"That's the point they [mailgun] lost me as a customer."
I would have been mad about the suggested $1k+ cleaning service too.
But, you do have to consider mailgun is protecting their reputation and assets as well. Like an IPV4 range that could get blacklisted if your diy cleansing wasn't right. And you mentioned your first run with the new provider was over 5% bounces, so it wouldn't have been good enough.
I'm less mad about the cleaning service and more mad about the pace of responses and the fact that I got 3 different responses from 3 different customer support reps who apparently didn't read any of the prior history in the thread.
I think the shutdown is totally valid and a good practice, but my initial ticket started with (paraphrasing): "ooooops, my bad for forgetting to migrate my bounces to the new domain. I've paused that campaign until I can clean it up." It still took almost 2 days to get reinstated after jumping through a bunch of unrelated questions.
Sure, it was on a weekend. I'm also slower at responding on weekends. But I also choose not to operate a mission-critical business specifically because I don't want to be on call on weekends. Maybe don't autoban people if you can't respond in a timely manner?
Follow-up thought: they just got acquired, so maybe there's some consolidation happening in terms of support or business processes that I'm not privy to. This was definitely more of a "straw that broke the camel's back" kind of response than abject outrage after the initial WTF response to the "clean your list before we re-enable you" message.
I started migrating while the service was down and they had given no indication that it would be turned back on any time soon. By the time my emails were reinstated, I was around 80-90% migrated. At that point, it's worth kicking the tires on the new service to see how deliverability compares.
I would have been mad about the suggested $1k+ cleaning service too.
But, you do have to consider mailgun is protecting their reputation and assets as well. Like an IPV4 range that could get blacklisted if your diy cleansing wasn't right. And you mentioned your first run with the new provider was over 5% bounces, so it wouldn't have been good enough.
I can see why Mailgun pushes that solution.