After 2 months, different tickets, the payment of 2 months of Foundation plan service (35 USD each month, 70 in total) I have managed to send just under 100 emails.
I’m about to throw in the towel, support is only dedicated to copying and pasting responses.
Now I have opened a ticket to be allowed to send 100 emails and they reply “our account was automatically placed on an evaluation period [1], which limits the account’s sending to 100 messages per hour and 10 recipients per email. To help protect our customers against spam, we have automated systems in place to flag accounts that appear suspicious”
We have 4,000 emails from a base built over 16 years, we moved from Wordpress but I can’t warm up my reputation by sending to 10 recipients. I have to put a tag on 100 users and go up, but it won’t let me send even 66 emails. Only work with 10 or less. (confirmed).
Does it make sense that you are paying for a service and that they limit it as if they were doing charity? I agree they need to be protected, but 10 recipients for a $35/month plan?
In the market we have better options, all with great service, reasonable ways to enter. In Mailgun the sellers say that 100 recipients, then another type of support arrives and says that 10.
This is not serious, how can we contribute to the development of other more serious connectors such as Amazon SES, Sparkpost or Mailenable?
I prefer to give this money to the community.
Where can I donate about 200 USD so that there is freedom to choose?
I don’t know if this is helpful because you already have contacted Mailgun - but I have also read cases where Mailgun support replied saying their system had made a mistake and lifted all limitations since. Happened to a few people.
Hello, thank you very much, excellent I will join and try to support.
I manage a customer service staff and no matter the channel, they must manage a single policy.
Here it seems that each boy, in his opinion, handles politics as he pleases. It’s something like oops, I was wrong, you’re right, it’s not 100 but 10. Imagine selecting 10 mailboxes to send a newsletter for 2 weeks in Ghost. This makes no sense.
I asked for 100 mailboxes, one mail a day, even for 1 month. 500 a week. 2000 a month (let’s forget my plan has 50 thousand). They answer me no. You are a new client = criminal.
If a company does not have clear policies, they differ in their core business criteria among their collaborators, they respond with copy&paste and they do not understand why their clients are angry, they do not deserve market share.
I do not pimp this kind of thing, I have asked for the money back. I prefer that the emails are sent manually by any of the 5 providers that we have Intercom, Amazon SES, Mailchannels or Sparkpost.
I totally agree with you. They must be held responsible for their customer support and faulty spam flagging system.
The problem is, they are kind of a monopoly in this field, Substack, Revue, etc. all use Mailgun behind the scenes. Independent self-hosted bloggers do not cause a substantial dent in their market, especially those who are trying to use their service directly.
The solution to this would be having alternatives like SendGrid be an option on Ghost. SendGrid has a better record when it comes to customer support and their service seems to be pretty robust. A solid Mailgun alternative.
Now, the responsibility of building a SendGrid integration for example, lies in the hands of the community. Similar to the Reddit link I posted earlier, we need projects like that to make this happen.
There’s low probability Ghost will natively support this in the near future. Here’s the founder’s stand on this matter. They don’t seem to consider this high priority.
If you ask me, I personally think this is a weak link in the decentralized chain that Ghost promises. Being positioned as a Substack alternative, a robust newsletter tech stack is necessary with at least another option besides Mailgun.
I also understand Ghost (Pro) will solve this problem, but that’s not the point. The whole appeal for using Ghost is freedom from a centralized system. If for example Ghost - the company - goes down or has a policy or business model change - we can choose to opt out of the service without being affected in a major way.
And I think not having a Mailgun alternative will affect a lot of publications in a major way if they ever need to self host.
Found a thread on this in the “ideas” category. Voted.
As mentioned earlier, there’s one dev (in the subreddit) working on this already. I’m doing my best to provide feedback and will eventually test the prototypes too.
Honestly, I think most users do not care about whether Ghost works with many different email services. They just want to send newsletters.
The problem is it’s a hit or miss for self-hosted publications.
Either everything works out of the box or you can’t send newsletters, at all.
Mailgun isn’t working like it should. And their support isn’t great at resolving issues.
Ghost has only one payment processor too - Stripe. But the difference is, it works and their support is great.
But yeah, I absolutely understand the limitations of the Ghost team and being self-funded. I also have no idea about the complexity of implementing these features. So take my suggestions with a grain of salt, haha.
I love Ghost and native comments have made it a solid platform recently. But Mailgun can sometimes ruin the experience.
I will continue to vote on the matter and provide feedback or information where I can.
Thanks for listening closely to the community though, always appreciated!
Hey so I’m the one working on the earlier mentioned reddit effort. My solution works for me (I run Awesome F/OSS on it, and emails get through because I have set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc on my SMTP servers), but it’s outside of Ghost completely – it’s an external program.
I want to note as was relayed to me, this is an active focus area (one of only two!) in the current Hacktoberfest – but the more sustainable long term solution is to support the Hacktoberfest. Maybe if there was a way to just fund a developer for working on that issue in Ghost directly?
Seriously. Mailgun ruined a lot of things for me. Since they don’t seem to appreciate the opportunity they have and what it represents, I think it makes a lot more sense to make them just another option. When you talk to them for support, they just treat you so poorly.
I had to deal with mailgun’s support. They would take up yo FIVE DAYS before answering half of the questions. They suck, big time. It’s like the fact of just having clients bores them. I wouldn’t recommend mailgun to anyone.
While support for other services is something I can’t help with (not skilled enough), I might just create a side-app with Budibase to bypass Ghost’s liimitation.
