
Ask HN: Anyone else having no email deliver with SendGrid? - samwillis
We have had no email delivered through SendGrid in over 16 hours. Their status says everything is normal but there are reports on Twitter of people having problems.<p>Is anyone else here having problems today?
======
SendGridBecca
SendGrid Support here! We wanted to step in and provide some color for what is
going on. We’re currently making changes to our shared IP system in order for
our customers to have a better delivery experience in the long term. As a
result of this, the IP group you’re sending from has a new shared IP
address(es).

As these IP groups warm up, you may see some deferrals if you are a Free or
Essentials customer. However don't worry, this warm up period won't last long.
Maybe a few days at most, or until major email receivers have enough data to
determine the legitimacy of email being sent from these new IPs.

Keep in mind SendGrid will continue to attempt to deliver these throttled
emails on your behalf for up to 72 hours (it rarely takes the full 72 hours to
deliver an email throttled in this way).

If you wish to avoid disruptions like this in the future, considering
upgrading your account to a Pro or higher plan
([https://app.sendgrid.com/settings/billing](https://app.sendgrid.com/settings/billing)),
which includes a dedicated IP address as opposed to sending from a shared IP
group. Dedicated IP addresses are great because instead of many different
users sending from the same IP or group of IPs, you are in complete control of
your sending reputation.

Customer feedback is extremely important us here at SendGrid, and we have made
these changes as a result of that feedback. We know in the long run, this will
immensely help your sending.

This will go away, just hang in there with us! If you have additional
questions, please feel free to contact us by going to support.sendgrid.com.

~~~
samwillis
We may not be a big customer to you and we may only send a few thousand
transactional emails per month but even on the "essentials" paid package we
expect a service level that is usable.

Suggesting that it's ok to wait a few days for our transactional email to
deliver is frankly offensive. By definition transactional email is expected to
be delivered in minutes if not seconds - days? That's got to be a joke?

This response is enough in its own to tip us into make a switch to an
alternative supplier. It may be of no interest to SendGrid if an "essentials"
customer leaves but if this is how you treat them you may find that more than
a few do.

Frankly this entire situation has been mismanaged. As email "experts" you
should have been able to migrate you customers over to the new IPs one by one
as the IPs send level increases.

Finally suggesting that as this only effects some of your customers and so
doesn't warrant being on the status page is just you making excuses to lie to
your customers and hide the fact you have a serious issue. If this was a
planed move with any possibility of delay you should have notified the
effected customers before hand. We only discovered the problem when our
customers stopped receiving emails and our support team saw an increase in
support requests.

P.S. Your competitor Postmark has a very different oppinion about dedicated
IPs
[https://postmarkapp.com/why/delivery](https://postmarkapp.com/why/delivery)

~~~
medmunds
> Suggesting that it's ok to wait a few days for our transactional email to
> deliver is frankly offensive

Another SendGrid customer here, in exactly the same situation (low-volume,
purely transactional, paid "Essential" plan). But even if I were sending
marketing blasts, a few days delivery delay would be unacceptable. It's hard
not to hear SendGrid's response as "we don't really support anything below the
Pro plan".

SendGrid has put up a support article about this:
[https://sendgrid.com/docs/Classroom/Deliver/shared_ip_thrott...](https://sendgrid.com/docs/Classroom/Deliver/shared_ip_throttling.html)

FWIW, a helpful SendGrid chat agent did move us back to a warmed-up IP pool
once I complained, and our mails are going through again.

[Edit: clarify we're on a paid plan -- just not the Pro one.]

~~~
samwillis
Nice to hear they are trying to help some customers.

I opened a support ticket 12 hours ago and have just been told it will
eventually be sorted.

~~~
medmunds
Try the chat option -- it's more immediate. (Though the chat agent did mention
they're pretty backed up.)

------
ComputerGuru
We're heavy SendGrid users and this is basically the excuse we've been looking
for to jump ship after several years with them.

SG is incompetent with regards to email delivery. This should not come as a
surprise to anyone that uses their service.

It took a month for them to confirm what we told them: users will still
receive previously-queued emails even after they unsubscribe (!!!), meaning
it's no surprise that they will flag future messages they receive as spam. A
month or so later, SG acknowledged the bug but stated they had no intention of
fixing that behavior at this time!

Their _core_ selling point is email delivery with low rejection and you don't
need to build it yourself. They totally failed there as users are rightly
marking their messages as spam _and_ we are therefore required to write, run,
and maintain our own mail queuing service to check outgoing emails against
_their own unsubscribe list_ before forwarding the email to SG to deliver for
us. At this point, we use them only for the metrics, which is just not worth
supporting such a sleazy operation.

------
Kequc
Sendgrid is overly complex for what I need it to do. It's bloated with
features, and over-complication. Their API to build a simple email
necessitates creating at least three different objects.

They have a whitelisting feature, in case you are using your own domain you
need to go through whitelisting steps. You need to configure your domain
appropriately. It goes on and on. Then there are multiple ways to go about all
of those things.

If you don't do it correctly then sometimes it doesn't work or a high amount
of email ends up in spam. By default they enable features which some countries
tightly control like tracking which all needs to be tinkered with to get
right.

Then once it's all working perfectly I have seen it take up to 10 minutes for
an email to be actually sent. I went with Sendgrid because they billed
themselves as easy to use. You might be better off using a SMTP server of your
own. You've got to configure it anyway.

~~~
linkregister
I didn't down vote you; your comment adds to the discussion. The annoying
SPF/DKIM additions to your DNS zone file are necessary for the basics of
delivery to the inbox. Gmail now displays a scary red unlocked padlock for
unsigned/unverified email. Running an SMTP server is indeed the way the
internet was meant to handle email. However, the other tenants in your /25
CIDR block will ruin your sending IP address's reputation and you will face
delivery to Spam and throttling unless you stay on top of blacklist removal
requests. There are plenty of use cases for using your own SMTP server for
sending, but I think the labor cost of doing so far exceeds the prices of
Sparkpost, Postmark, Mailgun, Sendgrid, or hell, even Mailchimp.

------
jerkstate
I'm not a Sendgrid customer but their "warm up" answer here is totally
insufficient. It strikes me as an attempt to spin a major outage as standard
operating procedure, and as a result I'm not going to use their product in the
future.

~~~
monkpit
What leads you to believe that their explanation is not acceptable? I'm not
saying I don't believe you, but more information about why you hold this
opinion would be interesting to me.

~~~
jerkstate
To accept their explanation would be to accept that they went into this
maintenance either with the intention of causing a several day long service
outage or without knowledge that they would cause a service outage (i.e.
something happened that they didn't anticipate.) If it was intentional, Bob
help anyone who trusts them with their business. If it was
accidental/unanticipated, they need to own up to what went wrong and show how
they're going to prevent it in the future.

------
rubenmch
Same here, all of our emails have been Deferred since yesterday. We have a
$9.95/month Essentials account.

Talked to chat support and they moved us to a new IP group and emails started
being Delivered, however this lasted only 10 minutes.

After that all of our emails started being Deferred again. Contacted chat
support again and they moved us again to a new IP group.

Let's see how much it lasts this time.

Chat support said having all of our emails Deferred for days with none being
Delivered is normal and expected. We send transactional emails so having our
customers wait days for the emails is not feasible for us.

We had recently switched from Mandrill, we'll have to start searching for a
new provider.

~~~
spdustin
I can heartily recommend Postmark. Generous free credits, excellent API, and
one of the best DMARC tools (also free,
[https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com](https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com))

------
codegeek
We have gone from Mandrill to Sendgrid and back to Mandrill.

We switched over to sendgrid after being pissed of with Mandrill due to their
sudden change but switching to sendgrid was a bad decision in hindsight.
Mandrill was rock solid and we never had issues. Sendgrid continues to have
deliverability issues every once in a while and not to mention the
blacklisting of their shared IPs (which I understand is a common problem with
all providers but never happened with Mandrill for our business).

We have switched back to Mandrill (yes, got a paying mailchimp account just to
use mandrill).

Not only sendgrid's UI is confusing, they don't even show the actual email
content in their dashboard.

~~~
bshimmin
They gave two months' notice of the change to having to have a paying
Mailchimp accounts with Mandrill - do you regard that as sudden? They also
sent quite regular reminders, too. (I will admit we ended up leaving it a bit
until the last minute, but it wasn't particularly arduous, even under moderate
pressure.)

We use AWS' SES on a few projects, and, while it seems to work effortlessly, I
have absolutely no idea how to get any logs out of it (like, anything beyond
the absolute number of emails sent), which is a fairly major limitation for
me.

~~~
crazypyro
Two months is very sudden for any enterprise software to make a large change
in payment and account system, in my experience.

------
nuschk
Same here. Had a chat with the support team and they say they had to allocate
a number of new IPs, since some of their existing IPs were blacklisted. Now
they need to warm up the new ones first, which may take an undefined amount of
time.

Support was very helpful and migrated our traffic to already warmed up IPs.

~~~
selckin
what does warm up mean in this context?

~~~
crazypyro
I'd assume its a process of slowly ramping up new IP addresses to send out
emails. If you take an IP and instantly use it on a massive scale, I'm sure it
triggers a lot of spam filters.

------
crisnoble
In case others are looking for alternatives to SendGrid, SparkPost has been
amazing to work with and offers 100,000 free transactional emails per month:
[https://www.sparkpost.com/](https://www.sparkpost.com/)

~~~
scosman
Whatever you do, don't consider Mandrill/Mailchimp. What they pulled earlier
this year makes this issue look like nothing.

~~~
inertial
Is it this ?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11203056](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11203056)
(Mandrill's Betrayal)

~~~
scosman
yup

------
restlessmedia
Status page seems so to suggest nothing is wrong...
[http://status.sendgrid.com/](http://status.sendgrid.com/)

~~~
SendGridBecca
Status page is for outages & maintenance only. Since this is not applicable to
all accounts and should only last at most a few days we have decided not to
post to our status page.

~~~
0xmohit
You would have done better to remain silent instead of making such posts.

A email delivery service isn't able to send those, and it considers that it
isn't worth posting on their status page!

Are these messages really from SendGrid support? Looks like a desperate bid to
prevent any future takeover attempts.

~~~
jessaustin
_Are these messages really from SendGrid support?_

Haha that's a great idea for a "dirty tricks" campaign against a competitor.
Every time they have an outage, a greenbean HN user starts posting less and
less plausible excuses with the aim of pissing everyone off. Eventually the
real CEO has to get on and say, "We don't know who this is but please ignore
them but no I don't want to say anything about our outage." Repeat for added
lulz...

~~~
linkregister
What's extra ironic is that Sendgrid employees were gloating on HN and posting
inaccurate information about competitors when the Mandrill TOS change was
announced. I think they really need an enforced social media policy.

Overall, I think Sendgrid does a fine job and it's unlikely this mistake will
be repeated. These gaffes don't represent the majority of the company.

~~~
0xmohit
> These gaffes don't represent the majority of the company.

Maybe a disgruntled support person then.

------
phil_s
Yep for 12-13 hours now. One thing I've noticed is that the CNAMEs I set up
for DKIM etc are not resolvable in DNS - could this be related to the issue?

All emails are listed under 'Activity' as being deferred.

Waiting for AWS to approve my SES access so I can switch away.

------
DanitaBaires
Same here, we have no delivered messages since yesterday at 17.00 GMT-3.
Contacted Sendgrid support about this because we're having a lot of registered
users that cannot activate their accounts.

------
poppup
I am using SendGrid on one project. Another surprising thing is that nobody
from SendGrid is responding to this thread to explain and rectify as I have
seen other companies do.

~~~
0xmohit
Perhaps you didn't see their helpful post here [0].

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12144124](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12144124)

~~~
monkpit
They wouldn't have seen it because it wasn't posted yet.

------
defied
We were previously using SendGrid but noticed a lot of email ended up in the
Junk folders.

Now we're using Postmark; much better service and no issues with
deliverability.

------
jazoom
Yup. Will be leaving SendGrid. This is appalling.

------
omfg
No emails going out over here either. Our customers are complaining. Might be
time to switch back to MailChimp.

------
AznHisoka
I used SendGrid years ago, and never want to go back to it.

Then I switched to AWS. Nobody got fired for using AWS S3.

~~~
nullcipher
You mean SES?

~~~
brianwawok
No he literally writes his all emails to AWS s3. Just dumps them in a file.

Hence, no one can get fired. How can you get fired, if your fired email is
just dumped in an s3 file?

~~~
Epskampie
You may have gotten downvoted to shit, but I thought that was funny!

~~~
brianwawok
Humor usually costs karma on hacker news but I can rebuild it with a few "wow
Ruby is slow" comments.

------
jrs235
Are you using their shared IPs or do you have a dedicated one?

------
joet3ch
We are experiencing this issue also. Contacted SendGrid support and had them
switch our traffic to different IP's.

Wish they would have communicated this in advance, or even update their status
page.

------
bruno222
If this guy was Homer Simpson, the answer would be:

(read using Homer voice)

"Uhhh, I love donuts! The status page is used only when something wrong
happens. In your case, we decide to give you an outage by purpose, without
telling you - haha - duh.

(Where is my beer, Marge?)

Oh, the customer is still waiting for my answer:

Dooonn't wooorrryyyy so much, we always do this on low plan customers - you
know, we need some dumb guys to warm up our new IP range - hohoho - meeeryyyy
x-mas!"

~~~
dang
We've banned this account for violating the HN guidelines. If you don't want
it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. We're happy to
unban people when there's reason to believe that they'll only post civil and
substantive comments in the future.

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12144124](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12144124)
and marked it off-topic.

------
SGDeepThroat
\-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: BCPG C# v1.6.1.0

SendGrid under cover agent here...

Don't believe the conspiracy theorists out there, that this wasn't a push to
the PRO plan for free tier usage account holders.

The free tier customers don't actually earn any money for send-grid, so I
wouldn't be surprised if this little stunt increased subscriptions for the pro
plan!

Remember, this wasn't an outage for anyone other than free tier account
holders and that's why it wasn't on the outage page!

SendGrid does want your business, as long as you don't spend too long on the
free-tier plan and ultimately upgrade!

Keep on Trucking...

Secret Agent... out!

\-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

~~~
samwillis
No, it's is an outage for paid accounts. It is just apparently that you need a
dedicated IP account to have not been effected.

