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. It is now supported by Sinch since that company's acquisition of Mailgun and Mailjet, through acquiring Pathwire.
$35
per month
Everest (Return Path + 250ok)
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Everest is an integrated email success platform providing crucial insights and deliverability guidance so users can reach more people, increase engagement, and improve efficiencies of their email programs. Everest helps to improve email deliverability by getting complete visibility into email marketing metrics and sender reputation, understand the audience and deliver content that is timely, personalized, and functions flawlessly on any device, and get a holistic view of a company's…
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.
Every new or established brand should be using Everest. It doesn't matter what you're trying to say in your emails—if they're not reaching the inbox, no one is listening or reading. Everest gives you the insight you need to understand your inbox placement, reputation and so much more.
Individualized attention. They really dug in to understand our products and services.
Easy-to-understand training and actionable items that you can sustain over a long period of time.
They're embedded in our instance of Exact Target, so I'm able to review the entire email program and don't have to open up a separate tool to gather this information.
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)
We have two separate areas for using Return Path. Our web ecommerce area that is using only transactional emails and a marketing email program that is partnered on the backend with Return Path. I see Return Path continuing to be utilized with our marketing emails, but over time I see less need for our transactional emails to maintain Return Path components.
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.
Absolutely fantastic support. It runs circles around the competition. They regularly reach out and chat, even if it's just to see if there's any issues we need to discuss. They clearly want the business and don't forget you once you sign the contract which is an issue with other similar services.
I joined my company after the implementation was nearly complete. We used the Return Path tool as we slowly increased our send volume in Marketing Cloud to monitor IP reputation and inbox placement.
To be honest, the tools are quite similar and again I dont recommend using them as a standalone products, but they power the work we do via CRMs and our marketing campaigns. Mailgun integrates slightly better which it is why it is the preferred choice for our agency, as it integrations options seem to be better
Like I said before, Return Path is really the budget bundle. You get a lot of service for how much you pay. Since I am currently at an early stage startup, we could not afford Litmus, so having Return Path is crucial. The partnership with Salesforce also allowed us to get it at pretty low cost.
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.
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.
It has helped identify inbox issues and thus helping our clients reach more inboxes.
They have negatively impacted client relations on numerous occasions. They have reached out and told clients they are having issues or need certain products when they are already our clients and we are proving solutions for them.
They provide solid customer support when you create a support ticket. They are usually very quick to respond and give you an answer.
