Mailgun (YC W11) is being acquired by Rackspace

http://blog.mailgun.net/post/30381960476/mailgun-is-being-acquired-by-rackspace

by twakefield • 14 years ago

153 62 14 years ago

blog.mailgun.net

aepstein• 14 years ago

Congrats guys! Great service and well-deserved, we're big fans (and customers).

k33l0r• 14 years ago

That link should probably point to the permalink for the blog post: http://blog.mailgun.net/post/30381960476/mailgun-is-being-ac...

Edit: The link appears to be fixed now.

buster2• 14 years ago

Soooo.. they are sending mails?

Not to be rude or anything, congrats! But from the website itself it sounds like "woohoo, we can send email". Atleast the features page lists 99% standard-mail features like "can send mail, can do SPF, can do DKIM, can filter mails"..

I guess that's not why they were aquired, so what is the real value of the company?

whafro• 14 years ago

Their support for incoming messages is pretty slick, especially in that they provide a message body that strips out signatures and replies. At Posterous, we managed that mechanism ourselves, and it was really hellish – it's great to be able to offload that responsibility for Kinsights.

That feature alone made us switch from SendGrid, and the more reasonable price point for our stage just sweetened the pot.

Udo2• 14 years ago

I too did not consider sending mail from applications a big deal, until I had to do it on a huge scale. Turns out it gets quite difficult to maintain an email module that consistently avoids your outgoing app emails being spam-flagged or otherwise corrupted. It's a neat service.

buster2• 14 years ago

I agree that it's not easy to do mail right, that's my daily business. But that's also the reason why i was wondering. I probably just don't like the marketing speak of the website (as if it would be something unusual to do SPF or mail routing or filtering or regex, etc. etc.). On the other hand it is hard enough in this business already. You need to point out that stuff, ok..

Anyhow, i have been downvoted for a serious question. Sorry i did upset people with a question....

citricsquid• 14 years ago

I assume you were downvoted for saying there is no value in being able to send (and receive) email, but there is.

Deliverability is a huge important issue for most people, if I send an email and it doesn't arrive then I'm in a bad spot. I used a similar service to Mailgun (http://postmarkapp.com) and the amount I paid per month (when I was sending emails) meant if I spent more than 1 hour of my time configuring and managing a mail server every month I would be losing money.

This is an especially big issue for people that are using virtual servers or not that great server providers, ones that recycle IPs, if I'm correct in my understanding of mail deliverability, if an IP has sent spam before it's almost guaranteed to be blocked by most spam protection companies, that sort of thing isn't good.

malandrew• 14 years ago

It's not just email deliverability. Mailgun's email API is super useful and worth learning because once you do you'll realize you can now do things with transactional emails in your app you never considered doing before. A few ways in which they are better than Sendgrid: (1) much better inbound JSON parsing of emails that can be used with any "route"; (2) On the fly route creation, modification and removal; (3) Pass through routing of individual mailboxes to your GoogleApps account for corporate email addresses. This is better than the Sendgrid approach because it allows you to put Mailgun in front of Gmail instead of the other way around. That could mean a noticable difference in speed of delivery of transactional emails reaching near real time relative to what you'd normally expect with email (<20 seconds).

If you're just sending in bulk, go with SendGrid, but if you want to do anything mildly interesting with email-as-an-interface, Mailgun cannot be beat. I'm honestly surprised it has taken other mail providers to offer these same features.

13rules3• 14 years ago

I just finished my first integration with MailGun (moving over from PostMark because MailGun has a better feature set imo) ... could not have been easier.

They have webhooks built in that can call your application when mail is delivered, bounced, opened, clicked, etc. That's huge for me. I allow my clients to send out emails to their users — now I can use that information to show my clients who has opened which emails ... I can also alert users if their email has become blocked or had a bounced email.

They give you a ton of functionality out of the box that would take a lot of time and effort to recreate on your own.

13rules3• 14 years ago

To me the real value is that for a very fair price I no longer have to be concerned with the ins and outs of sending email. Once you start sending tens of thousands of emails you run into problems. People don't receive the emails. They get blocked. Users accidentally mark them as spam. And so on and so on.

I don't want to focus on figuring out email - I just want to send them and have them get to the users that want them.

I use MailGun for email for the same reason that I use FreshBooks for invoicing my clients — because I want to spend my time building my business rather than focusing on solving a problem that someone else has already done a great job of solving.

jrideout1• 14 years ago

This is a great example. I think some of the disconnect with other commenters is thinking that sending email is trivial. It isn't. Even at small scale, deliverability starts to become a problem, there is infrastructure management (for example, this why people use heroku rather than just AWS) and receiving and tracking email requires managing all sorts of email weirdness that are not addressed by using software libraires (this is analogous to html parsing - getting all the non-standard or ambiguous cases right is hard).

jmcnevin• 14 years ago

Rackspace customers can use SendGrid to send up to 40K emails a month for free. I wonder how this might impact that deal.

gghootch• 14 years ago

Errr... SendGrid is $9.95 for 40k emails. You get 200 for free, just as with mailgun.

My guess is they'll integrate both products after which Mailgun and SendGrid will become largely equivalent services.

jarito• 14 years ago

jmcnevin is right, there is a special deal for Rackspace customers. It is documented here https://sendgrid.com/products/rackspace.

jesalg• 14 years ago

Yup, I was wondering the same. I'm hoping they don't switch out SengGrid for MailGun.

csallen• 14 years ago

Sweet, congrats guys! Been using Mailgun happily for ~2 years now, and it's great to see I won't have to change anything. Looking forward to the Rackspace integration!

unfoldedorigami• 14 years ago

Congratulations Mailgun. You guys deserve it.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

Anybody know a good alternative? It seems that aquired SAS means they will either suck or close.

daigoba66• 14 years ago

If you're just sending e-mails, check out Amazon SES. We've been using it and it works well.

sudonim• 14 years ago

I've heard just one caveat about Amazon SES. One of our russian customers wanted to make sure we didn't use it to deliver mail because apparently it's blocked by a few of the big ISPs in Russia.

mmahemoff• 14 years ago

I looked at various options just last week and went with Postageapp. Main reasons were easy Rails integration and the lowest plan lets you use your own domain. (Mailgun's lowest plan is $19; the free plan you have to use a mailgun subdomain.)

bretpiatt2• 14 years ago

Mailgun is going to continue to run as Mailgun, as a startup team on the product and operations just as they did yesterday. We believe in the team and what they're doing. This is not an acquihire -- they have a great offering that they will continue to build and manage going forward.

twakefield• 14 years ago

tomjen3, We are don't have any plans on closing or sucking in the future. But if you just prefer to support small ISVs, that is definitely worthwhile.

13rules3• 14 years ago

"We are don't have any plans on closing or sucking in the future."

Gold.

ivankirigin• 14 years ago

Your comment is needlessly negative.

msbarnett• 14 years ago

Debatable. Past history supports negativity: the Rackspace acquisition of Slicehost marked a large, negative turning point in Slicehost's customer support and competitiveness.

CloudKick and Anso Labs seem to have fallen off the map as well. I'd be curious to hear what former Jungle Disk users felt changed with the acquisition.

trimbo• 14 years ago

Sendgrid. At first glance, their pricing is better than mailgun anyway.

chanux• 14 years ago

I came here to express my fear of mail gun being not as much awesome anymore. I think it's a legit feeling.

That doesn't mean Rackspace is going to join the club of companies killing great startups but the last few times I saw acquisitions, things were not very sweet.

Hope mailgun will do even better under Racksapce. I wish them all the best.

dangrossman• 14 years ago

Mandrill (inbound and outbound transactional e-mail on MailChimp's delivery platform), or Sendgrid.

sandstrom• 14 years ago

We use Postmark and it works great (http://postmarkapp.com/). Sendgrid and AWS SES are other common alternatives.

sleepyhead• 14 years ago

I use and love http://postmarkapp.com/. (For transactional emails only)

rdl• 14 years ago

I would be a bit worried if I were a direct Rackspace competitor and using Mailgun, but otherwise this seems like a good thing for users -- Rackspace brings more financial and other resources, and this sale (a safe one) precludes a bad sale which might have otherwise happened (if Mailgun sold to Zynga or something and was acquihired or pivoted to in house, or sold to oracle and only bundled with services.)

BenjieGillam• 14 years ago

Congratulations guys - great product, well deserved acquisition :)

kategleason• 14 years ago

Congrats!

memnips• 14 years ago

Congrats! I love the service.

viscanti• 14 years ago

I met Ev and Taylor a couple months ago. They're a brilliant team, in a not-so-glamorous market (there's not a lot of buzz around sending mail). These guys are committed to building a reliable/developer friendly email service though. They totally deserve this.

dguaraglia• 14 years ago

You've nicely summarized what I think of them. I met the guys last year while looking for a job and they were great. Kudos to them!

aidos4• 14 years ago

This is probably a good time to ask about how people handle transactional email generally.

I had a play with Mailgun a while back (and others, Mailgun felt nicest to me) but there was a feature that seemed to be missing from them all.

How do you handle rules between outgoing emails?

For example, say there's an email that gets sent out on a user action, but you only want to send it out once a day. It feels to me like I should be able to set rules within Mailgun to say, only send out this email every x minutes, or, don't allow it to go out if another type of email has gone out before etc.

Is there a way of dealing with that? At the moment we have to put all those rules into our app, and it seems like something the app shouldn't have to deal with.

therandomguy• 14 years ago

Seem like the app is the right place for that logic to exist.

misterbwong• 14 years ago

Agreed. This kind of domain logic doesn't really belong in a generalized mail API. It should be easy enough to build in to your app by recording the last email date/time

tomwalsham• 14 years ago

This strikes me as somewhat of an edge case - to add a full rules engine for what is essentially a very app-specific set of behaviours.

One main reason the application is the best place to manage these rules is that it's rarely just the email content that dictates the engagement pipeline. Whether a user has interacted with a component, or logged in, etc, are all app-side variables which may affect whether or not you wish to send a given email.

That said, one method some of our customers use at PostageApp to simplify some of the logic is to pass a UID to the API based on the unique parameter sets - e.g. recipient + template + hour - and rely on the engine to discard the duplicate API calls.

aidos4• 14 years ago

I guess my concern is that you end up coupling components with marketing rules where there would otherwise be little or no connection.

todsul• 14 years ago

getvero.com - Very powerful rule system to send delayed emails. It's like Mixpanel for email (Vero is event driven).

ukd1• 14 years ago

this.

aidos4• 14 years ago

Interesting. That's very much along the lines of what I was thinking. Will sign up and see how it fits out use case. Thanks for the link.

carimura• 14 years ago

Hey Aidos,

IronWorker (our product from Iron.io) has scheduling capabilities and can be combined easily with SendGrid/Mailgun to provide any type of rules engine.

In it's most simple form, you can use it like cron in the cloud.

j45• 14 years ago

Congrats to Ev + team, from day 1 when they launched he's continued to answer my emails directly and openly, it's refreshing.

I really hope my beloved mailgun remains competitive and independently available and doesn't get assimilated like slicehost -- mailgun is a not-so-well kept secret that needs to stay as is.

sgrove• 14 years ago

Wow, that's great to hear - especially that Mailgun will continue along as-is. Their support has been phenomenal, and we've been extremely happy users.

Congrats to Ev, Taylor, and the rest of the team!

savrajsingh• 14 years ago

Congrats. Mailgun is a great product, hope the service continues!

nikita• 14 years ago

Congratulations to the mailgun team!

ericfrenkiel• 14 years ago

congrats Ev and Taylor!

lubos• 14 years ago

Nooo. I absolutely love this company. The last company I loved this much was JungleDisk and we all know what happened to it once Rackspace acquired it.

This is not such a great news for customers. Sorry.

bretpiatt2• 14 years ago

I'd love to get your feedback. We're always trying to improve the way we handle things and we know we can get better. We're on record publicly in the press about trying to do this differently and better. My email is bret.piatt@rackspace.com.

[From Dow Jones, from their interview with Pat Matthews, SVP of Corporate Development (my boss)], "Mr. Matthews said the acquisition is not an "acqui-hire" (a deal in which a start-up is acquired purely for its talent), and that Mailgun's team will continue to work in San Francisco, where Rackspace has an office. However, they will report initially to corporate development and remain autonomous for awhile so they're not integrated too quickly into Rackspace, a mistake that Rackspace has made in the past, he said."

bryanh• 14 years ago

Congrats guys! We just started using you not too long ago and have been impressed the whole time.

martindale• 14 years ago

Man, would it be nice if the local mail function on Rackspace servers was directly connected to Mailgun and billed to my account.

asdf333• 14 years ago

sweet! congrats ev and tyler

lukedeering• 14 years ago

We recently interview Ev http://howtowriteabusinessplan.com/2012/07/ev-kontsevoy-inte.... The guy is a beast! Good things happen to good companies! Job lads!

rokhayakebe• 14 years ago

Go Mailgun, Best Customer Service. (That was . for Period)

Mailgun (YC W11) is being acquired by Rackspace

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