

Rackspace acquires Mailgun (YC W11) - sudonim
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/28/rackspace-acquires-y-combinator-startup-mailgun-an-api-that-abstracts-creating-email-inboxes-for-apps-and-web-sites/

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patio11
Congratulations.

Also, TC, sigh. If you can't find someone to articulate the value proposition
for not hosting one's own email, I can help (+). Saying "young devs can't
figure out email" once makes you sound ageist, saying it three times makes you
sound stupid.

\+ Email makes businesses a lot of money. Delivery optimization is a full-time
job. Securing a new email server is highly non-trivial. Existing options for
controlling first-party inboxes and outgoing email with a web application rely
on brittle shell scripts and Deep Magick. There are operational inflection
points in administering email servers; navigating one incorrectly means the
business dies until addressed; many quickly quickly growing companies will hit
three to four of them. (Some popular web app genres can hit three to four
within weeks of launch - coupons or social anything, for example.)

~~~
sudonim
Completely agree (and that TC headline is terrible). We're an email startup
(not the delivery side). I had the pleasure of speaking with Ev @ Mailgun
early on in our life. He gave us tremendous help figuring out how not screw up
delivery.

That conversation also made me realize we didn't want to worry about all of
the things that companies like mailgun do well. I'm more than happy to leave
the intricacies of email delivery to the experts.

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chroma
I congratulate the Mailgun team and I wish them all the best, but Rackspace's
previous acquisitions bode ill for the future of Mailgun.

Rackspace acquired CloudKick in late 2010 and Anso Labs in February of 2011.
Both teams must have been put on other projects, because their products have
stagnated. CloudKick no longer lets people sign up. Their blog,
<https://www.cloudkick.com/blog/>, has broken images and few updates. I
couldn't find any products by Anso Labs, so I googled the founders. It looks
like they no longer work at Rackspace: [http://gigaom.com/cloud/openstack-
developers-leave-rackspace...](http://gigaom.com/cloud/openstack-developers-
leave-rackspace-for-nebula/)

Again I wish the best for Mailgun, but I really hope they know what they're
getting into. If I were a customer, I would be wary right now.

~~~
larrywright
CloudKick is perhaps one example, but Slicehost is a counterpoint. It became
their Rackspace Cloud offering, which is quite good.

~~~
chroma
Did it? I thought Rackspace was using OpenStack. And there was that PR debacle
migrating Slicehost accounts to Rackspace Cloud.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2510300>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515650>

~~~
jarito
I work at Rack. Our legacy compute provider is based on the Slicehost code.
Our new Open Cloud offering is based on OpenStack nova.

~~~
chroma
Thanks for the clarification.

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twakefield
Just to be clear, Mailgun is still offered as a stand alone service and
existing customers do not have to make any changes. Some more info is
available on our blog: <http://blog.mailgun.net/>

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pbreit
Rackspace has a nice deal with SendGrid (free SendGrid for Rackspace
customers)(<https://sendgrid.com/products/rackspace>). I wonder if this
remains as well as if there were any discussions on a SendGrid acquisition? I
suspect SendGrid might be aiming higher.

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nodesocket
Congratulations to everybody at Mailgun. Rackspace has a nice setup in SOMA,
you will be joining forces with the uber smart CloudKick crew.

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sotomayor
Congrats Roman and co, but I am not surprised. Your enthusiastic support and
the effort you have poured into the product is something I will learn from.

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mahmoudimus
Ev and Taylor are fantastic :) Those guys live and breathe email.
Congratulations to everyone at Mailgun!

