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
SMTP2GO
Score 9.7 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
SMTP2GO is a dedicated outbound email server SMTP2GO is a New Zealand based SMTP/Email API provider with support staff and servers based across the globe. It automatically connects to the closest server to ensure speedy and efficient delivery. The SMTP2GO support team offers 24/7 assistance in multiple languages to make setup simple. We offer support via ticket, chat and phone. GDPR? Inbound servers and data centres in the EU to make sure sending is…
Even with the list of negatives, Mailgun is still a great solution for how easy it is to work with and how ubiquitous it is to find examples and libraries out there on the internet. The company has great support and are usually quick to address and fix things. I do think they have some room for improvement with the lack of templates and the outdated UI log handling/filtering.
It's great for any application that you need to track email receipt and recipient interaction, or with devices/programs that don't fare well with Exchange based email services. Don't try to set SMTP2GO as your outbound email server if you're using O365, that just isn't a possibility (not that I've looked into that setup).
Mailgun is used by spammers, and sometimes your assigned mail server will get blacklisted because of other users on it.
If you end up with a mail server that is blacklisted, your mail will go nowhere. And, below the $300 and up pricing tiers, there is no one at Mailgun to help you get this problem resolved. You are just stuck.
In other words, Mailgun is unreliable as a mission-critical service. I would strongly recommend using a service with better processes in place.
Might be nice to add a monthly good looking PDF report for subaccount users that can be branded and sent directly to the subaccount contact. A 'client facing' report that we can use to show our customers the email usage history.
Reliability in email delivery is what counts the most. SMTP2GO is undeniably a winner in this category. The price is reasonable, therefore the RoI is excellent.
The time for the initial setup is very quick, since you can start sending (thus developing) from their sandbox in no time. The actual configuration involves, as usual, some DNS changes that may require time but are well explained and documented. Once everything is set up, there are a lot of monitoring tools that you can use to optimize your lists.
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.
MailGun's support staff is both friendly and helpful. They were very instrumental early on with helping out during the setup process by answering questions, providing documentation on best sending practices, detailing information about the advantages of sending from a dedicated IP rather than an IP pool, and helping us to remove ourselves from blacklists.
I've only needed support for the software once or twice the 5+ years i've used it. I found their support responsive and helpful at each encounter. They seem to have the same level of commitment to their enterprise as I do to mine which is refreshing.
Not really a con but I typically choose SendGrid over Mailgun simply because I've been using SendGrid for so long. Overall, SendGrid and Mailgun are both rock solid and very affordable. You could probably flip a coin on which one to use. I would definitely look into SendGrid's Accelerate Program too.
Our goal was to find a product what fit those needs:
Can be use with SMTP protocol to relay emails from our webhosting environment
Have an API to manage the account and offer the ability to also send emails
The competition was offering too much options and services that we wouldn't use but still had to pay for while SMTP2GO fulfilled our needs with a verry competitiveThe competition was offering too much options and services that we wouldn't use (but still had to pay for anyways) while SMTP2GO fulfilled our needs with a verry competitive pricing.
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.
Allowed us to use the same SMTP information across the board for all customers instead of having them split between several accounts.
More cost efficient than paying for several different email accounts.
Created an additional layer of great customer service for us since SMTP information is able to be preprogrammed into the equipment before ever leaving our facility.
