So with Mandrill going premium, what are some alternatives?

I'm not so sure about sendgrid now

I recently found sendgrid blocking quite a lot of emails. I contacted them with the info from the log:

Code:
550 "JunkMail rejected - o1678912x138.outbound-mail.sendgrid.net [167.89.12.138]:34514 is in an RBL, see Blocked - see http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?167.89.12.13

Their support came back wit a stock response that the problem was that IP was shared hosting and so could be blacklisted due to another user on the same server.

I responded that the IP in question (167.89.12.138), according to whois.arin.net Is a sendgrid IP, not my server.

Net Range 167.89.0.0 - 167.89.127.255
CIDR 167.89.0.0/17
Name SENDGRID04
Handle NET-167-89-0-0-1



No response yet.
 
That also happened to me.

One of their servers might have been blacklisted but it was delived a couple of minutes after that, I guess from another of their servers.


@BassMan could you please share how you've set up Pepipost?
I'm always getting errors.
 
No particular. Oh, I think one time a spamming came through their server, but no big deal. I just went with other service.
 
That also happened to me.

One of their servers might have been blacklisted but it was delived a couple of minutes after that, I guess from another of their servers.


@BassMan could you please share how you've set up Pepipost?
I'm always getting errors.
I could have sworn I posted something the other day

I was using Mandrill and right before I cancelled it because of the cost, the IP they were sending from got blacklisted and the messages being sent were getting rejected or something. Anyways, gone.

Now I'm back to using the default XF mail, will just deal with it for now.

On one of my sites though I have to (not my decision) have to deal with GoDaddy and their relay servers, which means all mail is delayed by about 4 minutes. Until I can switch servers I am looking for a mandrill-like option.

I've looked briefly at SAS but from the forum it sounds like they have the same horrid problems with mail delivery being delayed and blacklisted IPs. So what is the general feedback on these other alternatives?

Speed of mail delivery?

Reliability of mail delivery, i.e. not going to yahoo and hotmail spam (as well as gmail and AOL sometimes too)?
 
I'm using Sparkpost for one forum (smaller) with no issues. I'm using Amazon SES for another forum (larger, 500K posts) and I'm having no problems.

I was using Mandrill before.
 
You should use them if:
  • You're on a shared hosting, The IP might get blacklisted because of another site.
  • You send large batches, like newsletters or any other kind of mass email.
  • You just don't trust/like your hosting's email service.

Every week I send emails to inactive users, newsletters from time to time and big events notifications.
 
My biggest question is if any of these improve deliverability of forum email to hotmail (any Microsoft) and yahoo. Those are the biggest problem users. Next is probably Apple anything because they don't allow users to whitelist. The. AOL which seems to be less of a problem, and last is gmail which still is up there.

The there are all the cable providers like Comcast and Mediacom, as well as Verizon.

That dang grey listing and whatever else these companies use seem to almost jail all forum emails really easily. Even if I have a dedicated IP, which I do.

One is on a reseller account and the other is a VPS, both with deliverability issues. It's maddening.
 
Care to share the knowledge ;)
Well, you have
Mail in a Box
IRedmail
And just about any Linux distribution with a manual MTA setup on it for your domain(s). Preferably using virtual domains.

Also, I noticed there is several website that offers free, what about doing a poll to see what are the top ones?
You mean like Gmail Apps, Mandril, and the others... That's what this discussion thread is about. And remember, free is typically not truly free. Look what happened with Mandril.
 
Totally agree I simply wanted to put out that by doing a poll others user can see which option are more used than the other ones :cool:
 
I've been using Pepipost for about a month now on 2 sites and it's been pretty good. They are quick to help with setup, configuration, and troubleshooting issues. Their control panel is pretty straight forward, I found a few bugs and reported them, not sure if they have fixed or not (nothing serious, just unexpected action/etc)

Their bounce handler does work with XF but the only thing I haven't quite been able to figure out is their blacklisting system. I'm not sure yet exactly how to configure XF bound handler so that it works "together" but essentially Pepipost will blacklist an email under certain conditions and this does not necessarily translate to the forum account going to "email invalid (bounced)", so on the forum side, it may appear that an email/account is still valid because it hasn't bounced X number of times in X number of days etc but it might be blacklisted on Pepipost, so the message will get sent from the forum and then stopped there with no report back to XF saying that it was stopped. So these need to be synchronized somehow, or you need to manually check the blacklist.

I don't know how big of an issue this is for me personally but I can see it being a problem on a big board. Because you can't remove an address off the blacklist, you can only move it to the whitelist.
 
Top Bottom