
Sparkpost.com from sendgrid [very bad experience] - dave_walko
We left Mandrill for the same reasons everyone else did.  We migrated to sendgrid but then their formatting of our emails was quite odd.  We pushed through but after a few months, decided it was too much overhead (emails going as plain text and html when only wanting text)<p>We signed up with sparkpost yesterday around 9am.  Purchased the 100k account and our own IP.  Email sent was only about 11k emails which are just notification emails to the same 10-15 people.  4am I wake up to an email that says account was downgraded per our request.  I wake up and go look at my terminal and our account was suspended.  Suspended for sending emails using an email service?  I immediately wrote them but as of yet, have not heard a peep.  No warning, just poof.. account suspended.  When I goto my billing tab in the account it says the account was terminated.  I am posting this as a message for people to be aware.<p>I already have a mailgun account and will start using that unless I hear back from sparkpost.  If I do, I will update this post, actually, I will update it either way in the next 24 hours.
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ianhawes
I had the exact same experience with Sparkpost. They were used to send
receipts for purchases and not any sort of email marketing.

We started out on their free plan. While it wasn't as great as Mandrill
(couldn't view outgoing content, for example) they didn't mess up the email
format or inject any weird links.

We expanded to their paid plan as a result of our volume about a month later.
Roughly 2-3 weeks after that, we received an automated notice at 1 AM on a
Friday that our account had been suspended and that we should contact the
abuse group and that they would reply within "2 days".

Not only did they stop our outgoing emails, but they didn't even bother
queueing the ones our app was sending them. In fact, the worst part was that
their API was returning 200 OK for emails that weren't sent, so our system
didn't bother putting them in our failed jobs DB.

I emailed just about everyone in that company that I could find to no avail.
The "abuse team" replied at around 4pm that day that our account was suspended
for "multiple complaints" and that they were willing to give us "another
chance" and subsequently reinstated us.

We started a migration back to Mandrill.

~~~
posabsolute
I'm surprised so many people only send to 1 Email Service. These services
sometimes go down, sometimes slow down, having 2 active account and having an
easy way to switch in between (read even automatic) should be an applied best
practice.

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andwur
Assuming I'm understanding you correctly you sent 11,000 emails in under 24
hours to 10-15 people? For a newly created account I could understand that
raising a few red flags. Though that doesn't justify their support staff
failing to respond to queries nor the immediate account termination.

I get the feeling they're having trouble with their sender reputation; one of
our larger clients was recently switched to SparkPost from Mandrill ("it's too
expensive!") and it's now a continual battle with delayed deliveries and mail
being marked as spam. The issue never arose with Mandrill. (and yes, SPF and
DKIM are correct)

~~~
posabsolute
I must say I agree,

I'm surprised OP is not aware that's the kind of sending that can raise a lot
of red flags, before doing something like this on a new account I would have
contacted support to make them aware of this situation.

Specially on smaller senders, reputation is everything.

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codegeek
I moved away from mandrill but had to come back to them. Sendgrid sucked big
time. Email delays all the time. Go check their status page and u will know
what I mean. Also, they don't show email content like mandrill which is a big
issue for troubleshooting. So even though mandrill screwed with pricing and
last min change, they have been most stable for us. I don't even want to
bother with sparkpost or mailgun at this time. My 2 cents.

~~~
gondo
with mandrill you are never sure if your email was delivered. mandrill does
mark all emails by default as delivered until they decide otherwise later. so
you can very well see 100% deliverability and later check the same stats and
realize that it is actually 70%. the worse is, that you have to do it
manually, one per email bases. and mandrill as a company is aware of this for
couple of years and cosider this "normal" totally useless.

~~~
codegeek
It may have happened to you but we never had issues with Mandrill in terms of
deliverability for 2+ years. With Sendgrid, we have issues almost every week.
Just yesterday, sendgrid had an issue and the CTO himself had to jump in with
a post mortem. We had no choice but to go back to Mandrill because we cannot
play with the critical transactional emails. Damn, email delivery is such a
hard problem.

~~~
gondo
you might just not noticed but i would almost bet that it did happened to you
as well. we noticed it after 1.5years of using mandrill. and only because one
our user contacted us directly and was patient to cooperate with tracking the
problem. after that we discovered plenty other cases. and communicating with
mandrill revealed that it is how their system in fact works. anyways if you
are happy with Mandrill good for you, but remember my warning: you are living
in a dream that all the emails marked by mandrill as delivered are in fact
delivered.

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dave_walko
UPDATE [2 hours after initial post] I heard from compliance who asked a ton of
questions and said our email was flagged as spam by their system. Keep in
mind, we send to the same 10-15 people and not a single spam or bounce. I
wrote back immediately with the info they wanted. As I mentioned, I will
update as this progresses.

UPDATE [3 hours after initial post] Thank you for that information. I have re-
activated your account.

So it looks like a response time of about 5 hours. I find that response time
more than effective. The issue I still have is the automated block on a paid
account + static IP at 4am. It was inconvenient considering we had been
sending for almost a full day. I am still looking at staying with mailgun as
you all seem to really like them and from what I can see after my tests with
them, are quite nice.

So 1 day of usage of a service you are paying for on Sparkpost could get your
account suspended. My feeling is if they are going to be THAT overly
sensitive, they should do some initial questions prior to signing someone up
to a paid account. Not that a paid account should be exempt but it should
certainly grant some warning with a few hours before they just block your
account. They could easily throttle the paid account for 12 hours with an
email that the client needs to email them with info. Atleast email would still
be going out even if its slower...

Since YC has slowed my comment down, I wanted to check on speed. I am really
really surprised at how slow sparknews is. We are using smtp but here are some
stats: # in outgoing queue Time checked 2848 (starting point) @ 8:45 am 2849 @
9:01 am 2830 @ 9:19 am 2823 @ 9:25 am 2816 @ 9:30 am

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spdustin
I'm going to throw in my recommendation for Postmark (postmarkapp.com) for
transactional mail. Solid, reliable service for us.

~~~
jonnyrockit
+1 Been using them for 8 years without any trouble

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scosman
If you're sending high volume, consider AWS SES. It doesn't have the fancy
tempting of Mandrill/Sendgrid/etc, but it's a fraction of the cost and the
deliverability has been excellent. We migrated 98% of our emails off Mandrill
when they decided to screw all their customers and saved a ton of money.

~~~
codegeek
Except that SES does not offer dedicated IPs. So you are at the mercy of
shared IPs which can be a disaster in case one of those IPs get blocked due to
someone else's spam.

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andmarios
You could wait a couple days before making this public.

This post seems like you are seeking social justice and gives sparkpost the
chance to escape a bad review relatively unscathed.

Now even if they fix your issue, we will never know if it is due to good
service or fear of the pitchforks.

~~~
erlendstromsvik
Not sending mail for a couple of days is probably not an option - which would
be the case if SparkPost was your mail delivery agent. SparkPost should be the
one taking it's time.

We also had a funny experience with SparkPost. Sent millions of mails with
them. Suddenly one day 1(!) mail go through, which actually is a notification
mail to one of our site admins, asking if he want to allow a comment on a page
- a spam comment in this case, and SparkPost suspends our account.

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techcorner
Like Mandrill, most (all?) of these companies have some warmup period. Start
sending low volumes, then once you have enough reputation go to higher
volumes.

I don't belong to any of these companies but as a client, use their services
heavily. Imagine a spammer signing up with them and sending several thousands
mails in a day. They deal with such notorious people on a daily basis.

I am not saying you may have done anything wrong but probably their system
flagged you when you sent 11k emails to 10-15 people.

In any case here is my rec for you in order- 1\. PostMark - They do strictly
transactional email. 2\. Mailgun 3\. SparkPost 4\. SES

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nrjames
We moved to Sparkpost and hit a few bumps at first. However, after working
through those and paying for a dedicated IP address, the service has been
reliable and suits our use case. I do have the sense, however, that they need
to hire more support personnel.

I'm not sure if you found it, but I believe that Sparkpost has a "public"
support group on Slack. That's where I finally was able to get messages
through when we ran into problems. They were fixed promptly.

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AdamN
I used to love Sendgrid but they seem to be slowing down development these
days. Their interface hasn't changed much in the past few years and their
Python libs/docs are ok but not great.

If I were sending lots of email like I used to I would consider SES but for
the small volumes I'm doing now it seems like Sendgrid and Mailgun are good
enough. Postmark.app gets some positive reviews in the comments so maybe
people should give them a shot.

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timvdalen
We've been very happy with Mailgun. Just last week I sent out ~10k emails/day
within a week of setting up a new account (though to 10k different people).

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jpmw
Wow that sucks!

I moved to mailgun yesterday. I run an alert system for Google Analytics, so I
can't afford delays of more than a minute, and even then...

So far so good with mailgun!

Thanks for the info on Sparkpost, definitely not tempted to move there ;)

~~~
stevekemp
Regardless of which sender you use, you must remember that email often appears
"instant", but it really really isn't.

If you absolutely need to send notifications to users with "zero delay" then
email is not for you, and SMS is probably not sufficient either.

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nbevans
Mailgun has proved reliable for us. Sparkpost came across a bit desperate and
opportunistic on Twitter in the immediate Mandrill aftermath so I avoided
them.

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tmaly
Thanks for the info on sparkpost.

I shut off my Mandrill account, but I still need to migrate to something that
works.

Are there any things you do not like about mailgun?

~~~
dave_walko
I really like the fact their reporting is more granular. I am waiting to get a
static IP which hopefully won't take to long as I need to have it whitelisted
at one of our clients mail servers. Set up was very easy as I did it at 430AM
lol

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pentium10
What's your email about? That could be your problem! Share a screenshot.

~~~
dave_walko
No its not my email. They are system updates to the same people. None of them
complain as they need these updates.

~~~
michaelt
It sounds like a reasonable call on sparkpost's part. 99.9% of the time,
sending 10,000 e-mails to 10 recipients is a sign some of your code has gone
wrong, like an e-mail sending loop getting stuck.

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flippyhead
mailgun has worked pretty well for us

