
Mailgun (YC W11) is being acquired by Rackspace - twakefield
http://blog.mailgun.net/post/30381960476/mailgun-is-being-acquired-by-rackspace
======
viscanti
I met Ev and Taylor a couple months ago. They're a brilliant team, in a not-
so-glamorous market (there's not a lot of buzz around sending mail). These
guys are committed to building a reliable/developer friendly email service
though. They totally deserve this.

~~~
dguaraglia
You've nicely summarized what I think of them. I met the guys last year while
looking for a job and they were great. Kudos to them!

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j45
Congrats to Ev + team, from day 1 when they launched he's continued to answer
my emails directly and openly, it's refreshing.

I really hope my beloved mailgun remains competitive and independently
available and doesn't get assimilated like slicehost -- mailgun is a not-so-
well kept secret that needs to stay as is.

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aidos
This is probably a good time to ask about how people handle transactional
email generally.

I had a play with Mailgun a while back (and others, Mailgun felt nicest to me)
but there was a feature that seemed to be missing from them all.

How do you handle rules between outgoing emails?

For example, say there's an email that gets sent out on a user action, but you
only want to send it out once a day. It feels to me like I should be able to
set rules within Mailgun to say, only send out this email every x minutes, or,
don't allow it to go out if another type of email has gone out before etc.

Is there a way of dealing with that? At the moment we have to put all those
rules into our app, and it seems like something the app shouldn't have to deal
with.

~~~
todsul
getvero.com - Very powerful rule system to send delayed emails. It's like
Mixpanel for email (Vero is event driven).

~~~
aidos
Interesting. That's very much along the lines of what I was thinking. Will
sign up and see how it fits out use case. Thanks for the link.

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jmcnevin
Rackspace customers can use SendGrid to send up to 40K emails a month for
free. I wonder how this might impact that deal.

~~~
gghootch
Errr... SendGrid is $9.95 for 40k emails. You get 200 for free, just as with
mailgun.

My guess is they'll integrate both products after which Mailgun and SendGrid
will become largely equivalent services.

~~~
jarito
jmcnevin is right, there is a special deal for Rackspace customers. It is
documented here <https://sendgrid.com/products/rackspace>.

~~~
philjones88
Can confirm this deal, I use it with some clients at the moment, I get 40,000
credits per month for free.

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lukedeering
We recently interview Ev [http://howtowriteabusinessplan.com/2012/07/ev-
kontsevoy-inte...](http://howtowriteabusinessplan.com/2012/07/ev-kontsevoy-
interviewed). The guy is a beast! Good things happen to good companies! Job
lads!

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csallen
Sweet, congrats guys! Been using Mailgun happily for ~2 years now, and it's
great to see I won't have to change anything. Looking forward to the Rackspace
integration!

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aepstein
Congrats guys! Great service and well-deserved, we're big fans (and
customers).

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sgrove
Wow, that's great to hear - especially that Mailgun will continue along as-is.
Their support has been phenomenal, and we've been extremely happy users.

Congrats to Ev, Taylor, and the rest of the team!

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martindale
Man, would it be nice if the local mail function on Rackspace servers was
directly connected to Mailgun and billed to my account.

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k33l0r
That link should probably point to the permalink for the blog post:
[http://blog.mailgun.net/post/30381960476/mailgun-is-being-
ac...](http://blog.mailgun.net/post/30381960476/mailgun-is-being-acquired-by-
rackspace)

Edit: The link appears to be fixed now.

------
lubos
Nooo. I absolutely love this company. The last company I loved this much was
JungleDisk and we all know what happened to it once Rackspace acquired it.

This is not such a great news for customers. Sorry.

~~~
bretpiatt
I'd love to get your feedback. We're always trying to improve the way we
handle things and we know we can get better. We're on record publicly in the
press about trying to do this differently and better. My email is
bret.piatt@rackspace.com.

[From Dow Jones, from their interview with Pat Matthews, SVP of Corporate
Development (my boss)], "Mr. Matthews said the acquisition is not an "acqui-
hire" (a deal in which a start-up is acquired purely for its talent), and that
Mailgun's team will continue to work in San Francisco, where Rackspace has an
office. However, they will report initially to corporate development and
remain autonomous for awhile so they're not integrated too quickly into
Rackspace, a mistake that Rackspace has made in the past, he said."

------
BenjieGillam
Congratulations guys - great product, well deserved acquisition :)

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savrajsingh
Congrats. Mailgun is a great product, hope the service continues!

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unfoldedorigami
Congratulations Mailgun. You guys deserve it.

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bryanh
Congrats guys! We just started using you not too long ago and have been
impressed the whole time.

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nikita
Congratulations to the mailgun team!

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tomjen3
Anybody know a good alternative? It seems that aquired SAS means they will
either suck or close.

~~~
twakefield
tomjen3, We are don't have any plans on closing or sucking in the future. But
if you just prefer to support small ISVs, that is definitely worthwhile.

~~~
13rules
"We are don't have any plans on closing or sucking in the future."

Gold.

------
memnips
Congrats! I love the service.

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rokhayakebe
Go Mailgun, Best Customer Service. (That was . for Period)

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kategleason
Congrats!

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ericfrenkiel
congrats Ev and Taylor!

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asdf333
sweet! congrats ev and tyler

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buster
Soooo.. they are sending mails?

Not to be rude or anything, congrats! But from the website itself it sounds
like "woohoo, we can send email". Atleast the features page lists 99%
standard-mail features like "can send mail, can do SPF, can do DKIM, can
filter mails"..

I guess that's not why they were aquired, so what is the real value of the
company?

~~~
Udo
I too did not consider sending mail from applications a big deal, until I had
to do it on a huge scale. Turns out it gets quite difficult to maintain an
email module that consistently avoids your outgoing app emails being spam-
flagged or otherwise corrupted. It's a neat service.

~~~
buster
I agree that it's not easy to do mail right, that's my daily business. But
that's also the reason why i was wondering. I probably just don't like the
marketing speak of the website (as if it would be something unusual to do SPF
or mail routing or filtering or regex, etc. etc.). On the other hand it is
hard enough in this business already. You need to point out that stuff, ok..

Anyhow, i have been downvoted for a serious question. Sorry i did upset people
with a question....

~~~
ChuckMcM
I think you were getting down voted because its not the kind of comment folks
come to HN to read. It sounds like from this comment that you're a competitor?
("that's my daily business")

There is a lot of information on mailgun, both on HN and on the web. They've
made no secret of the problem space they were going after.

So Rackspace felt like they were worth acquiring, the product and customers
are supported so its not a strict acquihire exit, and while the questions
about sendgrid are good here (which are proxies for "What is Rackspace's
strategy as a services provider really?") there clearly was enough to Mailgun
to make this worthwhile. That you don't "get it" is ok but instead of the
snarky "Soo they just send email?" kind of thing why not dig into their
product and ask specifically about it? If it seems un-remarkable then talking
about how you implement the same features and qualifying the scale of that
would be helpful too.

