Hey everyone…
My app needs a very reliable transactional email service.
I read of problems with emails being blocked that have come via Sendgrid, then I read of the need to warm up IP addresses, and all sorts of faffing around required.
Can anyone recommend a transactional email service that just works reliably out of the box?
Thanks!
Antony.
Mailgun is great, although with any mail service, you’ll need to follow best-practices of anti-spam sending… We used to have deliverability issues, tried to tweak some things, and have much better deliverability now.
Mailgun also has a service that helps scrub your emails first, which should help
I’ve found ListJoy.com to be great for cleaning email lists - easy to use and does a really good job (materially better than the other 5 or so services we tested).
It’s also a best practice to have a process to scrub the hard bounced emails from your list along with ones that soft bounce too often. You should also remove emails when the recipient doesn’t ever open them because sending emails that aren’t opened hurts your deliverability.
And, it’s not just the company that you send transaction emails that matters but the specific server, plus all of the settings (for example, you’ll want to be sure to validate it as being from your domain with dkim and/or spf, etc.)
I haven’t had issues with Sendgrid, although you do need to set it up correctly.
Mandrill is probably the biggest and run by Mailchimp.
Postmark claims to have the fastest deliverability for transactional emails.
Sparkpost is another big one.
All should make you setup DKIM and SPF, which should help to keep you out of spam.
These may be helpful:
Warmup Services:
https://ipoven.com/
https://ipwarmup.com/
I can definitely recommend Postmark. 
Great list, @Kfawcett!
I’ve not mentioned it here, but I have had problems very recently with Sendgrid and it seems that Sendgrid has a big problem with deliverability to many domains.
The source of the issue is that some email systems – very notably Apple’s (so icloud.com, me.com, etc.) – apparently look at the ‘return path’ setting rather than the ‘from’ setting as part of determining the sending domain.
Sendgrid sets ‘return path’ to a special address to handle bounces, spam reports, etc. And this address is not the same as the ‘from’ address.
What happens is that Apple’s email system looks at this return path and says, “This sender does not exist, so we should not deliver this email.” And, in fact, the email just goes into the bitbucket.
Now, Sendgrid insists that it is Apple’s email system that is doing the wrong thing (and I would tend to agree with Sendgrid). However, Apple seems to have no intention of changing this, so it’s kind of on Sendgrid to work out some sort of solution on their end (email deliverability being their whole business, of course)… Or to convince Apple to fix their systems.
Sendgrid does have a solution, but it breaks a bunch of Sendgrid features:
The only solution Sendgrid offers for this is that – upon request – they can turn on an internal setting for ‘preseve sender’ – which causes the ‘return path’ to match the ‘from’ setting… thus getting around the Apple problem.
The downside to this solution, however, is that it breaks other aspects of Sendgrid (specifically, Sendgrid can no longer automagically handle bounces and spam reports, which is of course absurd).
So, I’ve been casually looking for a new solution here.
I don’t know what explains the fact that the entire Sendgrid user base isn’t up-in-arms about this issue. But Sendgrid is – at present – entirely unacceptable as an email delivery system. It’s so weird.
(And thanks, @antony for bringing this up! I’d be interested to hear from other @Bubble users that have experienced this. Pretty much for months, I had been unable to reliably email Apple’s domains.)
Best Regards,
Keith
Is there a plugin for Postmark? I cannot find it.
I‘m using Postmark in other projects, not within Bubble. Building a plugin to access the Postmark API should however not be too difficult.
+1 for Postmark
No idea why you would need a plugin (although it would be simple enough to do) as the API connector setup is trivial.
Is that simple? Nice!
Though I don´t know what would happen when it comes to send attachments, formatting, etc. Then I guess thing will get more complicated.
Yes, that is quite a simple templated email with a custom link.
But it is pretty friendly.
Hey everyone…
Thanks for such a great response. The service I choose will be used by all my app users for transactional emails to their clients, so it is something I definitely need to get right.
@Kfawcett, I really appreciate the depth of your reply and the link to the articles… just what I was looking for!
@keith, thanks for the details around your Sendgrid experience.
and @NigelG, thanks for making Postmark feel much more accessible!
It sounds like Postmark is the way to go. I have had communication with them, and they have made me aware that if any mailings sent out start to look like marketing rather than transaction messages then they will block my account… so that is definitely something I need to guard against. Maybe I’ll keep with Sendgrid for batches of over 25 messages, and Postmark for less than that.
Here’s to the power of our collective knowledge and experience on this forum!
All the best,
Antony.
CHave you considered using Mandrill with mailchimp or have any experience with it?
I am looking at it, but mailchimps website offers very little information on how to even set it up.
Happy i learned that sendgrid is not the way to go anymore.
Thank you for your time.
Asger
That is a great screenshot. Do you happent to have more of those that you would be willing to share for less savvy bubble users? 
Asger
Yes 
Here is there generic header for the calls.
Obviously your server-token will be from your app.
You can then set up a template in Postmark, including variables.
And then send them as parameters in the Body of the call.
Obviously that is just the send mail. But you can see all the API options here …
This is great,
does this one use a template or are you sending a plain email
