EmailOctopus | Full Stack PHP Dev | ONSITE (London, Manchester) or REMOTE (permission to work in UK required) | Full-time
EmailOctopus is a simple, intuitive and affordable email marketing platform. We’re a small company making a big impact — with a growing customer base we’ve gone from strength to strength over the past seven years. Some of our current clients include Jaguar Land Rover, Universal Music, Bear Grylls, WaterAid and NPR.
We’re looking for a talented Full Stack Developer to help us make EmailOctopus the preferred email marketing platform for thousands of users around the world.
The market for entrepreneurs/companies who know how to create IAM credentials but don't have the time or skills to build an entire email marketing platform on top of Amazon SES is bigger than you think (I co-founded EmailOctopus which does the same thing without the database hookup, which is a cool idea).
Since 2014 we've been making email marketing simpler, more intuitive and better value, to help anyone with an audience grow. We're sending over 100 million emails a week and processing a huge amount of associated data – 10 TB and counting! Doing this affordably (fair pricing is one of our core values) brings some unique and fun challenges.
You should apply if:
- You're excited by our technical challenges
- You have the right to work in the UK, but enjoy working flexibly from anywhere in the world
- You have 5+ years experience in PHP and its web frameworks, like Symfony/Laravel
- You're passionate about writing clean, well-tested and maintainable code
- You like the idea of working for a small company and having a big impact, and you have the ability to work with a high degree of self-motivation and limited supervision
CEO of an email marketing platform here (EmailOctopus). If anyone's curious, here's a chart showing our bounce rate to Gmail addresses over the course of the week:
I know this is your livelihood, but as someone who basically never wants marketing emails, all I can think is "nice" hopefully I get auto-unsub'ed from a ton of lists.
This is very charitable. How many people live with the nuisance of mailing (they un- or knowingly subscribed to) VS those who actually go through the trouble of unsubscribing/mark as spam in hope to rid of the from inbox?
I normally just delete mailing list mails. I don't even read them.
This year i decided to do "something" about it, so every mailing list mail received in my inbox that i don't want/care for gets an unsubscribe. It has already reduced my daily mails by a somewhat large amount. It's hard to say exactly how much, but i estimate around 10 emails less every day.
Most of the unsubscribed lists are from companies where i've purchased something andthe seller took the liberty of subscribing me to their mailing list. Those are mostly pre-GDPR that i've just never gotten around to dealing with.
The execption is of course obvious spam mails, to which unbsubscribing will probably do more harm than good.
That conclusion makes zero sense to me unless counting on the nebulous nature of the descriptor, “a large number”. They deliver successfully to my Gmail account on a regular basis so I must want to receive it? Feels like you’re telling me to stop dressing like a slut. ;)
Totally agree, especially as I signed up for exactly zero of them.
Rant: As I side note I usually try and buy direct when shopping online rather than through Amazon (for all but the most trivial purchases) and this is the 2nd largest drawback (behind filling in CC and shipping info) - because I bought one item from you, once in my life does not mean send me a daily email, and then when unsubscribing pretend like I signed up for them! For me it’s one of the easiest ways to destroy brand loyalty/reputation.
I would be very interested to know this as well. I am trying to switch my company over to Google Workspace right now and support has been telling me my signup issues will be "resolved in 48 hours or less."
What a joke. And this after we're leaving AWS Workmail because of bounced emails.
Heavily recommend you don't switch your company over to Google. Microsoft seems to understand that in the enterprise world you actually have to have support personnel, not just an opaque AI without chance for appeal
Consider yourself lucky. I have some ad words in "approval" porocess for 6 months now. I kid you not - every Friday I receive email stating that the update will be send to me on Monday (insert date here). Then nothing happens on Monday until Friday comes and I get exactly same copy, only date is different. At this point I literally laugh.
About your query
I gather that you are concerned about your Ads Disapproval for your Google Ads Account.
Observation
I understand that this is taking a bit longer as we are working with a limited staff due to Global pandemic and there is another team who reviews the account so there can be a slight delay in the decision I apologize for the inconvenience caused as I understand this is not the answer which you are looking for but be rest assured I will get back to you on coming Friday 12/18/2020 end of business day.
For any further assistance, I am just an email away.
Also anecdotally, during the outage, test messages from my non-gmail account to my standalone/non-enterprise gmail accounts consistently bounced; test messages from my non-gmail account to my G Suite Business-associated account went through.
Totally valid, and I wouldn't. The status page indicates that "Google Workspaces" is affected, but I don't know if that is synonymous with what I have (which was Google Apps a decade ago, unsure now). All I can say is I was receiving emails during the affected window.
As an ESP, how much of a headache will this be for you in weeks/months to come? I'm guessing this throws a huge wrench in deliverability techniques--how're you handling it?
It's a real headache but should be fully reversible. @shmoogy hit the nail on the head: we'll run through our events in that timeframe, inspect the raw bounce reason to check it relates to the Gmail outage, then undo the actions that the bounce caused.
The reason why this is so nasty is not because Gmail went down, but because they returned a 5XX permanent failure and not a 4XX temporary failure for these bounces. Literally every email provider will respond to a permanent bounce by suppressing all further emails to that email address (it's permanent, after all!), so the fallout from this will be huge.
The hard bounce status might be stored outside of your lists. I am not sure customers can easily change a hard bounce status themselves. Do you mean you just deleted those records with intent to re-add to reset the status? On our BigMailer platform this wouldn't work as hard bounce status would get preserved.
We use SendGrid and Mailgun right now, and both of these expose the suppression list, email address, time, and reason code + description. In Sendgrid you can filter, and mass select to remove suppressions easily (which was great). In mailgun I had to export a CSV and just removed them manually as there was not too many across my accounts.
Customers generally cannot change this on their end as far as I can imagine -- this is on the ESP end and is a protection built in because you are sending from their IP / Server and they don't take kindly to that.
+1 what Jonathan said. Typically, when email service providers are down the response code indicates a temporary issue with a soft bounce code, so you can still try to send to that address in the future.
The action for rectifying isn't too difficult, but the implications are still pretty big...
Thanks for sharing Jonathan, unprecedented situation. And that's just gmail.com addresses we can see data on, while there are all those business domains that use Google Apps for their email that probably experienced a similar issue...
Can I throw my hat into the ring? I run an email marketing platform (https://emailoctopus.com) that’s affordable and aimed at entrepreneurs/makers with newsletters. Shoot me an email if you’d like a discount.
Sure no problem, I have heard of it before, there are just a lot of options out there and it takes time to dig into each one when I only help out part time. Having a "start for free" option is definite a good idea and I probably will check it out soon.
Since 2014 we've been making email marketing simpler, more intuitive and better value, to help anyone with an audience grow. We're sending over 100 million emails a week and processing a huge amount of associated data – 10 TB and counting! Doing this affordably (fair pricing is one of our core values) brings some unique and fun challenges.
You should apply if:
- You're excited by our technical challenges
- You have the right to work in the UK, but enjoy working flexibly from anywhere in the world
- You have 2+ years experience in PHP and its web frameworks, like Symfony/Laravel
- You're passionate about writing clean, well-tested and maintainable code
- You like the idea of working for a small company and having a big impact, and you have the ability to work with a high degree of self-motivation and limited supervision
EmailOctopus is a simple, intuitive and affordable email marketing platform. We’re a small company making a big impact — with a growing customer base we’ve gone from strength to strength over the past seven years. Some of our current clients include Jaguar Land Rover, Universal Music, Bear Grylls, WaterAid and NPR.
We’re looking for a talented Full Stack Developer to help us make EmailOctopus the preferred email marketing platform for thousands of users around the world.
More about the role and to apply: https://workinstartups.com/job-board/job/137850/full-stack-d...
(please mention you heard about the role here)