Bouncer is a secure SaaS e-mail verification and deliverability platform designed for strong coverage and performance (up to 200,000 verified e-mails per hour per customer). Boasting users from 5000+ companies, Bouncer aims to be a solution for any business size.
$0
Pay-as-you-go model Credits
Mailgun, from Pathwire
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Mailgun is a transactional email API service which was owned and supported by Rackspace (acquired in 2012) and then spun off in 2017 as an independent and standalone entity.
I have already recommended bouncer to a number of my colleagues, and I know of one that is already deploying it. Protecting your online reputation, staying off of UCE blacklists and the like are important to deliverability of your messages. Having a simple tool such as bouncer really helps achieve deliverability goals without deterring from your workflow to any degree.
Mailgun's pay-as-you-go pricing structure is fantastic, especially if you don't need to send that much email. The pricing, including the free tier, is much more generous than what you can get with some pricier providers, like SendGrid. I mainly just use Mailgun as an SMTP server for web services, and the service has been set-up-and-forget, which is great because I never even have to log onto the Mailgun website and do any work. Mailing list support also looks great for rolling-your-own and not relying on more expensive mailing list services.
Maybe to add some filters for History checks (by date, period, reason, person's name in case it's a corporate account, domain of email (by writing it manually), etc.) and add a date of verification
In case it's a corporate account, to add name of the person who verifies an email/bulk
If an email has been previously checked, and now you want to check it again (e.g. a few days later), then to show the status of email BUT to mention that you've already checked this email earlier (maybe to show the date)
No built-in templating features (This was a bit sad after coming from Mandrill which excelled at this)
Dashboard UI (although easy to use) is a bit dated in appearance
Logs are cumbersome compared to Mandrill
Setting up TLD (top level domain) names (things like .online or .church) that are not common require an email to tech support (this is annoying)
Sometimes can be slow in delivery
Shared IP addresses can be SPAM filtered or delayed (requires an email to support to have a new one assigned - Note: this can be mitigated by buying a dedicated one for a monthly fee)
Because I love this kind of solution. Not a lot of different functionalities but really effective for why I'm using it. I need to make sure my email list and CRM are corrects and Bouncer is perfect for that!
It could be more up-to-date and could offer some extra features that other competitors do like templating and better querying and filtering. As it is right now most things are easy to use but seem rather barebones next to Mandrill. The API is easy to implement thanks to the great documentation which is why I recommend Mailgun so often.
There have been a few minor outages through the years, but nothing more than a few minutes. These small outages are to be expected in any kind of a SaaS product, but Mailgun handles them very well. We designed our software to just retry sending after a while if there is an outage. As far as I know, we have never had to do more than a few retry cycles. This is all automated on our end, so we rarely even notice. Our customers have never noticed any mail sending outages.
The API and the deliverability of emails is excellent. Their API is very responsive and performs perfectly fine. I have no complaints there. Their management interface though (accessed through the web) is pretty slow though. Searching through lists of emails when I'm tracking down a problem for a customer can take 10+ seconds which is annoyingly high for a modern web app.
You can't seem to get ANY support until you shell out hundreds of dollars per month. I even did this when we could not deliver mail with Mailgun, and the response was slow and inadequate. Nor would they refund my money. I'll never be a customer of Mailgun again.
Bouncer validates and cleans email lists more accurately than other tools. It has a lower false, positive rate, can identify hard bounces, and provides detailed reports on email validation results, making it a more reliable and effective tool for maintaining a clean email list.
MailGun is more expensive than SparkPost and about the same price-wise as SendGrid. MailGun had a notably easy set-up process, since they are the first SMTP service we signed up with, and their support has been very helpful in identifying deliverability issues, providing documentation on IP reputation management, and recommending best sending practices.
Over the past six years, Mailgun has scaled with our growth very easily. We haven't had to make any code changes to handle our larger volume today, and their pricing has scaled naturally with our growth. As far as I know, there is nothing we will need to do in order to grow 10-fold. Mailgun just handles the load really well.
ROI can't be defined for mail checking, but it definitely saves much time and effort, and probably money since it allows us to appear in mailbox of our leads.
By not investing in our mail server, we have saved huge amount of money and time. For configuration and installation of an email server on Linux-based server, we would have to hire a network administrator.
If email delivery is an issue in a hosting provider, another solution is to switch the hosting. Fortunately with Mailgun, we didn't need to try different hosts and experiment which one works best for emails. We can stick to our existing web hosting provider and would not need to change it just for the sake of improving email deliverability.
The pricing of Mailgun is very cheap and straightforward. First 10K emails are free every month and that's a big advantage for our organization because our volume of emails is rarely more than 10K per month.
