Sparkpost.com from sendgrid [very bad experience]

I had the exact same experience with Sparkpost. They were used to send receipts for purchases and not any sort of email marketing.

We started out on their free plan. While it wasn't as great as Mandrill (couldn't view outgoing content, for example) they didn't mess up the email format or inject any weird links.

We expanded to their paid plan as a result of our volume about a month later. Roughly 2-3 weeks after that, we received an automated notice at 1 AM on a Friday that our account had been suspended and that we should contact the abuse group and that they would reply within "2 days".

Not only did they stop our outgoing emails, but they didn't even bother queueing the ones our app was sending them. In fact, the worst part was that their API was returning 200 OK for emails that weren't sent, so our system didn't bother putting them in our failed jobs DB.

I emailed just about everyone in that company that I could find to no avail. The "abuse team" replied at around 4pm that day that our account was suspended for "multiple complaints" and that they were willing to give us "another chance" and subsequently reinstated us.

We started a migration back to Mandrill.

Assuming I'm understanding you correctly you sent 11,000 emails in under 24 hours to 10-15 people? For a newly created account I could understand that raising a few red flags. Though that doesn't justify their support staff failing to respond to queries nor the immediate account termination.

I get the feeling they're having trouble with their sender reputation; one of our larger clients was recently switched to SparkPost from Mandrill ("it's too expensive!") and it's now a continual battle with delayed deliveries and mail being marked as spam. The issue never arose with Mandrill. (and yes, SPF and DKIM are correct)

I moved away from mandrill but had to come back to them. Sendgrid sucked big time. Email delays all the time. Go check their status page and u will know what I mean. Also, they don't show email content like mandrill which is a big issue for troubleshooting. So even though mandrill screwed with pricing and last min change, they have been most stable for us. I don't even want to bother with sparkpost or mailgun at this time. My 2 cents.

UPDATE [2 hours after initial post] I heard from compliance who asked a ton of questions and said our email was flagged as spam by their system. Keep in mind, we send to the same 10-15 people and not a single spam or bounce. I wrote back immediately with the info they wanted. As I mentioned, I will update as this progresses.

UPDATE [3 hours after initial post] Thank you for that information. I have re-activated your account.

So it looks like a response time of about 5 hours. I find that response time more than effective. The issue I still have is the automated block on a paid account + static IP at 4am. It was inconvenient considering we had been sending for almost a full day. I am still looking at staying with mailgun as you all seem to really like them and from what I can see after my tests with them, are quite nice.

So 1 day of usage of a service you are paying for on Sparkpost could get your account suspended. My feeling is if they are going to be THAT overly sensitive, they should do some initial questions prior to signing someone up to a paid account. Not that a paid account should be exempt but it should certainly grant some warning with a few hours before they just block your account. They could easily throttle the paid account for 12 hours with an email that the client needs to email them with info. Atleast email would still be going out even if its slower...

Since YC has slowed my comment down, I wanted to check on speed. I am really really surprised at how slow sparknews is. We are using smtp but here are some stats: # in outgoing queue Time checked 2848 (starting point) @ 8:45 am 2849 @ 9:01 am 2830 @ 9:19 am 2823 @ 9:25 am 2816 @ 9:30 am

I'm going to throw in my recommendation for Postmark (postmarkapp.com) for transactional mail. Solid, reliable service for us.

If you're sending high volume, consider AWS SES. It doesn't have the fancy tempting of Mandrill/Sendgrid/etc, but it's a fraction of the cost and the deliverability has been excellent. We migrated 98% of our emails off Mandrill when they decided to screw all their customers and saved a ton of money.

You could wait a couple days before making this public.

This post seems like you are seeking social justice and gives sparkpost the chance to escape a bad review relatively unscathed.

Now even if they fix your issue, we will never know if it is due to good service or fear of the pitchforks.

Like Mandrill, most (all?) of these companies have some warmup period. Start sending low volumes, then once you have enough reputation go to higher volumes.

I don't belong to any of these companies but as a client, use their services heavily. Imagine a spammer signing up with them and sending several thousands mails in a day. They deal with such notorious people on a daily basis.

I am not saying you may have done anything wrong but probably their system flagged you when you sent 11k emails to 10-15 people.

In any case here is my rec for you in order- 1. PostMark - They do strictly transactional email. 2. Mailgun 3. SparkPost 4. SES

We moved to Sparkpost and hit a few bumps at first. However, after working through those and paying for a dedicated IP address, the service has been reliable and suits our use case. I do have the sense, however, that they need to hire more support personnel.

I'm not sure if you found it, but I believe that Sparkpost has a "public" support group on Slack. That's where I finally was able to get messages through when we ran into problems. They were fixed promptly.

I used to love Sendgrid but they seem to be slowing down development these days. Their interface hasn't changed much in the past few years and their Python libs/docs are ok but not great.

If I were sending lots of email like I used to I would consider SES but for the small volumes I'm doing now it seems like Sendgrid and Mailgun are good enough. Postmark.app gets some positive reviews in the comments so maybe people should give them a shot.

We've been very happy with Mailgun. Just last week I sent out ~10k emails/day within a week of setting up a new account (though to 10k different people).

Wow that sucks!

I moved to mailgun yesterday. I run an alert system for Google Analytics, so I can't afford delays of more than a minute, and even then...

So far so good with mailgun!

Thanks for the info on Sparkpost, definitely not tempted to move there ;)

Mailgun has proved reliable for us. Sparkpost came across a bit desperate and opportunistic on Twitter in the immediate Mandrill aftermath so I avoided them.

Thanks for the info on sparkpost.

I shut off my Mandrill account, but I still need to migrate to something that works.

Are there any things you do not like about mailgun?

What's your email about? That could be your problem! Share a screenshot.

mailgun has worked pretty well for us