So with Mandrill going premium, what are some alternatives?

All that is fine until it makes it to Microsoft. Then, it has nothing to do with the validity of an IP address or the website it originates from, if they think it remotely resembles spam, that's where it ends up. That's not reflected in any kind of stats because it doesn't get outright rejected. The sender is completely blind to classification as spam or junk because the sender domain/etc is all verified as "OK" by the recipient, but the content is spammy looking or junk looking so that's where it ends up.

Now, if there was a feedback system in place to let the sender know that "yes" your email was accepted as "real email" but then "we still think it's kinda spammy so we hid it from the recipient by stuffing it into a spam folder that they never check so nyaaa" that would be much more helpful.

Instead, people waste money thinking that any of these services will solve the problem. I'm saying that they won't...that's my experience.

I regularly have to tell people to look in their junk folders by sending a separate email from a different address that will hopefully not end up in spam itself. I can testify this this!
 
All that is fine until it makes it to Microsoft. Then, it has nothing to do with the validity of an IP address or the website it originates from, if they think it remotely resembles spam, that's where it ends up. That's not reflected in any kind of stats because it doesn't get outright rejected. The sender is completely blind to classification as spam or junk because the sender domain/etc is all verified as "OK" by the recipient, but the content is spammy looking or junk looking so that's where it ends up.

Now, if there was a feedback system in place to let the sender know that "yes" your email was accepted as "real email" but then "we still think it's kinda spammy so we hid it from the recipient by stuffing it into a spam folder that they never check so nyaaa" that would be much more helpful.

Instead, people waste money thinking that any of these services will solve the problem. I'm saying that they won't...that's my experience.

I regularly have to tell people to look in their junk folders by sending a separate email from a different address that will hopefully not end up in spam itself. I can testify this this!

Actually ... I find BT and related companies far worse! But yes, Microsoft are very difficult to deliver to.
 
What's BT refer to? I feel like I should know this lol

British Telecom ... largest Telco/ISP in the UK I believe?
  • btinternet.com
  • btconnect.com
  • btopenworld.com

I average between 3-5% bounce rate from these domains and significantly less from MS and Yahoo domains.

Actually AOL is pretty bad too - we went through a phase where no emails were getting through at all - currently around 4.5% bounce rate, although they don't tend to block like BT do.

Australia's Bigpond (Telstra) is also bad - worse than BT in many regards.
 
Ah, gotcha. Well again, bounce rate is measureable. Spam/junk treatment - as far as I know, there is no data for this. At least nothing anyone is sharing.
 
Ah, gotcha. Well again, bounce rate is measureable. Spam/junk treatment - as far as I know, there is no data for this. At least nothing anyone is sharing.

Well, some email providers/ISPs actually block your emails - so you generally get a "block" bounce notification from them.

I guess in many ways, Gmail's stats are very misleading - because they never block you, they just quietly put the emails in the spam folder and you're none-the-wiser.

So while on the surface BT/MS/AOL/Bigpond seem worse because of all the block bounce messages - at least you can measure progress. With gmail you've not really got much to go on ... although I guess you could track open rates, but that's not necessarily indicative of spam folder rates.
 
that won't work, you can't make an API call to get bounce notifications - they come in via an inbound webhook to your website.

Actually - FYI this is no longer true ... there is a Message Events endpoint you can query which gives you exactly the same data as the webhooks do - just not near-real-time (takes a minute or so for the events to show up) ... but that's good enough for most purposes.
 
Actually - FYI this is no longer true ... there is a Message Events endpoint you can query which gives you exactly the same data as the webhooks do - just not near-real-time (takes a minute or so for the events to show up) ... but that's good enough for most purposes.

I can see that info here:
https://api.sparkpost.com/api/v1/message-events/?events=bounce,out_of_band&from=2018-06-06T11:00
("from" is not mandatory)

In this way, a simple add-on could regularly check Message Events every 20/30 minutes and set User State accordingly.
 
I use postmark. Really good service and nice dashboard.

@m1ne Please can you let me know that how to setup Automated bounced email handler and Automated unsubscribe email handler with postmarkapp? I am getting this Server error log.

Code:
src/vendor/zendframework/zend-mail/src/Storage/Imap.php(215): Zend\Mail\Protocol\Imap->connect('smtp.postmarkap...', 25, 'tls'

Code:
Zend\Mail\Protocol\Exception\RuntimeException: Unsubscribe connection error: cannot connect to host ; error = fsockopen(): unable to connect to ssl://smtp.postmarkapp.com:2525 (Unknown error) (errno = 0 ) src/vendor/zendframework/zend-mail/src/Protocol/Imap.php:93
 
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I found mailgun (free) is getting worse - a whole raft of fails from hotmail due to the free shared IP keep getting blacklisted.

So I bit the bullet and upgraded to Mailgun "Growth" ($80 p.m.) with a dedicated IP. Bam! solved the issue.

However I consider this a temporary fix in that I can't afford to continue with $80 a month for such a small non-profit forum (5k emails a month).

Yes Amazon SES is OK but the logs are crap. Sometimes I need to really know what the server response was whther someone got the email or not and mailgun is good for that.

But I'm just chucking this out there to say that Mailgun does seem to be good

I have also tried the free Sparkpost, Pepipost and Sendgrid) Plus the support with mailgun Growth is spot on - immediate chat help.

But time will tell.
 
So I bit the bullet and upgraded to Mailgun "Growth" ($80 p.m.) with a dedicated IP

I found it interesting (and somewhat disappointing) that the previously free options on SparkPost were wound right back to nothing more than basically a "limited trial" level of functionality, while the paid option went from $49pm to $75pm - which is right up there with what the other premium mail services like Mailgun are charging.

Unfortunately I don't think there are many options around for smaller or non-commercial sites to achieve high mail deliverability for a decent price any more. That's largely because it has become extremely difficult to deliver emails due to increasingly aggressive anti-spam filters - ESPs have to go to a lot of trouble to keep their mail sending activity squeaky clean to protect their reputation.
 
I found mailgun (free) is getting worse - a whole raft of fails from hotmail due to the free shared IP keep getting blacklisted.

So I bit the bullet and upgraded to Mailgun "Growth" ($80 p.m.) with a dedicated IP. Bam! solved the issue.

However I consider this a temporary fix in that I can't afford to continue with $80 a month for such a small non-profit forum (5k emails a month).

If you're on the hunt for an alternative my personal go to would be PostMark (Would cost you $10/m). This line might resonate well with you:

While most email service providers would like you to think a dedicated IP means “better delivery”, we think it’s an excuse for an upsell and a means of handing off responsibility to customers.

At Postmark, it’s our job to ensure the best deliverability no matter what, and for most people, a pristine shared IP pool will have the best results.

Edit: Just to clear the above, they do also sell dedicated IPs if you really want/need it but you should be fine without.
 
For only 5k emais/month (an average of 7mails per hour) why not using your own server? Are you on a vps?
On reading this again, I think I misunderstood in my previous answer which I have now deleted. You didn't mean to suggest I go out and buy my own server, but to use phpmail on "my server" provided by my host.

It is currently shared hosting so that could well have the same hotmail issues. But I will look into switching to a VPS compared with the cost of mailgun dedicated IP and the advantages of mailgun logs that are good, also on that package the support is good. I'm not sure any host would ever be able to offer email support like that or guarantee the same delieverbility but will look into it.
 
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If you're on the hunt for an alternative my personal go to would be PostMark (Would cost you $10/m). This line might resonate well with you:

Looks very good. I'll probasbly give it a whirl, my main need is to easily know when emails were delived successfully or not. At least Mailgunhas good logs to show their failures!

As opposed to Amazon SES which all seems very complex and their bounce notices don't always arrive.
 
Looks very good. I'll probasbly give it a whirl, my main need is to easily know when emails were delived successfully or not. At least Mailgunhas good logs to show their failures!

As opposed to Amazon SES which all seems very complex and their bounce notices don't always arrive.

Postmark is perfect for this, I've used it for many years now.

Screenshot from 2020-02-21 14-58-51.webp
 
Does anyone know how they can tell whan an email is clicked?

But it looks good, my main reservation now is I got no answer whan contacting them via the email form (sales enquiry)

Links are converted to go through their platform.
So, yourdomain.com/something-here/ is converted to click.pstmrk.it/2s/yourdomain.com/random-string
 
Does anyone know how they can tell whan an email is clicked?

But it looks good, my main reservation now is I got no answer whan contacting them via the email form (sales enquiry)

When did you reach out? Support works Monday - Friday I believe. Always been friendly and fast (during business hours) for me.
 
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