty of people, this is a NOT a widely held norm. It really IS ok to just start a chat or email with a "Hey, do you have a moment?"
That doesn't mean it should be ok. We probably all would be better off providing more context for more effective communication. But standards here seem to vary widely.
I think that it sounds harsh to say "I don't take meetings with no agenda", but is the right thing to do. Everyone wants your time, and it's the most valuable resource you possess, so being protective makes a lot of sense.
I wouldn't reply to someone's email and accuse them of "low-effort sales" or whatever. I'd just say "thanks, not interested" and then be internally mad at the low effort.
From the other side, I think that sales should be aware that these emails can read like "hey, we're going to shut you off unless you chat with me for 30 minutes" which is annoying. It would be nice to clarify that up front, to avoid the negative emotion associated with that prospect.
> it sounds harsh to say "I don't take meetings with no agenda", but is the right thing to do
Evan's is the wrong way to do it. "I am busy–do you have specific recommendations you can share over email" is more concise, polite and to the point. (Ignoring the e-mail, or a simple not interested, are also options.) And if you want to use those words, fine, but leave off the "low effort" insults at the end.
I think it is useful, though, to teach people that it's disrespectful to send vague meeting requests without an agenda. Using your "I am busy -- do you have specific recommendations..." response obscures the real objection.
Certainly I think there's a better way of saying it than OP did, though: perhaps, "before we schedule anything, can you propose an agenda so we can both be sure a meeting is the best use of our time?" or something like that.
I would say that telling someone who emailed you in an unsolicited fashion that you have an expected protocol for interaction isn't in the wrong and putting that line first in an unambiguous way is practically required for how people read emails. They did ask for context after that line, which was fine. I will say that the 'low-effort' part of their phrasing could have been constructed better but the first reply was more in the scope of stern and terse than outright insulting and hostile. I feel like I have to answer dozens of emails like this in a similar fashion because then I get the form letter or PDF that they want to show me over a meeting or they actually give an agenda and I can make the appropriate decision for myself. Since there's an existing relationship here any ambiguity wastes everyone's time, if it was an unrelated entity then you can assume sales email but in this case you can't. Any moderate sized company or larger is a multi-headed hydra so it's never obvious what part of the beast you are talking to and why they are seeking you out.
There is a difference between saying "I like my meetings to be specific and driven by agenda , what are the points you like to discuss" and saying " I don't take meetings without agenda.
The OP could have ignored the email, or even marked spam it. If you take the effort to reply then do it courteously there is no excuse for being rude.
Well, if you read the exchange below, it might not be an insult after all. It definitely was low-effort: he started by saying that he admires Even's work, but then admitted it's just a formula and so on. Really, if the words you use have no meaning, why to use them? He is definitely not the worst of all salesmen I met, but not particularly bright, and the effort he put into the initial email wasn't really above average.
After reading the last comment on the task, he just seems oversensitive and hostile.
> I feel that your initial outreach was intentionally deceptive in a transparent and falsifiable way -- and for no reason. You could just as easily have said you were "interested" in Phabricator without being dishonest.
> It's important that I be able to trust people I do business with. It took you three words to violate my trust by lying to me.
It's okay to be annoyed with someone for using a standard email template. He takes it a step too far and accuses them of having malicious intentions when it's obviously not the case.
I don't believe this applies to salesmen, though. They're trained to exploit all holes related to human decency and courtesy. They expect a polite person will not reject an invitation (to a meeting they absolutely don't need and which serves only one party) and so on.
1. It's a bit different if it's a 'customer success' type person from a product that you're already using- that's different from totally cold outreach
2. You're free to just ignore them, especially over electronic communication. (Silently mark it as spam if you're really annoyed). I teach my kids that the adult way to respond to this kind of pushiness over something like email is to simply ignore them. Responding back with rudeness is juvenile, this is like day 1 of Being A Professional 101 kind of stuff. 'No thanks' and/or then ignoring them puts you in control of the situation, it's ultimately the high road
> 1. It's a bit different if it's a 'customer success' type person from a product that you're already using- that's different from totally cold outreach
It's really not, but I agree completely with your second point. I've managed interactions with vendors for only ~5 years and this is for a small startup, with not a lot of them, and still over 5 years they switch up your account managers left and right (people keep moving companies) and you never know what you're going to get. And each of them thinks your whole job is to just wait for their random emails to have calls without agendas scheduled where they'll go over whatever playbook they were given to see if you'll commit some more spend this quarter before their earnings.
I tend to reply after only several days and try to not get baited into looking an asshole like this Evan person did - but sometimes it's hard. I can imagine this person gets way more email than I do and my advice would be to just not reply if what you're going to write is to "teach them a lesson". There's no point in telling someone they lied to you in a sales email, get over yourself.
Salespeople are people too. They deserve some courtesy until they step over a line. I will always try to be polite on my first reply, if the salesperson actually wrote me something directly. If it was just a spammy mail merge blast, then I will ignore the bot. Even knowing they are using sales techniques, I try to not be a jerk. Even though I agree with the author of the original post, he comes off a low EQ.
"Some" courtesy, perhaps, but many first contacts are already over the line in their fundamental construction.
Someone illegally robocalling my cell will earn my scorn immediately. As well as any idiot calling at 3AM in the region of my area code. When I'm called the very next day by a company I asked to put me on their do not call list, while I won't emotionally terrorize the fellow on the phone, it's worth pointing out in no uncertain terms that this is completely unacceptable, and exactly why. If someone scrapes my git logs for emails to give poorly targeted recruiter spam, I'm going to share my two cents about how exactly I feel about their half assed effort.
> he comes off a low EQ.
Low in empathy, maybe. Low in EQ? I disagree.
High EQ doesn't make you a slave to false smiles and empty pleasantries, nor require you to engage in networking with anybody with a pulse. Not all relationships are positive, cooperative, and worth building and reenforcing, nor necessairly worth attempting to salvage in such a direction. The author's initial responses are a bit cold and testing - correctly suspecting low effort sales full of faux relatability without much actual common ground - while not being so negative as to prevent the possibility of correction should that suspicion be proven wrong instead of validated.
Evan perhaps makes a minor mistake in not triaging, cutting off, and ghosting these sales pitches earlier - when it becomes clear it's not a relationship or conversation he'll value. This would likely be driven by curiosity, concern, a desire to give the benefit of the doubt, and/or empathy despite the cold demeanor - but that's not particularly a low EQ thing either.
TL;DR: Sith lord EQ techniques are still EQ techniques.
Could the sales outreach be done better? Sure, but I've seen a lot worse and I feel like the initial email setting the tone with "This request is so vague and nonspecific..." was already more passive aggressive than it has to be and set the tone for the rest of the thread.
Sales people, just like recruiters have a job to do. I just recognise there's another person on the other end doing their job, so there's ways to tell them in a friendly way that you are not interested without being overly rude or smug about it.
> Despite the incident in 2018, Mailgun appears to be giving an excessive level of access to customer data to employees who do not need it in 2020: Joe had access to specific customer domain information, and didn't hesitate to use it purely to try to sell me something. From this, I infer that it is likely routine that sales staff examine customer data without any kind of control or approval. I don't think this is acceptable.
Same thing happened with me on GoDaddy. I used GoDaddy's domain purchase system to negotiate and buy a domain, and transferred it to Cloudflare. A few years later, a GoDaddy buyer contacted me about buying the domain. The only way they could have gotten my email is to trawl through their past purchase records since the domain wasn't using any GoDaddy systems (DNS, email, etc) after it was transferred out.
I sent a very unhappy email back to them and I've been transferring my domains out to other registrars. I no longer recommend GoDaddy.
Of course GoDaddy is scummy, but this is not the only way your information could have been obtained. During the transfer out period, you must provide unmasked contact info. There are services that crawl this info and provide a full historical ownership history. So if your information was ever available in whois, including during the short transfer window, it has been crawled.
That said GoDaddy has never been a good registrar anyway.
I'm just going by what you are saying: that not using GoDaddy email means they couldn't have contacted you. Not using GoDaddy email service is irrelevant and your mention of it at all implies you aren't aware of how your information can get out. It's certainly possible to prevent it but you're not giving the vibe that you understand this.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit. What I meant is when Godaddy contacted me to purchase my domain name, that domain name was in no way mapped to my account - it was not using any GoDaddy services at all. The only way they could have gotten my personal email address was to (1) get the info from WHOIS which Cloudflare blocks - they have a contact form instead of showing the email address or (2) get my email from the past purchase forms.
And in fact they did get my email from the past purchase because I use separate email accounts for my domain registrations and a separate account for domain purchases.
From the comments it seems like there's a bit of an information gap in terms of how email service providers (ESPs) like Mailgun operate, what data they must have routine access to, and how the space evolved to make money (this last part of my info is dated as I left the space about a decade ago).
First, ESPs send email on a client's behalf. One of the primary benefits of using an ESP is co-opting their email reputation and their contacts with real time blacklist (RBL) operators, postmaster organizations at major email providers and third party email reputation groups. A good reputation keeps a sender's email out of the junk folder (or worse refused/dropped on the floor) and is really all most folks care about (especially at an API driven company like Mailgun).
In order to do all of the above, an ESP needs access to the details of the email that's being sent, including recipient email addresses and the contents of the message being sent. This is because both of those things can potentially be dangerous and the ESP is the ultimate responsible party in the eyes of the receiving email provider (i.e. Google holds Mailgun as the responsible party for what Phabricator sends).
Now, as to this sales call, sometime ago (circa ~2004 I guess) it became apparent that ESPs could work with their problematic clients to improve their sending habits, thereby improving their reputation and collect more money from the client in the process (via either direct consulting fees or increased sending volume). This kind of win-win made a lot of sense, but as the price-per-email sent was dropping ESPs were looking for ways to reliably generate more revenue and, well, "deliverability consulting" became a thing. My guess is that this is what this email exchange was about, and like any consulting effort, it's only as good as the last interaction and here I agree with Evan that "Joe" fumbled the ball fairly badly.
Personally, I would have just reached out to Mailgun support and asked what's up with the incorrect billing and Joe's problematic responses, but that doesn't appear to have been Evan's first choice.
Source for the industry insider info is that I used to run the technical side of a small ESP from about 2003 to 2009, was an active participant in MAAWG and generally had to work with my peers across orgs to navigate deliverability problems regularly.
This Evan guy reminds me of the worst customers I have: rude, know-it all, overreacting. Just because you're a customer you're not entitled to be an ass.
Of course they have data about the customer performance, it's part of their job, it doesn't mean it has access to private data.
With the caveat that I know nothing about mailgun, so may have misunderstood parts of the conversation, it sounds, to me, like the salesman did a few very helpful things...
1. Pointed out that the user had been spending money on a service which was not actually being provided. Presumably, mailgun would correct this error.
2. Exposed that the "mail success rate" which the user was seeing might not be the full story.
3. Showed the user that he was paying for suppressed emails, so could (presumably) save some coin by cleaning up his list. (Note that the cost of cleaning might be higher than the extra payments, but good to know that there's a cost to suppressed emails so that the user can make a judgement.)
This rep was honest ("it was a template"), gave a specific agenda when asked, and gave useful information. Complaining that your rep has access to your data when that's his entire job is ridiculous. Data security best practices are that data should be provided on a "need to know" basis. In order to provide the above 3 values, the rep needs access to that data.
The other possibility, which would explain the different delivery numbers and different understanding of the dedicated IP status, is that the sales rep was confused, screwed up, and was looking at some other customer's data while thinking it was Phabricator's.
It was quite sad to read the announcement that development had stopped. Phabricator provided me with one of the best development experiences I've ever had. I guess Github + Gitlab won, and it became insanely difficult for the smaller players to make a dent.
As possible explanation of the initial response, I understand the frustration as I get dozens of these 'how does Tuesday at 3', 'time for a call next week?', etc emails every week as part of sleazy companies' spam email drip campaigns to more than one of my email accounts. That said, continuing to send email to 30,000 suppressed email addresses means you need to spend some time cleaning out old emails from your list. I do this semi-regularly for the confirmed opt-in list for PortableApps.com which is sent via mailgun.
I don’t know, this interaction kind of makes me like Mailgun. Sounds like they were seeing some weird stuff with a customer and reached out to see what was up. That’s what I want out of an email infrastructure provider. It’s hard to maintain high deliverability if you don’t keep careful tabs on things.
I was kind of expecting the complaint to be about how the API only allows a single API key (which is terrible for multiple projects), and doesn't allow generating multiple API keys w/ multiple types of access (kind of like what Cloudflare's API allows you to do)
You can use SMTP [1] if you need something like that . While SMTP technically slower than REST, practically it doesn't matter if your application processes mailjobs in forked background threads or a queue, also most ESPs would rate limit outgoing email after it reaches their system to prevent abuse.
the benefit is also no custom code or needing to add their SDK, you can replace the service by simply replacing the credentials, probably without even a code deployment if you store credentials in env.
I went from mailgun to gsuite. costs went up 3x and almost all of my emails are going to spam folders even when the contact and I have been emailing each other for ages.
Would definitely recommend mailgun/sendgrid over gsuite for emails and not entirely agree with this blog post.
If you started sending Hubspot marketing or CRM emails directly from Gsuite its going to get marked as Spam, thats the whole point of using a transactional service.
I've had multiple clients in the past who have decided to send "Check out my new App!" emails to their entire contact list from Gmail who shortly found out the hard way that it caused all their emails to start being marked as Spam.
I only send out limited transactional emails via gmail and thats only because hubspot only supports sending email by connecting gmail. For some absurd reason they dont allow SMTP servers for sending emails.
Since hubspot is our CRM I had to start using gsuite. The problem is is that the emails from hubspot land in the inbox. BUT the emails from my outlook that I type it out land in people's spam folder.
One reason why I have zero concerns with googles overarching data privacy issue is that I can see how stupid their AI /algorithms are. And with more noise it just gets worse not better.
I built https://forwardemail.net as the costs went up and I needed a cheaper alternative for my domains. Any questions feel free to email me, nick@forwardemail.net
Well, we use Mailgun at work and it’s pretty great. I’ve only ever had one issue with it and it and their support was outstanding.
As somebody who used to work in enterprise support, I don’t see them as having done anything wrong here. It’s just somebody reaching out to do their job.
I laughed out loud when I saw the last email on the page misspells Evan's name as "Even"- as someone named Evan who gets people misspelling my name that way constantly.
Does not admire Evans. Unclear axe wielding. If you really want help be specific. Mailgun is not a very good service in general from my experience but it works. A good alternative if price is relevant.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? It's not what this site is for, we ban accounts that do it repeatedly, and I just had to ask you about this elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29539111). Moreover, we've had to ask you about it repeatedly in the past before this.
> This request is so vague and nonspecific ("Let's take a look"?) that it feels kind of like a low-effort template sales email. If it is, and your primary goal in sending me this email is to get me to purchase more Mailgun services, please do not send me any more emails like this.
This entire sentence was unnecessary..
> Mailgun's hiring or training process for sales employees doesn't seem to be very good: Joe didn't seem to understand the Mailgun system. Beyond not needing it, I also don't think it is acceptable for staff who can not consistently demonstrate a high level of competence to have access to customer data.
In this specific case, someone somewhere is lying about services being provided. If that's sales then that's not great. If that's accounts/billing then that's probably worse. In any case it's a pretty terrible look for the company concerned, and understandably results in an erosion of trust.