
Mailgun Acquires Mailjet - agbonghama
https://www.mailgun.com/blog/mailgun-acquires-european-competitor-mailjet/
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jadbox
Fair warning, just this week Mailgun locked my account due to random "spam"
detection. We only send unique hand created emails and have only sent to about
200 unique users over the last few months. Because our account is locked, our
customers cannot contact us at all and we can't reach out to them. It's been 3
days and our support messages have gone unanswered.

Hopefully this gets cleared up real soon. I kind of feel like the process
might be pushing people to upgrade to premium phone support to regain access
to their business, but maybe I'm being pessimistic.

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meritt
> our customers cannot contact us at all

I thought mailgun was for delivering emails? How/why are they your MX?

~~~
nullspace
They are actually one of the few services that u can use for programmatically
receiving emails. When it works, it just works - but unfortunately the spam
thing bit us as well.

Fortunately we were able to get it resolved quickly

~~~
sethammons
We provide that at Twilio SendGrid too: Parse Webhook

~~~
fludlight
Having both phones and email at one supplier sounds risky. If you lock my
account it takes out the two major ways a customer can reach us. No thanks.

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krn
Over time I learned to prefer European B2B tech companies, because they strive
to be profitable from the beginning, take less VC money, are more stable,
predictable, cost-conscious, engineering-focused, and, therefore, often much
less likely to be acquired: Adyen, MessageBird, KeyCDN, OVH, Hetzner, INWX,
Mailbox. It's a bit sad to take Mailjet out of this list, even if it's
considered a success for the company.

~~~
alexis_fr
Actually, this is a very helpful feedback for any company. And funnily enough,
would Europe’s difficulty in creating a funding ecosystem be the key point
that ...reinforces their startups?

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krn
In Europe, there is still a lot of pride in completely owning your company,
and not having any plans to sell it to anyone, except maybe IPO. In many
cases, the original founders are still running their _tech_ companies 20 years
later. It could almost be said, that a "serial tech entrepreneur" is not a
thing in such a conservative society, because even entrepreneurs prefer
certainty and stability in their lives over high risks / high returns, and the
fear of failure is much stronger than in the US.

~~~
semiotagonal
I've never understood why anyone would trust a serial entrepreneur. If a
business is great, why would they exit? If it's not, why are they esteemed?

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daolf
And another company acquired coming from efounders, a startup studio
specialized in SaaS.

I think efounders track record is really interesting, out of 19 companies, 4
acquisition and 3 other project that seems to work very well (AirCall, Front
and Spendesk).

All their companies are here for the curious:
[https://www.efounders.com/companies](https://www.efounders.com/companies)

~~~
yoran
Indeed, very happy to see this European success.

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heydenberk
Semi-related: If you are in the market for an email provider for transactional
emails, I encourage you to use Postmark. It's a developer focused company with
a simple pricing model and great documentation, and their IPs tend to have
great reputation scores. I don't work for them, but I switched from one of
these two and am very happy I did.

~~~
HEHENE
A semi-interesting story, we used Postmark at my last company. When we signed
up they offered something like 50,000 free credits. Then if we setup DKIM they
offered another 50,000 or so credits. Then about three months later they sent
us a survey and offered us another 75,000 credits if we filled it out.

All in all before we had even launched our application they had thrown nearly
200,000 free email credits at us. We hadn't even provided a credit card yet.

Considering at launch we were sending about 2,000 emails per month on a busy
month we joked that we would never have to pay these guys.

Come a year and a half later we're sending a lot more than 2k emails per month
and we're just about out of credits. At this point Postmark had become so
ingrained in our applications (we made heavy use of their SDKs and templates)
there wasn't any easy way to switch if we wanted to.

While we thought they were the fools for giving us such an obscene amount of
free credits, they ultimately won in the long game and that company is still
using (and now paying) Postmark.

All of that said, Postmark IS fantastic. I use them for every project where I
need to send or receive mail, and I wouldn't consider anyone else. Highly
recommend them.

~~~
codezero
I was waiting for the bad news, it’s refreshing to see this retention tactic
pay off because of the quality of the product. That’s killer. You can probably
get a future discount by offering a testimonial/case study :)

~~~
sam1r
Great assist. Just wanted to say that I am interested in free Postmark
credits.

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annoyingnoob
Why do all of these mail services look like spam engines?

I know several companies that seems to shop for these mail services. Someone
spams me though a service like this, I complain, next week I'm getting email
from the same sender but through a different spam service.

You email/spam service providers need to create a clearing house for bad
customers, because bad actors just move around and change names and always
find a new home to land in.

~~~
howard941
I don't know about the acquiree but as a mail admin I've found Mailgun to be
unresponsive to abuse emails and an unrepentant spammer. Block them and move
on.

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travelton
I think this is a great acquisition for Mailgun. IMO, the biggest pain point
for implementing Mailgun is that backend developers don't want to manage email
templates, deal with email client compatibility, or manage A/B testing within
a backend codebase. This acquisition should fix that disconnect by allowing
the marketing team to perform these tasks via the Mailgun control panel.

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1123581321
I hope this means the MJML project was part of the acquisition reason (it
underlies their builder) and won’t see its support reduce.

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jrodom
We're really excited about MJML. Creating messages that render properly on all
email clients is challenging and MJML solves the problem in a very developer
friendly way. You should expect MJML and the Passport editor to be integrated
into Mailgun in the near future!

~~~
patrickserrano
Glad to hear it Josh, can't wait!

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denton-scratch
I dislike automated commercial email.

To be more accurate, I loathe and despise it, and have done since I first
received a commercial email spam, in the early 1990s. The very name "Mailgun"
sounds to me no different from "Spam cannon". Substitute "chimp" if you want;
it doesn't make it better for me.

~~~
dewey
So company employees should send you handcrafted "Please confirm your email
address by clicking this link" transaction emails?

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denton-scratch
Companies should stop asking for my email address at all, ever. I use email to
talk to friends and relatives. I am not interested in commercial email. I
don't like my town being decorated with advertisements, either.

My inbox is full of rubbish ads - it overwhelms the stuff I care about, and
makes my life sadder.

~~~
gldalmaso
There are more use cases for sending email other than marketing. We don't like
sending them, but many customers prefer to have transactional information (for
instance, an audit has been done in some factory plant you manage) and
periodic reports come to their mailbox instead of having to log in to some web
app to see it.

It always a pain point and someone somewhere is certainly not receiving
something they feel they should. These services help because of how complex
the email ecosystem has become with layers of identity and reputation and
such.

~~~
denton-scratch
Kewl. There are "use cases".

That doesn't work for me; I am not a "use-case". I'm an individual person, and
my choice is to not receive unsolicited advertising. Marketers don't seem to
understand that some people object to receiving "helpful product suggestions"
all through the day.

>>KERPLUNK<< another catalogue book just fell through the letterbox, and is
destined for the recycling bin. Dammit, save me the trouble; just put it in
the bin yourself, it's just by the front door. Hell, the bin's big enough; put
the whole batch in my bin, end your shift, and go back to bed.

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_Codemonkeyism
I feel with all the people who left the horrible Mailgun (we've used them for
5 years), switched to Mailjet (we luckily didn't) and are back with Mailgun
now.

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thefounder
Both services are trash. Maillgun in particular holds emails even for days and
reports them as sent. Apparently it's a "security" feature.

~~~
LeonM
If you bring a letter to to post office, you have sent it, but that does not
mean it is delivered. It takes the postal service some time before the letter
is eventually delivered. during that time the letter is sent, but not
delivered. Email works exactly like paper mail.

If there is a security related issue on the receiver side (like an expired
certificate), the sender (Mailgun) may hold the email and retry a couple of
times. Eventually the issue may get resolved and the email will be delivered,
or the sender may choose to deliver the email without encryption (unless MTA-
STS is used, of course). During this whole process the email is sent, but not
delivered.

I understand that the status 'sent' may be confusing to you, but calling the
companies 'trash' just because the email protocol from 1982 does not uphold
your standards is a bit harsh.

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rasputinlives
I bet they drop "gun" from the name

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jaynetics
The "gun" one did the acquiring! They'll obviously give Mailjet a more martial
name. Mailbomb sounds good and familiar to me.

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mc32
They should go for the ambivalent “chainmail”.

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nathancahill
Visions of FW: FW: FW: FW:

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tolstoshev
This makes no sense - guns function completely differently from jets. What
were they thinking?

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rtkwe
It's like the A-10 Warthog, a jet built around a gun.

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marksomnian
Key part:

> We’ll continue to maintain separate brands, develop new products for each
> brand, and enhance our existing offerings. As a Mailgun customer, you aren’t
> likely to notice any change, except for new features and functionality
> coming your way soon.

~~~
ar7hur
[https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

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ponytech
Same announcement on mailjet website: [https://www.mailjet.com/mailgun-
acquires-mailjet](https://www.mailjet.com/mailgun-acquires-mailjet)

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dwx360
We are in the govtech sector and decided for mailjet because of european and
national data privacy regulation for governments ("DSGVO", data residency,
etc). Does anyone of you know how the merger will affect the companies DSGVO
promise or if will mailjet stay a company under european/french law?

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windexh8er
I've heard varying degrees of feedback on Thoma Bravo - but I'm curious what
the general consensus is? It appears, from the outside, that they allow their
investment targets to remain autonomous - but I'm curious how hands off (or
on) they are.

~~~
jrodom
Thoma Bravo has been a great partner for us. Our management team has
maintained a high level of autonomy in driving the vision and strategy of the
company including the decision to pursue this acquisition. There is a
tremendous network current/past companies with a wealth of experience that
we've been able to draw from that already has proven to be incredibly valuable
as we continue to scale the company.

~~~
windexh8er
Fantastic, thank you for sharing the insight!

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shortformblog
I don’t really use Mailjet for now, but admire their work and think MJML is
one of the biggest innovations we’ve seen in the email space in quite some
time. Hoping that keeps up in the coming years under Mailgun.

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ed_blackburn
How long before the Salesforce acquisition now?

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te_chris
I wouldn't complain if email in SF stopped being such a tirefire

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funnywalrus
This space is really starting to get really competitive

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runnr_az
I guess it's the right time to announce my company, Mailsub?

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snagglegaggle
Mailmail or Gunjet?

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tiborsaas
Missed opportunity to weave "joining forces" in the title somehow :)

