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.
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?
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.
Thank you! Something I would have forgotten as well and probably will not anymore
DMARC and friends only help with authenticity. There's plenty of fraudsters sending authentic spam out there. The cost of a new domain is like $6, and there's plenty of people inputting their credentials on fake webmail signin pages for spammers that have trouble maintaining a credit card.
I don't know why they don't just keep a master list of every bounced email across every domain (or maybe that's what their paid verification product is and I just haven't looked at it closely enough?) and let me set a flag when sending an email to reject anything they know is going to bounce.
Of course, this is just a mistake and after explaining Mailgun shouldn't charge $1358 for clean service. But as a customer, you should take some responsibility when doing something wrong as well. For example, if the account is old, and this is the first time this happen, and once we explain the mistake, Mailgun should waive that fee.
On AWS SES if the bounce rate >10%, your account is temporarily suspended.
If the exact samething happen with any mail provider, where a large of emails volume are bounced. They would need to pause/restrict your account in some way.
I would suggest look into AWS SES and started to write code to handle bounce email yourself to get a sense of it.
Uncleaned, imported list? CHECK
No domain warm-up? CHECK
Ignore hometown hero MailChimp that would have predicted bounces and disarmed your foot gun? CHECK
Passing blame to customer support? SAD
I don't recall what MailChimp's pricing was back then, but 50k users would be $640/mo today (vs ~$80 on Mailgun). I'm currently north of 300k users, which is up into the "contact us for pricing" range. It just doesn't make sense for a site with revenue sub-$10k (like, well sub-$10k).
I could've dropped that price by spending a shitload of time deactivating contacts and trying to keep my active users count lower, but email just isn't that profitable for me. I wouldn't say I'm great at email or attribution, but I estimate I drive ~$250-500/mo in sales through email (up from $0 when I started).
The other points are good ones -- even on Mailgun, I should've had different subdomains set up for IntroCave for transactional/campaign/newsletter blasts. I got "good enough" results doing it the lazy way, though. I still wouldn't have remembered to migrate the bounces, and this might have actually increased my bounce rate. Since bounce lists are per-domain and not per-account, a signup bounce wouldn't necessarily have prevented me from sending transactional stuff later (I've since added a bounced flag to my user model which would catch this).
(edit: actually the first point is pretty good. i disagree with the rest. list was mine, domain was warmed with a week of email before the ToS blast, and I manually ramped up volume on the ToS blast for the first 30 hours or so while keeping an eye on deliverability. This was entirely my fault, so I'm not sure what you mean by blame... I'm not happy with the customer support response, but the title of the post should make it pretty clear where the blame lies--me!)
Postmark is definitely better in my experience with multiple customers. They actually check the delivery to different big mailproviders like gmail.
The support I had there was also quick and helpful.
It is definitely pricier, but should spare a couple of headaches if email is vital to your business.
I don’t want emails about changing to your ToS
I did weigh whether to send a notice or not, and for me it came down to emotion more than economics. My thinking:
It'll end up costing a few hundred dollars to send it out. A lot of users have probably forgotten what IntroCave is or don't need it any more, and hopefully they'll request account deletion (hundreds of people did). I expected to generate approximately $0 in sales from the email, but if I can save even a handful of users from typing in the old domain, getting redirected to the new domain, wondering WTF, and bouncing -- that seemed worth it.
That's a spammer, by definition.
I don't see any evidence of being a spammer.
According to @SimianLogic, they had 300,000 users. If they are sending about 1,000 emails a day, that would mean that each user is receiving an average of 1.2 emails a year.
There is also a monthly newsletter that goes to 30,000. That means that in addition to the 1.2 emails a year each user receives, 10% of users receive an additional one (1) email per month. Given that only 10% of users receive the newsletter, I'm assuming it isn't too difficult to opt out.
This doesn't seem like spam. Rather, IntroCave (now IntroMaker) has hundreds of thousands of users and therefore needs to send thousands of emails.
These emails all go to users who have signed up for an account. Traffic is weird right now (domain migration in progress), but I was getting ~250-350 user signups a day.
I send a monthly newsletter to users who have been recently active, a welcome sequence of 2 or 3 emails depending on where you sign up, and have an abandoned cart sequence of 3 emails (here's the link to your video / your preview will expire soon / your preview has expired).
Both of those channels (newsletter / automated sequences) have opt-outs, but the automated ones see pretty good engagement. The max number of automated emails is in the 5/6 range before unsubscribes, so it only takes ~3-4 emails per user to get up to 1k/day -- especially when you toss in another 100 or so for normal password resets, receipts, order emails, etc.
What definition of "spammer" are you using?
What he did is upload a mailing list manually, rather than curate one with a service. This manual practice makes it almost impossible to guarantee that valid unsub requests have been honored, among other things. In this particular case, he admits accidentally including bounce out addresses.
That's why good email services make it difficult to upload 100k addresses and call it a day.
Additionally, permission to email someone with app notifications is not permission to send them bulk.
How on earth would you categorize that as spam?
