<story><title>Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid</title><url>https://github.com/atech/postal</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jwr</author><text>I tried using Sendgrid and was surprised to find out that unless you buy an expensive plan, then:&lt;p&gt;* You get IPs from a shared pool, and the reputation is nowhere near guaranteed. In fact, many of my mails were blackholed or rejected.&lt;p&gt;* The &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; IPs that were used by someone for spamming are not immediately removed from the pool, so you &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; encounter them.&lt;p&gt;The net result for me was that Sendgrid is not a solution for my transactional E-mail, because of the high risk of my E-mails getting blackholed&amp;#x2F;rejected. I use it for newsletters&amp;#x2F;marketing only.</text></item><item><author>dan1234</author><text>Isn’t part of the reason for using Mailgun, Sendgrid etc that you get to send via IP addresses with good reputation?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lucaspiller</author><text>I had exactly the same experience. For context I run a SaaS targetting small&amp;#x2F;medium businesses, who usually have in-house email servers with extremely restrictive spam filters. The IP was on a blacklist, so some of my customers just couldn&amp;#x27;t use my service. I contacted SendGrid and their only solution was to upgrade from a $20&amp;#x2F;mo plan to a $80&amp;#x2F;mo plan with a dedicated IP - they wouldn&amp;#x27;t even move me to another IP in the pool.&lt;p&gt;Given this, and my volumes of mail were increasing (once you go over 100k emails&amp;#x2F;mo SendGrid&amp;#x27;s pricing goes up a lot), I setup my own mail server using Cuttlefish [0]. I set it up on an OVH instance that I pay £2.50&amp;#x2F;mo for. I contacted them to enquire about spam policies before opening an account, and they said they take it very seriously and monitor outgoing SMTP for spam.&lt;p&gt;The IP address I ended up with was still on one blacklist, but the process to remove it was pretty easy (fill out a form, and explain the situation) and took about 1 day. I set this up around 6 months ago and have had no problems with deliverability since then, I&amp;#x27;m now up to sending around 300k emails per month.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;basho&amp;#x2F;cuttlefish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;basho&amp;#x2F;cuttlefish&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid</title><url>https://github.com/atech/postal</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jwr</author><text>I tried using Sendgrid and was surprised to find out that unless you buy an expensive plan, then:&lt;p&gt;* You get IPs from a shared pool, and the reputation is nowhere near guaranteed. In fact, many of my mails were blackholed or rejected.&lt;p&gt;* The &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; IPs that were used by someone for spamming are not immediately removed from the pool, so you &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; encounter them.&lt;p&gt;The net result for me was that Sendgrid is not a solution for my transactional E-mail, because of the high risk of my E-mails getting blackholed&amp;#x2F;rejected. I use it for newsletters&amp;#x2F;marketing only.</text></item><item><author>dan1234</author><text>Isn’t part of the reason for using Mailgun, Sendgrid etc that you get to send via IP addresses with good reputation?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jimktrains2</author><text>We really need a better solution to fighting spam.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;jimktrains&amp;#x2F;email_ng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;jimktrains&amp;#x2F;email_ng&lt;/a&gt; is an overly complicated idea I had once, but the basic gist is that the receiver could give the sender a signed receiver email address that is for the sender&amp;#x27;s email address.  This way, transactional email (and sure, I guess marketing from your company) would be able to get through and the email given out wouldn&amp;#x27;t be able to be used if sold or stolen, as the receiving mail server would reject it because of a bad signature (bad sender, and coupled with DKIM and SPF, a malicious user wouldn&amp;#x27;t be able&amp;#x2F;allowed to spoof the sender&amp;#x27;s email).</text></comment>