Getting your message through

Tapio Nurminen

April 17th, 2020

Since 2012, Flo Apps Ltd has used a number of subcontractors to deliver transactional emails. These companies include

Mailgun

Mailjet (recently acquired by Mailgun)

Mandrill (part of Mailchimp)

Postmark

SendinBlue

Twilio Sendgrid

Throughout the years, Mandrill has been our number one email provider. They did have a major blackout in February 2019 but have mended their ways since. Over the past 12 months, we have not had a single issue with them.

If you’re trying to choose between email providers, here’s some factors to consider when making the selection:

1. Support

How quickly does their support react? Do you get answers that are helpful?

2. Features

One of the main features we need is being able to send an identical email to a large number of recipients without them seeing the other recipients. Using Bcc is out of the question as using Bcc can easily land your messages in recipients’ filters. As far as I know, Mandrill is currently the only email provider to which you can send a single API call and Mandrill delivers the messages, one by one, to up to 1,000 recipients.

Another handy feature I highly appreciate in Mandrill is its automatic inclusion of a text version for HTML emails. You do not need to generate the text version yourself as the sending mechanism handles it automatically.

3. Deliverability

While getting your messages into recipients’ email boxes sounds simple, it isn’t. It’s particularly difficult to measure email providers’ quality in their free starter plans. Those plans use shared IP’s and getting your messages through may prove challenging.

4. Pricing

Email providers’ pricing models differ widely. For larger volumes of email, using a dedicated IP is a must to get past the spam filters. Different companies have different price tags for dedicated IP’s.

5. Panel usability

All transactional email companies provide panels to analyse email delivery. Some backend UI’s are fast and responsive, others are slightly sluggish. While Mandrill provides an easy-to-use panel, they haven’t updated the UI since its launch in 2012. Aging is starting to show.

In my opinion, one of the most useful features is to be able to view the full message content in the send log. As far as I know, Twilio Sendgrid’s panel lacks this feature.