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.
Iām 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?
This isnāt 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.
If you search in the Ghost Reddit, there is a guy that managed to integrate a custom server SMTP. Heās 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.
Is Ghostās 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 donāt really have options with Ghost Blog you are basically forced to use Mailgun if you want to use Ghostās newsletter service!
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.
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 accountās 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 Iām just locked in and when the issue occurs then part of my audience doesnāt get deliveried their emails
I believe so. The āadapter 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.
However, on the Mailgun website, thereās 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, āDue today 12$, monthly recurring fee - 35$ā. Nowhere on their website I found any indication of the claim made on the Ghost FAQ.
Thank you, thatās helpful to know. Do you know where can I select that PAYG plan? Because on sign-up itās unavailable, I can only select the trial. Does it become available in the settings when I activate the trial?
Nice :) I wish there was a way to submit a pull request to modify the FAQ page I mentioned, as Iād include there an explicit mention of how it works. Mailgun in its current official Pricing page is pretty off-putting.
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.
We definitely need an alternative as Mailgun. The Free account does not allow you to use your own domain and you are required to use the sandbox domain provided by Mailgun. It is also rate limited to 100 emails per hour. You still get 5,000 for a month. Perhaps this isnāt a big deal for some, but when every tutorial shows setting up a domain with Mailgun under the free account just know that it is likely not what youāre looking for.
What you need to do is sign-up for a paid account, the Foundation account for $35 per month and then Unsubscribe from that account, which will then prompt you to downgrade to a pay-as-you-go account. This PAYG account is not listed on their account offerings anywhere. You will only see this option after doing the above sign-up and downgrade.
