We have had no email delivered through SendGrid in over 16 hours. Their status says everything is normal but there are reports on Twitter of people having problems.
SendGrid Support here! We wanted to step in and provide some color for what is going on. We’re currently making changes to our shared IP system in order for our customers to have a better delivery experience in the long term. As a result of this, the IP group you’re sending from has a new shared IP address(es).
As these IP groups warm up, you may see some deferrals if you are a Free or Essentials customer. However don't worry, this warm up period won't last long. Maybe a few days at most, or until major email receivers have enough data to determine the legitimacy of email being sent from these new IPs.
Keep in mind SendGrid will continue to attempt to deliver these throttled emails on your behalf for up to 72 hours (it rarely takes the full 72 hours to deliver an email throttled in this way).
If you wish to avoid disruptions like this in the future, considering upgrading your account to a Pro or higher plan (https://app.sendgrid.com/settings/billing), which includes a dedicated IP address as opposed to sending from a shared IP group. Dedicated IP addresses are great because instead of many different users sending from the same IP or group of IPs, you are in complete control of your sending reputation.
Customer feedback is extremely important us here at SendGrid, and we have made these changes as a result of that feedback. We know in the long run, this will immensely help your sending.
This will go away, just hang in there with us! If you have additional questions, please feel free to contact us by going to support.sendgrid.com.
We may not be a big customer to you and we may only send a few thousand transactional emails per month but even on the "essentials" paid package we expect a service level that is usable.
Suggesting that it's ok to wait a few days for our transactional email to deliver is frankly offensive. By definition transactional email is expected to be delivered in minutes if not seconds - days? That's got to be a joke?
This response is enough in its own to tip us into make a switch to an alternative supplier. It may be of no interest to SendGrid if an "essentials" customer leaves but if this is how you treat them you may find that more than a few do.
Frankly this entire situation has been mismanaged. As email "experts" you should have been able to migrate you customers over to the new IPs one by one as the IPs send level increases.
Finally suggesting that as this only effects some of your customers and so doesn't warrant being on the status page is just you making excuses to lie to your customers and hide the fact you have a serious issue. If this was a planed move with any possibility of delay you should have notified the effected customers before hand. We only discovered the problem when our customers stopped receiving emails and our support team saw an increase in support requests.
> However don't worry, this warm up period won't last long.
How long is "not long"? Your customers can't fix support problems this causes by saying "Well golly gee our vendor says it'll be over in not long"--in fact, thanks to you, they may not be able to email their own users at all.
> Keep in mind SendGrid will continue to attempt to deliver these throttled emails on your behalf for up to 72 hours
After which time...what? You'll summarily delete the emails? Refund the customers for failing to do your jobs? What exactly?
> Customer feedback is extremely important us here at SendGrid, and we have made these changes as a result of that feedback.
Sure, but you didn't warn the effected customers. Some of whom were paying you.
~
You all fucked up here, and this is probably going to lose you a lot of accounts. Good work.
We're heavy SendGrid users and this is basically the excuse we've been looking for to jump ship after several years with them.
SG is incompetent with regards to email delivery. This should not come as a surprise to anyone that uses their service.
It took a month for them to confirm what we told them: users will still receive previously-queued emails even after they unsubscribe (!!!), meaning it's no surprise that they will flag future messages they receive as spam. A month or so later, SG acknowledged the bug but stated they had no intention of fixing that behavior at this time!
Their _core_ selling point is email delivery with low rejection and you don't need to build it yourself. They totally failed there as users are rightly marking their messages as spam _and_ we are therefore required to write, run, and maintain our own mail queuing service to check outgoing emails against _their own unsubscribe list_ before forwarding the email to SG to deliver for us. At this point, we use them only for the metrics, which is just not worth supporting such a sleazy operation.
Sendgrid is overly complex for what I need it to do. It's bloated with features, and over-complication. Their API to build a simple email necessitates creating at least three different objects.
They have a whitelisting feature, in case you are using your own domain you need to go through whitelisting steps. You need to configure your domain appropriately. It goes on and on. Then there are multiple ways to go about all of those things.
If you don't do it correctly then sometimes it doesn't work or a high amount of email ends up in spam. By default they enable features which some countries tightly control like tracking which all needs to be tinkered with to get right.
Then once it's all working perfectly I have seen it take up to 10 minutes for an email to be actually sent. I went with Sendgrid because they billed themselves as easy to use. You might be better off using a SMTP server of your own. You've got to configure it anyway.
I didn't down vote you; your comment adds to the discussion. The annoying SPF/DKIM additions to your DNS zone file are necessary for the basics of delivery to the inbox. Gmail now displays a scary red unlocked padlock for unsigned/unverified email. Running an SMTP server is indeed the way the internet was meant to handle email. However, the other tenants in your /25 CIDR block will ruin your sending IP address's reputation and you will face delivery to Spam and throttling unless you stay on top of blacklist removal requests. There are plenty of use cases for using your own SMTP server for sending, but I think the labor cost of doing so far exceeds the prices of Sparkpost, Postmark, Mailgun, Sendgrid, or hell, even Mailchimp.
I'm not a Sendgrid customer but their "warm up" answer here is totally insufficient. It strikes me as an attempt to spin a major outage as standard operating procedure, and as a result I'm not going to use their product in the future.
What leads you to believe that their explanation is not acceptable? I'm not saying I don't believe you, but more information about why you hold this opinion would be interesting to me.
Same here, all of our emails have been Deferred since yesterday. We have a $9.95/month Essentials account.
Talked to chat support and they moved us to a new IP group and emails started being Delivered, however this lasted only 10 minutes.
After that all of our emails started being Deferred again. Contacted chat support again and they moved us again to a new IP group.
Let's see how much it lasts this time.
Chat support said having all of our emails Deferred for days with none being Delivered is normal and expected. We send transactional emails so having our customers wait days for the emails is not feasible for us.
We had recently switched from Mandrill, we'll have to start searching for a new provider.
We have gone from Mandrill to Sendgrid and back to Mandrill.
We switched over to sendgrid after being pissed of with Mandrill due to their sudden change but switching to sendgrid was a bad decision in hindsight. Mandrill was rock solid and we never had issues. Sendgrid continues to have deliverability issues every once in a while and not to mention the blacklisting of their shared IPs (which I understand is a common problem with all providers but never happened with Mandrill for our business).
We have switched back to Mandrill (yes, got a paying mailchimp account just to use mandrill).
Not only sendgrid's UI is confusing, they don't even show the actual email content in their dashboard.
They gave two months' notice of the change to having to have a paying Mailchimp accounts with Mandrill - do you regard that as sudden? They also sent quite regular reminders, too. (I will admit we ended up leaving it a bit until the last minute, but it wasn't particularly arduous, even under moderate pressure.)
We use AWS' SES on a few projects, and, while it seems to work effortlessly, I have absolutely no idea how to get any logs out of it (like, anything beyond the absolute number of emails sent), which is a fairly major limitation for me.
Same here. Had a chat with the support team and they say they had to allocate a number of new IPs, since some of their existing IPs were blacklisted. Now they need to warm up the new ones first, which may take an undefined amount of time.
Support was very helpful and migrated our traffic to already warmed up IPs.
Same experience here - we were migrated without warning 3 days ago and the majority of outgoing messages were subsequently deferred for 12 hours or more. When we reported the issue we were basically told they would be delivered eventually. No offer to migrate our traffic or to compensate us in any way.
We filed a support ticket and also had our traffic moved to a new IP, but I had to write to their Twitter account for them to pay attention. I urge everybody with an Essentials plan to do this, because it seems that if you don't complain on any channel possible you'll stay on this situation until it passes which can be "a few days" as they say.
In case others are looking for alternatives to SendGrid, SparkPost has been amazing to work with and offers 100,000 free transactional emails per month: https://www.sparkpost.com/
Status page is for outages & maintenance only. Since this is not applicable to all accounts and should only last at most a few days we have decided not to post to our status page.
Yep for 12-13 hours now. One thing I've noticed is that the CNAMEs I set up for DKIM etc are not resolvable in DNS - could this be related to the issue?
All emails are listed under 'Activity' as being deferred.
Waiting for AWS to approve my SES access so I can switch away.
Same here, we have no delivered messages since yesterday at 17.00 GMT-3. Contacted Sendgrid support about this because we're having a lot of registered users that cannot activate their accounts.
I am using SendGrid on one project. Another surprising thing is that nobody from SendGrid is responding to this thread to explain and rectify as I have seen other companies do.
If this guy was Homer Simpson, the answer would be:
(read using Homer voice)
"Uhhh, I love donuts! The status page is used only when something wrong happens. In your case, we decide to give you an outage by purpose, without telling you - haha - duh.
(Where is my beer, Marge?)
Oh, the customer is still waiting for my answer:
Dooonn't wooorrryyyy so much, we always do this on low plan customers - you know, we need some dumb guys to warm up our new IP range - hohoho - meeeryyyy x-mas!"
We've banned this account for violating the HN guidelines. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected]. We're happy to unban people when there's reason to believe that they'll only post civil and substantive comments in the future.
[+] [-] SendGridBecca|9 years ago|reply
As these IP groups warm up, you may see some deferrals if you are a Free or Essentials customer. However don't worry, this warm up period won't last long. Maybe a few days at most, or until major email receivers have enough data to determine the legitimacy of email being sent from these new IPs.
Keep in mind SendGrid will continue to attempt to deliver these throttled emails on your behalf for up to 72 hours (it rarely takes the full 72 hours to deliver an email throttled in this way).
If you wish to avoid disruptions like this in the future, considering upgrading your account to a Pro or higher plan (https://app.sendgrid.com/settings/billing), which includes a dedicated IP address as opposed to sending from a shared IP group. Dedicated IP addresses are great because instead of many different users sending from the same IP or group of IPs, you are in complete control of your sending reputation.
Customer feedback is extremely important us here at SendGrid, and we have made these changes as a result of that feedback. We know in the long run, this will immensely help your sending.
This will go away, just hang in there with us! If you have additional questions, please feel free to contact us by going to support.sendgrid.com.
[+] [-] samwillis|9 years ago|reply
Suggesting that it's ok to wait a few days for our transactional email to deliver is frankly offensive. By definition transactional email is expected to be delivered in minutes if not seconds - days? That's got to be a joke?
This response is enough in its own to tip us into make a switch to an alternative supplier. It may be of no interest to SendGrid if an "essentials" customer leaves but if this is how you treat them you may find that more than a few do.
Frankly this entire situation has been mismanaged. As email "experts" you should have been able to migrate you customers over to the new IPs one by one as the IPs send level increases.
Finally suggesting that as this only effects some of your customers and so doesn't warrant being on the status page is just you making excuses to lie to your customers and hide the fact you have a serious issue. If this was a planed move with any possibility of delay you should have notified the effected customers before hand. We only discovered the problem when our customers stopped receiving emails and our support team saw an increase in support requests.
P.S. Your competitor Postmark has a very different oppinion about dedicated IPs https://postmarkapp.com/why/delivery
[+] [-] andrewvc|9 years ago|reply
The tone of this message is pretty terrible.
[+] [-] 0xmohit|9 years ago|reply
However, this message warns me not to sign up unless for a Pro account (don't know what that means).
You are essentially telling your Free or Essentials customers to go and f*ck off. Not nice.
[+] [-] mathgeek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angersock|9 years ago|reply
> However don't worry, this warm up period won't last long.
How long is "not long"? Your customers can't fix support problems this causes by saying "Well golly gee our vendor says it'll be over in not long"--in fact, thanks to you, they may not be able to email their own users at all.
> Keep in mind SendGrid will continue to attempt to deliver these throttled emails on your behalf for up to 72 hours
After which time...what? You'll summarily delete the emails? Refund the customers for failing to do your jobs? What exactly?
> Customer feedback is extremely important us here at SendGrid, and we have made these changes as a result of that feedback.
Sure, but you didn't warn the effected customers. Some of whom were paying you.
~
You all fucked up here, and this is probably going to lose you a lot of accounts. Good work.
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|9 years ago|reply
SG is incompetent with regards to email delivery. This should not come as a surprise to anyone that uses their service.
It took a month for them to confirm what we told them: users will still receive previously-queued emails even after they unsubscribe (!!!), meaning it's no surprise that they will flag future messages they receive as spam. A month or so later, SG acknowledged the bug but stated they had no intention of fixing that behavior at this time!
Their _core_ selling point is email delivery with low rejection and you don't need to build it yourself. They totally failed there as users are rightly marking their messages as spam _and_ we are therefore required to write, run, and maintain our own mail queuing service to check outgoing emails against _their own unsubscribe list_ before forwarding the email to SG to deliver for us. At this point, we use them only for the metrics, which is just not worth supporting such a sleazy operation.
[+] [-] Kequc|9 years ago|reply
They have a whitelisting feature, in case you are using your own domain you need to go through whitelisting steps. You need to configure your domain appropriately. It goes on and on. Then there are multiple ways to go about all of those things.
If you don't do it correctly then sometimes it doesn't work or a high amount of email ends up in spam. By default they enable features which some countries tightly control like tracking which all needs to be tinkered with to get right.
Then once it's all working perfectly I have seen it take up to 10 minutes for an email to be actually sent. I went with Sendgrid because they billed themselves as easy to use. You might be better off using a SMTP server of your own. You've got to configure it anyway.
[+] [-] linkregister|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerkstate|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkpit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rubenmch|9 years ago|reply
Talked to chat support and they moved us to a new IP group and emails started being Delivered, however this lasted only 10 minutes.
After that all of our emails started being Deferred again. Contacted chat support again and they moved us again to a new IP group.
Let's see how much it lasts this time.
Chat support said having all of our emails Deferred for days with none being Delivered is normal and expected. We send transactional emails so having our customers wait days for the emails is not feasible for us.
We had recently switched from Mandrill, we'll have to start searching for a new provider.
[+] [-] spdustin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codegeek|9 years ago|reply
We switched over to sendgrid after being pissed of with Mandrill due to their sudden change but switching to sendgrid was a bad decision in hindsight. Mandrill was rock solid and we never had issues. Sendgrid continues to have deliverability issues every once in a while and not to mention the blacklisting of their shared IPs (which I understand is a common problem with all providers but never happened with Mandrill for our business).
We have switched back to Mandrill (yes, got a paying mailchimp account just to use mandrill).
Not only sendgrid's UI is confusing, they don't even show the actual email content in their dashboard.
[+] [-] bshimmin|9 years ago|reply
We use AWS' SES on a few projects, and, while it seems to work effortlessly, I have absolutely no idea how to get any logs out of it (like, anything beyond the absolute number of emails sent), which is a fairly major limitation for me.
[+] [-] nuschk|9 years ago|reply
Support was very helpful and migrated our traffic to already warmed up IPs.
[+] [-] mrw34|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanitaBaires|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] selckin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crisnoble|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scosman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmh_ca|9 years ago|reply
HTTPS://postmarkapp.com
[+] [-] restlessmedia|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] medmunds|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SendGridBecca|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phil_s|9 years ago|reply
All emails are listed under 'Activity' as being deferred.
Waiting for AWS to approve my SES access so I can switch away.
[+] [-] DanitaBaires|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poppup|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xmohit|9 years ago|reply
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12144124
[+] [-] defied|9 years ago|reply
Now we're using Postmark; much better service and no issues with deliverability.
[+] [-] jazoom|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omfg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AznHisoka|9 years ago|reply
Then I switched to AWS. Nobody got fired for using AWS S3.
[+] [-] nullcipher|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrs235|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joet3ch|9 years ago|reply
Wish they would have communicated this in advance, or even update their status page.
[+] [-] bruno222|9 years ago|reply
(read using Homer voice)
"Uhhh, I love donuts! The status page is used only when something wrong happens. In your case, we decide to give you an outage by purpose, without telling you - haha - duh.
(Where is my beer, Marge?)
Oh, the customer is still waiting for my answer:
Dooonn't wooorrryyyy so much, we always do this on low plan customers - you know, we need some dumb guys to warm up our new IP range - hohoho - meeeryyyy x-mas!"
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12144124 and marked it off-topic.
[+] [-] bruno222|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtmail|9 years ago|reply