SendGrid pathetic service and ratings!

[Lucas James]

A very alarming situation. SendGrid has gone nose down from 10/10 to 0/10.

Trust Pilot Review: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/sendgrid.com

Would someone from IPS can elaborate why you guys are still providing SendGrid integration despite its poor service and ratings?

This is end of 2020, we need some good email provider(s) API integration to the IPS software, like AWS SES API etc.

Thanks

[christopher-w]

What's to stop you using the PHP or SMTP options? I'm using Mailgun SMTP.

 

[Lucas James]

2 hours ago, christopher-w said:

What's to stop you using the PHP or SMTP options?

 

[christopher-w]

6 minutes ago, Lucas James said:

 

Take your choice then. Speed versus efficacy.

 

[Runar]

6 minutes ago, christopher-w said:

Take your choice then. Speed versus efficacy.

I think his question deserves an answer. Why is SendGrid a default option when there are better and cheaper services?

[G17 Media]

SendGrid's shared IP pool is being blacklisted at an increasing amount of places. It's no longer a great place for deliverability.

See here for more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14202068

[CoffeeCake]

3 minutes ago, G17 Media said:

SendGrid's shared IP pool is being blacklisted at an increasing amount of places. It's no longer a great place for deliverability.

See here for more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14202068

That link has a discussion from 2017. We use sendgrid, and haven't had reports of any issues. Deliverability seems to be just fine. I'm sure there are others with issues, yet this has not been an issue for us (or at least one we've been made aware of).

We have made attempts to reduce the amount of outbound mail significantly by defaulting members to notifications only unless they opt-in to e-mail notifications, but this makes sense for our community and may not work for yours.

We use @stoo2000's bounce email management application to address any bouncing addresses with great success (though it's not yet upgraded to 4.5).

[G17 Media]

39 minutes ago, Paul E. said:

That link has a discussion from 2017. We use sendgrid, and haven't had reports of any issues. Deliverability seems to be just fine. I'm sure there are others with issues, yet this has not been an issue for us (or at least one we've been made aware of).

We have made attempts to reduce the amount of outbound mail significantly by defaulting members to notifications only unless they opt-in to e-mail notifications, but this makes sense for our community and may not work for yours.

We use @stoo2000's bounce email management application to address any bouncing addresses with great success (though it's not yet upgraded to 4.5).

The issue is still very current; see Kreb's on Security's post here, from last month: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/08/sendgrid-under-siege-from-hacked-accounts/

We get a lot of mail rejections from corporate domains from SendGrid, deliverability to Google is still quite high, although read rates are much lower. We are using our own custom e-mail stack now and hardly ever deal with rejections.

Either way, if SendGrid is still working great for you, I wish you the best.

[CoffeeCake]

4 hours ago, G17 Media said:

deliverability to Google is still quite high, although read rates are much lower.

That's interesting. Just gave this a review. Good indicator messages are going into Spam folders, yet nothing seems out of whack. I wonder if we're just on a lucky pool of IP addresses.

Are you using SPF/DKIM?

[Jordan Miller]

Intersting. I use SendGrid. 😶

[Jordan Miller]

Sooo I checked why my sending activity history with SendGrid was so weird lately. They said this:

Quote

Thank you so much for your patience while I got your account pulled up, it looks like a number of emails are being blocked by the recipient servers citing spamhaus listing for one or more of the shared IPs in your pool. I want to assure you that we're working closely with Spamhaus to resolve the addresses listed on their site and lift any blocks. We're making progress and communicating with Spamhaus on daily basis. There's a good chance that this particular blocklisting may already have been resolved; that being said, because the listing organization is in control of this system, we're unable to give an estimated time of resolution for this as the listing org may re-list at any time or prolong a listing due to subsequent complaints. Another thing to note is that sometimes just as quickly as an IP is delisted, it can be re-listed again just as quickly. This is common across all blacklistings which are a prominent risk across our shared IPs.

Wtf. I dont even know what to say or what to do. 

 

Edited September 29, 2020 by breatheheavy

[CoffeeCake]

17 minutes ago, breatheheavy said:

recipient servers citing spamhaus listing for one or more of the shared IPs in your pool

It looks like it's the luck of the draw then? We are on a paid plan, though not with dedicated IP addresses.

[Jordan Miller]

Just now, Paul E. said:

It looks like it's the luck of the draw then? We are on a paid plan, though not with dedicated IP addresses.

What plan are you on? They're advising me to upgrade now (of course lol). 

Honestly, this is a huge nightmare. I have to be able to send emails out and need to find a solution asap. 

[CoffeeCake]

We are integrated with Google cloud platform. I'm not sure. It all goes through GCP.

It doesn't look like there's anything on their pricing page that matches what we have, so I'm not sure if we're grandfathered in some way.

On their pricing page, you'd need the $90/month option to get a dedicated IP for outbound/inbound mail. No matter what service you'd go to, you want dedicated IP addresses to mitigate against someone else doing bad things and you getting blacklisted as a result. Otherwise, it may just be a matter of time from these reports.

[ahc]

We stopped using SendGrid for this reason.  More than half of our emails were not being delivered because we kept being assigned IP addresses that were blocked by most of the top providers.  When I sent in a ticket, they told me I would need to pay more money or just deal with it because they don't try to get their IPs unblocked.

I dealt with it by deleting my SendGrid account.  They got rid of SparkPost integration because of numerous issues and terrible customer service, but I actually had zero issues using SparkPost where I've always had those issues with SendGrid.

[Jordan Miller]

3 minutes ago, Paul E. said:

We are integrated with Google cloud platform. I'm not sure. It all goes through GCP.

It doesn't look like there's anything on their pricing page that matches what we have, so I'm not sure if we're grandfathered in some way.

On their pricing page, you'd need the $90/month option to get a dedicated IP for outbound/inbound mail. No matter what service you'd go to, you want dedicated IP addresses to mitigate against someone else doing bad things and you getting blacklisted as a result. Otherwise, it may just be a matter of time from these reports.

Yea that's the plan they're suggesting I move to, which is 6 x the price of what I've been paying (and am trying to keep my expenses as low as possible cause, well, 2020 lol). 

Wondering if there are any other options? 

2 minutes ago, ahc said:

We stopped using SendGrid for this reason.  More than half of our emails were not being delivered because we kept being assigned IP addresses that were blocked by most of the top providers.  When I sent in a ticket, they told me I would need to pay more money or just deal with it because they don't try to get their IPs unblocked.

I dealt with it by deleting my SendGrid account.  They got rid of SparkPost integration because of numerous issues and terrible customer service, but I actually had zero issues using SparkPost where I've always had those issues with SendGrid.

Just checked out SparkPost. So this isn't compatible with IPS? Are there any alternatives to SendGrid? Besides the cloud option of course. @ahc

Edited September 29, 2020 by breatheheavy

[Runar]

2 minutes ago, breatheheavy said:

Wondering if there are any other options? 

There are numerous options! I've been a happy user of Mailgun since SparkPost was dropped.

[ahc]

@breatheheavy  SparkPost is compatible via SMTP only, but it used to be fully integrated just like SendGrid until Invision removed it.  It's cheaper and more reliable in a lot of ways than SendGrid ever has been.

I haven't looked too much into other options outside of SparkPost because we switched back to using our server which is doing okay for now.

I forgot to also note that when I first created my SendGrid account, they suspended it a few hours later because they thought I stole someone's registered business information to sign up for an account without giving me the option to verify.  It took several weeks for me to prove that I owned the business.  SendGrid can shove it where the sun doesn't shine for all I care.

[Jordan Miller]

3 minutes ago, Runar said:

There are numerous options! I've been a happy user of Mailgun since SparkPost was dropped.

Which plan are you on?

Their $35 plan says it has a dedicated IP but it also says this. I'm confused. @Runar

 

2 minutes ago, ahc said:

@breatheheavy  SparkPost is compatible via SMTP only, but it used to be fully integrated just like SendGrid until Invision removed it.  It's cheaper and more reliable in a lot of ways than SendGrid ever has been.

I haven't looked too much into other options outside of SparkPost because we switched back to using our server which is doing okay for now.

I forgot to also note that when I first created my SendGrid account, they suspended it a few hours later because they thought I stole someone's registered business information to sign up for an account without giving me the option to verify.  It took several weeks for me to prove that I owned the business.  SendGrid can shove it where the sun doesn't shine for all I care.

So you're using SparkPost's Premiere plan for $75 a month? @ahc

Edited September 29, 2020 by breatheheavy

[Runar]

2 minutes ago, breatheheavy said:

Which plan are you on?

I'm on the "free" Flex plan. My community is not that email heavy so I rarely have to pay for my usage.

3 minutes ago, breatheheavy said:

Their $35 plan says it has a dedicated IP but it also says this. I'm confused.

With Mailgun you can choose between different plans (Flex, Foundation, Growth, and Scale), but also adjust how many emails you'll send each month. "Foundation 100k" means the Foundation plan with 100 000 monthly emails. If you adjust the slider on the pricing page, you'll see the price for this plan is $75/month. But at that point, you might as well pay $5 more to get longer retention.

For the record, I'm doing just fine without a dedicated IP address.

[ahc]

4 minutes ago, breatheheavy said:

So you're using SparkPost's Premiere plan for $75 a month? @ahc

No, still using our server.  We send a lot of emails so even using Sparkpost, we'd have to use their $170/m plan to accommodate it.

[Jordan Miller]

8 minutes ago, ahc said:

No, still using our server.  We send a lot of emails so even using Sparkpost, we'd have to use their $170/m plan to accommodate it.

Oh wow. So you send ~250K emails per month from your sever? 

I am going to look into this option right now.

Super annoyed with SendGrid mainly because they didn't say anything to me and I had to discover this on my own. And then their solution is to make me pay more. Gurrrrl. 

[ahc]

7 minutes ago, breatheheavy said:

Oh wow. So you send ~250K emails per month from your sever? 

I am going to look into this option right now.

Super annoyed with SendGrid mainly because they didn't say anything to me and I had to discover this on my own. And then their solution is to make me pay more. Gurrrrl. 

I send about 180k/m but it would cost more to choose the 100k plan and then be charged the fee for each additional email over that.  A lot of our members prefer to get email notifications since they pop up on their mobile.  Good alternative until our website's mobile app is finished and they finally get push notifications.

[Jordan Miller]

12 minutes ago, ahc said:

I send about 180k/m but it would cost more to choose the 100k plan and then be charged the fee for each additional email over that.  A lot of our members prefer to get email notifications since they pop up on their mobile.  Good alternative until our website's mobile app is finished and they finally get push notifications.

Interesting. And just to confirm you send these 180K emails from your server? Via SMTP in the ACP? 

[Morrigan]

I'm just gonna lol right out of this topic because I just can't. When services get popular they tend to start causing their own issues because they don't properly handle their own spam (not you, to me its them).

I think IPS used to integrate SparkPost and eventually it started to have a similar issue and then it went from allowing free accounts to not allowing free accounts. I also think they had another email service before that NGL.

Email is a sticky business, a few dozen people report your very reputable emails as spam and everything goes to hell, so I recommend you be patient with IPS as they investigate and talk to SendGrid for those that use it. Its not an overnight solution. I do ABSOLUTELY, recommend @stoo2000's bounce mail application as it does save both money and heartache with garbage emails, deleted emails, etc which can cause much of this heartache.