
Mailgun Becomes an Independent Company - kikki
http://blog.mailgun.com/mailgun-becomes-an-independent-company/
======
pm90
Thus begins the piecemeal partitioning of Rackspace. It was pretty obvious
that would be the ultimate result after being taken private by Apollo. To be
sure, there was much inertia within the company to let go of services that
weren't profitable/weren't the future of the company anymore even before the
acquisition.

All the while, you have a leadership that continues to say "Everything is OK!
This is good news overall for the company! Let's continue to work hard in
solidarity with each other! We're one big happy family!" Its important for
people (in general) to see past that kind of management bullshit, look at the
numbers (profitability, customers etc.) and make a very informed decision
about their future, lest they get caught unaware by "restructuring".

Disclosure: Obviously, a former Racker. Loved the peers I worked with and the
company culture. Management was (is?) a total shit-show. I was lucky enough to
see the future and take a better job before the company went private.

~~~
jwdunne
It seems that ever since Fanatical Support® became an actual line on our
package, it's been anything but.

Kinda a kick in the teeth when you pay through the nose for an archaic machine
because "we sell support".

~~~
snackai
Fanatical Support? Once requested custom pricing info, 56 hours later I got a
call from someone who had no idea what I was asking about.

~~~
jwdunne
For non-technical users, you must use Plesk. Want to use WHM because cpanel is
more familiar? Won't support the server at all.

Want to use CloudLinux because it makes multiple PHP versions easier for the
less technical? Won't support your server at all.

So it's only fanatical support for a subset of what most vendors usually
support.

Don't get me wrong, support is better than what you get with say eUKhost but a
lot of stuff is faster to just do myself than pick up the phone and listen to
some bad techno until I get through to Linux support.

Fanatical Support my arse.

~~~
snug
Rackspace makes that clear from the beginning. Do you want someone who can
support the most common usecases very well, Apache, Nginx, MySQL, Ubuntu,
CentOS. Or do you want mediocre support that can support YOUR use case.

What you need is a consultant or a service that specializes in your particual
use case.

~~~
jwdunne
Except that cpanel / WHM IS a common use case. Cloud Linux, I concede, isn't
common but making multiple versions of PHP is a common use case.

~~~
devnull42
As a former support racker I can tell you that while those might have fall
outside our offical spheres of support you would have had no issues getting
support for cPanel or WHM. CloudLinux support is a different story.

~~~
jwdunne
Well, we were told by the account manager there is support for it. Then a
Linux tech said they simply do not support it.

Same case with CloudLinux but understand there. To be honest, it's a bit much
for what I needed and confusing as hell to work with myself.

The support used to be awesome but I just feel in the last year or so it
hasn't been that great.

------
morrbo
I agree, Mailgun is fantastic. However, their lack for 2 factor authentication
is seriously worrying.

The only other issue that I do have with them is that the "history" for
messages has a really stupid encoding. Basically, when a message does fail, or
get marked as spam, we have a web hook set up. This works great. However, when
looking at the message source, it has a dumb encoding on carriage returns, and
colons. It's not the biggest issue, but still annoying.

We ended up making a little appliance to resend failed emails for our sales
guys. Basically, this had to have the code "Replace("=\r\n",
"").Replace("=0D=0A", "").Replace("=3D3D", "").Replace("=3D", "=");" instead
of just being a straight copy paste. Ideally we could have a "resend" button.
In the console.

~~~
axiak
Rather than trying to write your own quoted printable decoder, why not use a
library? E.g in python it would just look like:

    
    
        quopri.decodestring(message_source)

~~~
morrbo
honestly? because i didn't know the encoding was called quoted printable, lol.
I wish I had have known that at the time as it would have saved me a lot of
hassle. I'm going to go back now and use a library, as my guessing-at-the-html
is probably wrong.

Edit: a quick cursory google shows [http://www.dpit.co.uk/decoding-quoted-
printable-email-in-c/](http://www.dpit.co.uk/decoding-quoted-printable-email-
in-c/) as a good enough solution for C#. I feel kind of stupid now, but had
honestly never heard of QP encoding before.

~~~
justinator
quoted-printable is used to encode email messages quite a (7)bit :) Take a
look of the source of most any HTML-formatted email.

In my experience, it's the only way to keep content of an unknown character
set and highly diverse content from getting corrupted when going through
processing stages (for email). A lot of the tools to manipulate an email
message can (also) be destructive.

Email is weird.

I can see why they'd use it for this service, if the original email was also a
part of the notification they're sending.

~~~
disiplus
alternative is to use base64. some things you learn when you have to deal with
emails.

also first time i was sending sms messages and not using ascii trying to
determinate the message length was fun. and by fun i mean gsm 7bit annoying.

~~~
justinator
I wouldn't suggest base64 encoding for messages that are mostly text
(plaintext, html _messages_ ), but it's just dandy for attachments.

Debugging something in an email message encoding in quoted-printable simply by
viewing its source is doable sometimes. If it's in base64, not so much. I
believe the size of your message would also be less using quoted-printable,
rather than base64

------
bretpiatt
I'm a Mailgun customer and CEO of Jungle Disk (that I bought from Rackspace a
year ago). As a Mailgun customer I'm really excited about this. For comparison
at Jungle Disk we've already doubled the R&D investment in our first year and
will continue to grow it over time. I believe the Mailgun team will be able to
really accelerate what they're able to do too. Secondly, I'm happy to have
more neighbors moving to our area of town!

~~~
Lazare
Oh, so that explains what happened to Jungledisk! I was an early customer,
loved it, then got fed up and left when the product stagnated, bugs were left
unfixed, and support became terrible.

Somehow I'd missed the news of the acquisition, so it was all a bit
mysterious. Maybe I should check the product out again... :)

------
brightball
Mailgun's a solid service. They've got the best inbound handling of all of the
services out there in terms of letting you apply rules before the messages hit
your servers.

I haven't looked at their outbound service in a while because I've been so
impressed with Sendgrid's dual DKIM CNAME setup so that they can handle
automatically rotating your DKIM keys without bothering you...that it's really
hard to even think about trying somebody else.

~~~
leetrout
Have you used Postmark as well? I was very impressed with PM's inbound options
and never looked further.

~~~
brightball
I haven't looked in a while. At one point over the last year or so I sat down
and tried them all. For the most part they all seemed pretty much the same.
Mailgun's big distinguishing factor was the ability to pattern match on
different factors of the incoming emails to apply different handling rules. I
believe they also had a setting that would let you download attachments
separately when I looked, which gets to be big with volume inbound processing.

Postmark has a nice DMARC processing system.

------
ChefDenominator
Maybe this means Mailgun lists feature will be friendly to DMARC? It was such
a great solution for domains not really requiring a mail server for inbound
mail, that is, until everyone started caring about p=reject (well, except for
Gmail - I'm still not sure how much my mail has to not conform to standards
before they refuse to deliver to even a spam folder).

~~~
jlgaddis
Verifying that a valid mail exchanger (MX) exists for a domain when receiving
mail from that domain is a fairly common thing to do.

That is, if an e-mail coming into my server purports to be from example.com,
checking for the existence of a valid MX for example.com is a common "anti-
spam" measure. If example.com can not or will not accept mail, rejecting (or
marking as spam) the incoming message is considered acceptable.

~~~
ChefDenominator
The DMARC problem is not related to MX records.

~~~
jlgaddis
Sorry, I was referring to _"... for domains not really requiring a mail server
for inbound mail ..."_

If example.com sends out mail but can't or won't receive incoming mail, then
some mail servers may reject those outbound messages.

~~~
ChefDenominator
You read past the part where I described receiving mails. It sounds like you
have never used the service, so have no idea what I'm talking about, so have
no idea what you're talking about.

~~~
jlgaddis
To be clear, I was talking about a completely different issue (deliverability,
in general -- not related to Mailgun). My mistake, I suppose.

------
fasteo
Congrats from a happy - and paying - customer. Sending around 500K
transactional emails/month without an issue.

Hope they add support for tracking against SSL/HSTS sites.

~~~
jrodom
We are working on SSL support now. While this has drawbacks, you can terminate
on a service like Cloudflare and we can enable HTTPS link writing for your
sending domain. Otherwise, hangtight for a more integrated solution.

~~~
fasteo
Thanks for the tip. I didn't know that you can enable https link writing for
the domains. I will test this for sure in one of our low-volume domain.

~~~
jrodom
Sounds good. This feature isn't generally available, so email me at josh at
mailgun and I will help get things configured on your sending domain.

------
eykanal
> If you are a current customer, you remain in good hands. Nearly every
> Mailgun employee and all of leadership is continuing with the new
> organization and excited about the mission ahead of us.

...except Bob over there, but he's kind of a grumpy old man anyways, so you
can just ignore him.

Pro tip: Just write "The team is very excited" or something like that, its
saves that tiny bit of awkwardness.

~~~
lmm
To my mind this kind of honestly is appealing, where "The team is very
excited" would sound fake. Maybe a British vs American difference?

------
kuon
I moved to mailgun after the mandrill "incident" and I have been very happy
since. I hope the service will stay stable!

~~~
manyxcxi
Out of curiousity (either I missed it or I forgot) what was the Mandrill
incident?

~~~
boredpudding
Mandrill became part of the Mailchimp subscription. Only for paid accounts.
Basically making costs for low-traffic projects way higher than they used to
be if you didn't use Mailchimp with Mandrill. (Mailchimp subscriptions start
at 10 $ a month)

[https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/217467117](https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/217467117)

~~~
nodesocket
I got burned by Mandrill as well, even though I pay Mailchimp $59 a month.

After all the hate mail they recieved they opened up a free Mandrill plan if
you are a paying Mailchimp customer. Who knows how long that will last though.

Basically I just recommend Mailgun or AWS SES now.

------
AlexB138
Rackspace spun off both Cloud Sites team and Jungle Disk last year, along with
shutting down a team or two. Seems they're focusing on slimming down.

~~~
ascendantlogic
They were taken private last summer: [https://blog.rackspace.com/why-
rackspace-is-becoming-a-priva...](https://blog.rackspace.com/why-rackspace-is-
becoming-a-private-company)

------
meesterdude
i've used mailgun for several high-volume clients and overall it works - but
the feeling I got when working with their API, their docs, their UI and their
support is a product in maintenance mode. There is a lack of polish, a lack of
effort, and a lack of overall robustness. But, it works.

I hope the spin off lets them focus on improving the service and the
surrounding experience - I definitely would rather they succeed than go belly
up. As it stands if someone pops up with similar offerings, I'd definitely
check them out. But mailgun isn't impossibly far off from creating an
exceptional product. The question is: with this change, will they?

------
kikki
I'm a big fan of Mailgun, but haven't actually sent enough mails in a month
yet for them to actually charge me. I wonder what % of their users are the
same?

~~~
manyxcxi
We were having some deliveribilty issues with Office365 just putting
everything in the Junk Mail no matter what we were trying. I found a write up
on the issue from someone else who had the same issue and the solution (for
them) was basically, pay Mailgun for a dedicated IP. It was going to be a
tough pill to swallow because we send, MAYBE, 200 emails a month (they're
basically for password resets and such, not mailing list blasts).

Their support basically refused to take my money and switched us to a
different sending server that day and our emails were no longer hitting the
junk folder within possibly less than two hours of first contact with their
support.

As a developer it's incredibly easy to integrate with, the dashboards are very
helpful for debugging, and the one time in at least a few years I've reached
out to their support they were informative and expedient.

I've found their competitors to be harder to integrate with and focused more
on mass mailing for marketing, wanting to funnel everything through their UI.

I hope Mailgun can keep up all the good work they're doing, it's a breath of
fresh air to know sending emails from our web applications will take all of
five minutes to integrate.

~~~
maxencecornet
>We were having some deliveribilty issues with Office365 just putting
everything in the Junk Mail no matter what we were trying. I found a write up
on the issue from someone else who had the same issue and the solution (for
them) was basically, pay Mailgun for a dedicated IP. It was going to be a
tough pill to swallow because we send, MAYBE, 200 emails a month (they're
basically for password resets and such, not mailing list blasts). Their
support basically refused to take my money and switched us to a different
sending server that day and our emails were no longer hitting the junk folder
within possibly less than two hours of first contact with their support.

I literally went through the same problem, and they did the same thing for me,
they didn't accept money for a dedicated IP

It seems that spammers are using their free tier to send spam emails, and
because of that, some of their non-dedicated IP range are listed as spam by
Office365/google

~~~
jrodom
This is (and probably always will be) a work in progress for us. Our systems
promote you into higher quality IP ranges as you send better e-mail. The
downside is that this is a reactive process. We have some experiments that
we're starting to run to help improve onboarding and IP assignment for
legitimate users. In the meantime, support is always happy to review your
account and expedite this process for you.

------
scandox
> prior to closing

This gave me a mini-heartattack...I guess I don't think about VCs and
investments as much as the average reader of these things.

------
otto_ortega
Best of luck, I all ask/need from them is to keep their free tier available,
don't be another mandrill please!

~~~
jrochkind1
Their free tier is kind of ridiculously valuable offering for free. I don't
think I 'deserve' it, but I'd be awfully sad to see it go too.

------
leetrout
I see a lot of comments about alternatives and such.
[https://postmarkapp.com/](https://postmarkapp.com/) is really nice. I've used
them for years in all of my personal projects and it has always Just Worked™.

I've avoided MailGun & SendGrid entirely for various reasons.

~~~
novaleaf
i use sendgrid, and like the product, but the customer support is pretty
terrible. i accidentially sent myself about 20k devlog emails, and they
suspended my account. not just "i'm sorry you are over quota" but actually
suspended, meaning I couldn't just upgrade my plan to fix things.

worse still, i sent them a request to un-suspend my account at 5:20pm on a
weekday, had their indian support ho-hum about it over the next 13 hours until
I finally submitted a new ticket around 7am in the morning and their USA
support picked it up, fixing my issue in about 30 min. (total downtime near 14
hours).

i will keep using them because I doubt the disaster scenarios for other
providers is going to be much better, but I'm also going to setup a second
mail provider as a failover for the next time I have issues with them.

------
leesalminen
I'm glad they learned the importance of support from RS and internalized it. I
have noticed an increase in quality of support over the past couple months.

------
tarikozket
Why the post is signed by "CEO of Mallgun"?

~~~
jrodom
fixed!

------
bambax
I really, really like Mailgun! and can't understand why they don't get more
"press" or mentions on the forums, etc. It seems only their competitors are
ever talked about.

Yet with Mailgun everything always works, the API is super simple and so is
integration. And their free tier lets you handle 10,000 msg per month!!

Maybe they can use some marketing, because the product is great!

------
arenaninja
Having used both Rackspace and Mailgun and had a great experience with both
I'm sad that it's come to this.

Good luck to Mailgun! DFTBA

------
harrisreynolds
I hope this helps them improve. The lack of decent error messages and support
caused me to switch to SparkPost.

~~~
ganesharul
Can you please share other buying decision for sparkpost compared to mailgun?
What about deliverability?

~~~
harrisreynolds
I like there system for deliverability too. They make you setup up the sending
domain and verify it which really helps. Check out this tool if you are
interested in deliverability: [https://www.mail-tester.com/](https://www.mail-
tester.com/)

------
razin
Can anyone shed some light as to why companies might choose to spin out a
division into a separate entity?

~~~
amorphid
Not a spin out expert, but a few reasons I can think of right now:

\- preparation for a sale

\- raising capital for the spin out, but not the parent company

\- the spin out is not part of the parent's core focus, and is something of a
distraction

\- the parent is transitioning to more of a holding company, and looking to
make further acquisitions that have nothing to do with the spinout

\- the spin out is an idea developed by a parent company team, and that team
wants to leave the company to develop the idea, so they work out a deal where
the company and the team both get a stake

------
mrmch
This is awesome news for Mailgun customers, kudos to Will and the Mailgun team
for pulling this off.

Mailgun has one of the best inbound/outbound API combinations available, great
for companies with a strong developer team.

------
CodeWriter23
This is great news and puts my Mailgun-related fears about the Rackspace
acquisition to rest. I look forward to actually paying for Mailgun's service
soon.

------
pedroborges
Congrats guys!

\- From a happy customer.

------
ferrantim
Congrats to the entire Mailgun team. I'm looking forward to seeing all the
awesome stuff you do an an independent company!

------
laktek
Has anyone done any comparison between API based email services like AWS SES,
Mailgun and SendGrid?

~~~
20years
MailGun has better delivery than SES and easier to get setup than SendGrid. I
use both MailGun and SendGrid but stopped using SES awhile ago due to delivery
issues.

~~~
laktek
Thanks, this helps. What sort of delivery issues you ran into with SES? Was it
possible to diagnose?

~~~
20years
I haven't used SES in over 2 years now so things may have changed but lots of
ISP's blocked the emails. Even basic transaction type emails.

Also, if you send over 10k too soon, you may be throttled or shut down.
Lastly, they also throttle you if your bounce rate is higher than 2%. To get
around that, you must make sure your list is super clean or send emails slowly
to make sure your bounce rate is not over 2% in any given month. Not ideal for
newsletters or large customer lists imo.

Again, some of this may have changed since I used them 2+ years ago.

------
fmariluis
I'm a happy customer and I'm really glad to hear this.

------
ericcholis
Next up, Object Rocket?

------
Animats
Does this mean we can now identify and block Mailgun's IP block to reduce
spam?

~~~
linkregister
Sure, as long as your users don't mind missing their signup confirmations and
password resets for Stripe, GitHub, Lyft, Slack, Pagerduty, Heroku, etc.

