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.