You can but you should be aware that there is a constant battle raging between good and evil (i.e., spam) in the email universe. In order to be on the ‘good’ side of that battle and get your email delivered, there are numerous things you need to do. You need to have the right authentication infrastructure and register your IP and Domain appropriately. Also, you need to have a history of email sending that complies with ESPs rules in order to build a good reputation.
Moreover, if you are going to receive, store and host emails, you better be prepared for maintaining this orchestra of software, take care of backups, hardware failures, security patches and monitoring. Stop kidding yourself, it’s not 1998 anymore. :-)
Here’s a classic post, So You’d Like to Send Some Email (Through Code), from Jeff Atwood about all of the hurdles in order to properly send email, and that’s just sending.
We are hosted at Softlayer (and highly recommend them). We use a combination of bare metal and virtual machines (depending on the task). We have control over our own network with dedicated /24 IP subnets. In addition, we run development and testing infrastructure at multiple hosting providers, including Rackspace.
Most of Mailgun’s features are exposed for all of our plans. So the big difference is the trade off between the monthly minimum and the per message rate. As you move up in plans, the monthly minimum grows and the per message rate shrinks. As you get into the high volume plans, the per message rate gets down to $0.10 per thousand messages.
There are a few feature differences:
Our default for Pro Accounts is one IP address, but if you want additional IPs, you can contact support@mailgunhq.com. All of our paid accounts can create multiple domains in the control panel or through the API.
It depends.
If you are sending a lot of email (greater than 50k per week), it is a good idea to have a dedicated IP in order to isolate your reputation. If you are sharing your IP, you are sharing your reputation with those other senders. In addition, ESPs rate limit your emails based on the IP. So if you are a high volume sender you should consider getting a pool of IPs. However, your reputation can also be hurt if you are not sending enough volume consistently from an IP - so it’s a tricky balance.
If your email sending is volatile with large spikes of volume, ESPs may assume those large spikes are spam. Also, if you overall volume is too low, they won’t acknowledge your reputation. Generally, if you are sending less than 5,000 emails per day, a shared IP may be the right solution.
The other thing to consider is using separate IPs for your bulk and transactional mail. There are a couple reasons for this:
Mailgun’s infrastructure mitigates some of the argument’s for a dedicated IP address. First of all, we are constantly monitoring our shared IP addresses for any reputation issues. We also allow you to schedule deliver of your emails by using the o:deliveryime parameter. This allows you to delay the delivery by using a time in the future and also allows you to jump other messages in your queue (say from a large bulk mailing) by using a delivery time of now().
Mailgun allows our paid plans to create multiple domains so don’t be shy.
The name of an email domain matters most for receiving messages: If your domain name is mycompany.com it means you can receive messages sent to xxx@mycompany.com
Domain names do not matter as much if you’re only sending. You can send messages from sales@mycompany.com even if your domain name is called mycompanymail.com or mycompany.mailgun.org. Although, it is best for deliverability if you are using the same domain in the From field that the actual sender is using.
There are two types of domains you can register with Mailgun:
easy to set up: it requires no DNS changes on your part.
Your own domain like mycompany.com. This requires you to configure some records at your DNS provider. We give you those records and instructions in your control panel.
If your company’s primary domain is mycompany.com, we recommend the following domain names for mailgun:
- mycompany.com, unless you’re already using this name for your corporate email.
- m.mycompany.com or mail.mycompany.com
- mycompany.net or mycompany.org
Sometimes, it is a good idea to separate the domains for the type of messages you are sending. For example, some companies will use a different domains or subdomains for bulk marketing mailings and transactional or corporate mail in order to keep the reputations separate.
Finally, if you want multiple addresses and you want to direct certain emails to certain IP addresses, you will need to have a unique domain or subdomain for each IP address. In this situation, it’s best to contact support@mailgunhq.com to discuss your infrastructure.
Yes, for sending. No, for receiving. Only one email server can receive messages for a given domain name. It could be either Mailgun or Google servers, but not both. However, you can use the same domain for sending at multiple servers. If you’d like to register your Domain at multiple servers for sending but you don’t want to receive email at Mailgun, just don’t configure your MX records to point to Mailgun.
No, you need to create a new one and delete the old one. It’s a good idea to create the new one first.
No, not at this time. This is something that is in our feature pipeline.
We have a “Verify Records” button when you click on a domain in the “Domains” tab that will confirm that they are set up correctly and if not, show the incorrect records in red.
You could also use dig in your command line interface.
Absolutely.
Mailgun is primarily a developer’s tool so the best way use Mailgun is through our APIs. They are quite RESTful and we’ve tried to make them as intuitive as possible. Our Quickstart Guide is a good place to start and you can also use the API Reference for more detail. We also expose a lot of the features through the control panel. The User Manual is a good place to get a full overview of all of the capabilities of Mailgun.
It’s really up to you. Whatever you find easier is fine with us. The HTTP API has some advantages, though. First of all, it’s faster. Second, we think it’s easier to use - you don’t have to deal with MIME because we will assemble it on our side. Just use a request library available for your language of choice.
By default all messages you send are DKIM-signed by Mailgun signing authority. This helps to ensure your mail gets delivered properly. Please contact sales@mailgunhq.com if you want to sign your emails with your own domain (requires a Pro Account).
Each message you send out has both the sender and from address. Simply put, the sender domain is what the receiving email server sees when initiating the session, and the from address is what your recipients will see. For better deliverability it is recommended to use the same from domain as the sender, but it is not required.
You can technically set the from field to be whatever you like. The sender must always be one of your Mailgun domains.
BCC functionality works like this: specify a BCC recipient in the recipients list when sending, but do not include his address into “To” or “CC” fields. You could also use the API, which has a specific BCC parameter.
You can specify up to 50 recipients when sending message via SMTP (RCPT TO command) or when using Mailgun’s messages() API resource. You can use our template variables to personalize the message, see our User Manual.
Most often, this is caused by internet service providers (“ISP”) blocking port #25. This tends to happen if you are using a residential ISP.
To check this, try running telnet in command line:
telnet smtp.mailgun.org 25
If port 25 is not blocked, you should see something like this:
Trying 174.37.214.195...
Connected to mxa.mailgun.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mxa.mailgun.org (Mailgun)
For SMTP, you have an SMTP username and password for each domain you have registered at Mailgun. To send mail from a particular domain, just use the appropriate credentials. For the API, the domain is one of the parameters in the URI.
You probably have a new account and we are in the process of establishing a sending reputation for your IP for all major ESPs. By delivering slowly and gradually increasing sending rates, Mailgun protects and improves your sending reputation. See our section on Deliverability below for more information.
The way to think about your email reputation is much like your credit score. When you haven’t sent any email, you don’t have a bad reputation but you don’t have a good one, either. Also, no ESP is going to allow you to send a million emails to their mailboxes, much like no one is going to give you a credit card with a huge credit limit when you graduate from college. There needs to be a history of performance for you to create a reputation. We use algorithms for our new senders that automatically queues your email and sends them at rates that makes the ESPs happy, increasing those rates as your sending reputation grows.
Some of the factors that help you build a good reputation faster and increase deliverability are:
Also, consider letting your users to reply to your emails. Having a meaningful email conversations with your audience will do wonders for your reputation as a member of email community.
Finally, there are certification and white label services that can help (although, you still need some history of sending). We have a partnership with Return Path and get help get you signed up for their Email Certification Program. They have already audited our infrastructure so we can get you a discount off of their list pricing.
Absolutely. Ideally, you send email that people want. That’s over half the battle. In addition, you should make your content interesting and relevant to the recipient.
There are a few things to keep in mind about your email content. First, we suggest that you set up a test mailbox at Mailgun and enable our spam filters to receive a “spamicity” score to test how your content is being judged by spam filters. Here are some other things to consider:
You can, but remember that your reputation is tied to your domain name as well as the IP address. If you are in danger of being classified as a ‘bad’ sender of email, you will be affecting your domain reputation, which is very hard to recover from. It may be safer to use a separate domain for sending marketing or even transactional email.
Rate limiting allows ESPs proper time to process and filter spam and ensure that transactional email doesn’t get backed up. Without rate limiting in place, ESPs would be even more overwhelmed than they already are. The ESPs all have different sending limits on a per hour, per day basis. Once you hit thresholds with the rate limits, send too much spam, or have any number of other issues, the ISP may start returning error messages. Some ESPs will want you to slow down the sending, stop sending for a period of time, or change your habits (due to bad engagement, bad reputation, etc). We automatically adjust your sending rates according to the feedback from these ESPs to keep you in their good graces.
Generally, these rate limits are on a per IP address basis. Contact us at sales@mailgunhq.com if you wish to purchase additional dedicated IP addresses for your account.
Yes. Generally speaking, you don’t want too few IPs, in case you experience more volume than you expect and you don’t want so many IPs that you look suspicious or spread out your volume over too many IPs. There has to be a balance of volume to IP/domain. Sending too much volume from an IP, sending from too many IPs or sending too little from a range of IPs can all lead to deliverability issues.
One of the best resources is the blog Word to the Wise. Also, Return Path is a service that enhances deliverability and they publish a lot of great information through their blog and white papers. Below is are some best practices from the major ESPs.
Yes. Click on your domain in the Control Panel and enable our spam filtering service.
You can create as many mailboxes as you like. We don’t charge per mailbox, we charge per total GB of storage (see our pricing page)
No, you only need a mailbox if you want to store email in a IMAP/POP3 accessible mailbox at Mailgun. You can create a route for any email address in your domain without creating a mailbox.
We parse them and provide parameters for you to handle them as you wish. Please take a look at our User Manual or API Reference to see more details on the parameters we provide.
You’re most likely using GMail for sending your message. From GMail’s documentation (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=82454):
Finally, if you’re sending mail to a mailing list that you subscribe to, those messages will only appear in ‘Sent Mail.’ This behavior also occurs when sending to an email address that automatically forwards mail back to your Gmail address. To test forwarding addresses or mailing lists, use a different email address to send your message.
When a message from, say, kontsevoy@gmail.com goes through a route:
test@mailgun-domain.com -> kontsevoy@gmail.com
When this message arrives to GMail, it will have kontsevoy@gmail.com as both sender and recipient, therefore GMail will not show it.
In other words GMail does not show you messages you sent to yourself.
The other possibility is that the address had previously experienced a Hard Bounce and is on the ‘do not send’ list. Check the Bounces tab for a list of these addresses and remove the address in question if it is there.
Mailgun allows you to check the authenticity of its requests by providing three additional parameters in every HTTP POST request it makes. Please take a look at our webhooks documentation for more information.
There is no 100% guarantee. However, there are some good clues. Mailgun provides DKIM and SPF verification for incoming mail, which is shown in the MIME headers once spam filtering is enabled in the Control Panel. This way you can at least know if the message is coming from an authenticated server.
Absolutely. Your Mailgun domain is a fully featured email server which you can connect your email client to. It supports all major email standard protocols such as SMTP, POP3 and IMAP.
You can connect an existing webmail UI (like Gmail) via protocols above, but we do not offer our own webmail UI at this time. Let us know if you want to build one!
We don’t have an HTTP API to access data in Mailboxes, but context.io has some great APIs for this.
Yep, Mailgun tracks all of the typical events that occur with emails: Opens, Link Clicks, Bounces, Unsubscribes and Spam Complaints. We make that data available to you via the Control Panel or through the API. In addition, you can set up webhooks and we will post events to your URL. Take a look at our tracking documentation for more information.
Mailgun does have features to help you with list management. First of all, we will not deliver again to recipients that have hard bounced, unsubscribed, or complained of spam. This is to maintain your email reputation. You can remove emails from these do not send lists if it was a temporary issue. You can always access this information via the API or Control panel to update your lists.
You can think of hard bounces like permanent errors and soft bounces as temporary errors. We will stop attempting delivery after one hard bounce. With soft bounces, we keep trying to deliver but eventually we will stop trying to delivery in accordance with the receiving ESP’s feedback.
It’s up to you. You can use Mailgun’s unsubscribe handling. You can include our unsubscribe variables: %unsubscribe_url% (for the entire domain) and %tag_unsubscribe_url% (for just emails with this tag) and we will take care of the unsubscribe handling for you. Take a look at our unsubscribe documentation for more information.
It’s very simple, just tag your emails with the appropriate header and Mailgun will group all of the events that occur to emails with that tag. Our analytics and campaign reports include those tags as one of the dimensions by which you can view and filter data. You can have multiple tags per email. Take a look at our tagging documentation and campaign reports documentation for more information.
Tracking Stats are just event counters that give you an overview of what is happening to your email. You can see all of the events that are occurring but the only other dimensions are domain and tag. Campaign reports have other dimensions like recipient domain and time and give you a more in-depth analysis of what is happening with your emails. In order to group emails for campaigns, you need to use the X-Campaign-Id header tag.
Since creating a campaign is as easy as including an arbitrary tag, yes. You can easily view which campaign is performing best by viewing the data grouped by tag.