from Hacker News

How not to migrate an email domain

by SimianLogic on 10/12/21, 2:48 AM with 28 comments

• by tyingq on 10/13/21, 3:16 PM

  "That's the point they [mailgun] lost me as a customer."

  I would have been mad about the suggested $1k+ cleaning service too.

  But, you do have to consider mailgun is protecting their reputation and assets as well. Like an IPV4 range that could get blacklisted if your diy cleansing wasn't right. And you mentioned your first run with the new provider was over 5% bounces, so it wouldn't have been good enough.

  I can see why Mailgun pushes that solution.

• by Gys on 10/13/21, 2:02 PM

  > I forgot to migrate the bounce list from the old domain to the new domain (and, less important numbers-wise but still important: the spam list).

  Thank you! Something I would have forgotten as well and probably will not anymore

• by kureikain on 10/13/21, 8:10 PM

  We gotta give Mailgun some empathy here. It's tough to run an email service and keep reputation of it. If some bad actor got in, they can send large spam email and dilute the reputation.

  Of course, this is just a mistake and after explaining Mailgun shouldn't charge $1358 for clean service. But as a customer, you should take some responsibility when doing something wrong as well. For example, if the account is old, and this is the first time this happen, and once we explain the mistake, Mailgun should waive that fee.

  On AWS SES if the bounce rate >10%, your account is temporarily suspended.

  If the exact samething happen with any mail provider, where a large of emails volume are bounced. They would need to pause/restrict your account in some way.

  I would suggest look into AWS SES and started to write code to handle bounce email yourself to get a sense of it.

• by elif on 10/13/21, 3:51 PM

  DIY campaign mail over a transactional service? CHECK

  Uncleaned, imported list? CHECK

  No domain warm-up? CHECK

  Ignore hometown hero MailChimp that would have predicted bounces and disarmed your foot gun? CHECK

  Passing blame to customer support? SAD

• by dddw on 10/13/21, 8:51 PM

  > I don't know yet whether Postmark will be any better, but I like the product so far and they seem to be a lot more customer-focused. Fingers crossed!

  Postmark is definitely better in my experience with multiple customers. They actually check the delivery to different big mailproviders like gmail.

  The support I had there was also quick and helpful.

  It is definitely pricier, but should spare a couple of headaches if email is vital to your business.

• by Aachen on 10/13/21, 10:31 PM

  Noob here (with his own mail server so I'm not familiar with these kinds of issues). What's the problem with a bounce? You pay for the delivery attempt anyway I assume, why do they care?

• by TedDoesntTalk on 10/13/21, 9:06 PM

  > I stopped the ToS email with around 70k more users to send

  I don’t want emails about changing to your ToS

• by Animats on 10/13/21, 3:19 PM

  "I was sending ~1,000 emails a day on normal days and a monthly newsletter of around 30,000."

  That's a spammer, by definition.