Mailgun alternative for ghost bloggers? Unreasonable restriction from mailgun

Developer help Self-hosting
1

Recently, I discovered I am not able to send out newsletters to my subscribers. I emailed to Mailgun and discovered mailgun has restricted my blog from sending out newsletters with more than 10 recipients, although they said I am able to send out more than 100 messages per hour. This 100 messages per hour does not apply to bulk-sending newsletters.

Mailgun said they are unable to lift the restriction due to lack of sufficient sending history. How am I going to build sufficient sending history if they restrict my newsletters from being sent out? This does not sound reasonable to me.

Iā€™m not sure if anyone else encounters the same problem as me. I have no choice but to look for other alternatives to Mailgun. Are there good alternatives?

I hope Ghost team will look into support for other mail providers. This restriction from Mailgun is a serious issue. How can I build a newsletter audience if I cannot send out to more than 10 receivers?

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This isnā€™t unusual, especially with a new domain, since there is no information regarding reputation. I found Mailgun helpful when starting out, and they soon lifted restrictions once they were confident of my intentions, i.e., not a spammer, and I had sent a reasonable number of messages that were delivered.

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Were you able to get this resolved with Mailgun?

We are facing a similar situation and I did contact Mailgun support and their requests are equally unreasonable and their staff unhelpful.

We have a 1500+ member list we imported. We are NOT game to manually break it down to their requirements.

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If you search in the Ghost Reddit, there is a guy that managed to integrate a custom server SMTP. Heā€™s working on other solutions. I agree that just one option for the newsletter service is not enough, Ghost should open to every newsletter service, because there are so many with very compelling free tiers.

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This is the only one I could find, so I am presuming you mean this: Reddit - Dive into anything

If that is the Reddit post you are referring to, he does not share his code.

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Try to get in touch with him, maybe he will help you.

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Is Ghostā€™s development team working on alternatives to Mailgun? Mailgun forces you to pay $35+ even if you just have 10 to 100 subscribers and do not even send out more than 500 emails per month where other email providers give you a good free tier. Sendgrid for example has a good free tier but we donā€™t really have options with Ghost Blog you are basically forced to use Mailgun if you want to use Ghostā€™s newsletter service!

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10

Welcome to the Ghost community, @the_opensourcegeek.

I suggest you do your research, and read threads about Mailgun integration. Moreover, no one is forced to use Mailgun, nor is there a charge for the service for the low volume blogs.

The Ghost team is small, and they have previously stated that they are using their capacity to add new features rather than adding additional bulk mail providers.

Since Ghost is open source, anyone can contribute, and add additional bulk email options.

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I started a pull request here if you want to pick up and run with it:

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Would it be an option to have other mail provers sponsor the development of the intergration?

Hi @markstos totally get the only email provider with mailgun and resources.

Recently I have been having issues with the shared IP that mailgun uses for sending getting blacklisted. The solution is to raise a support ticket requesting that my accountā€™s IP be rotated and after a couple of days it is sorted.

There is not much I can do about this because my daily send volumes are not yet high enough for my own IP address.

My frustration is that Iā€™m just locked in and when the issue occurs then part of my audience doesnā€™t get deliveried their emails :frowning:

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I believe so. The ā€œadapter patternā€ needed to support other mail providers would be a small amount of work to be added to the core and the team has already expressed willingness to merge such a change.

Once the adapter pattern is in place, all the code to support a third party can be external to Ghost and needs no approval or review from the core team. It could be published, documented and supported separately.

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Is that still true? In the Ghost FAQ (ā€œWhy do I have to set up Mailgun for newsletters?ā€), thereā€™s a claim that 600 emails incur 0.50$ invoice which is not sent.

However, on the Mailgun website, thereā€™s no evidence of that. There are three pricing tires, all of them enterprise-grade pricing unreasonably high for a beginner. When you try to sign up, it says in unambiguous terms, ā€œDue today 12$, monthly recurring fee - 35$ā€. Nowhere on their website I found any indication of the claim made on the Ghost FAQ.

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They hide it, but it exists. Lots of us are using it!

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Thank you, thatā€™s helpful to know. Do you know where can I select that PAYG plan? Because on sign-up itā€™s unavailable, I can only select the trial. Does it become available in the settings when I activate the trial?

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Select the trial, then immediately downgrade. Itā€™ll show up :slight_smile:

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Nice :) I wish there was a way to submit a pull request to modify the FAQ page I mentioned, as Iā€™d include there an explicit mention of how it works. Mailgun in its current official Pricing page is pretty off-putting.

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Hereā€™s a community produced guide.

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Hello everyone, to add to that. guide, I wish to inform people who find this issue now that it works like this:

When creating an account, you will be required to upgrade to the foundation trial, which lasts for 30 days. You will need to link your payment card to proceed.

It is only after this, and a few days of using it, that you can now proceed with unsubscribing from that.

In other words: put your card in, set it up, send some mail, try it out, and then downgrade.

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