Mailgun Reviews

Overall: I use several different email service providers, each for a different reason. I use Mailgun almost exclusively for inbound mail processing. The inbound processing also offers a preliminary spam filter so that at least most of the spam isn't sent further down my process chain. It's super easy to set up inbound routes using specific strings or wildcard matches that will accept mail and forward to multiple different recipients. These recipients can be either proper email addresses or webhook endpoints. I often use the address forwarders in combination with the SMTP outbound service to build a system where Gmail users can use their free gmail.com account to receive and send emails from their small business domain without having to sign up for and configure a proper G Suite account. I use the webhook forwarders in combination with Zapier and Integromat to receive any emails that need to be processed and automatically acted on. Mailgun normalizes all the different types of email and attachment encodings and packages the message data into an easy-to-parse JSON package that makes it super easy for me to grab what I need and reliably act on the normalized data.

Pros: Inbound mail processing with spam filter Free tier offers great sending limit SMTP and API integration for outbound messaging

Cons: This product doesn't offer any sort of backend mail building or sending functionality. It's only an engine for sending messages. This means you'll have to build your messages somewhere else and integrate them into your sending code.

Reasons for Choosing Mailgun: The pricing structure for Mailgun was a much better fit for my specific needs of inbound mail processing. Mandrill provides inbound mail as part of a much larger and more complete service offering that was not necessary for my use case. I simply wanted a service that would accept, process, and forward messages without all the other tools built into Mandrill.

Overall: They suddenly and mistakely suspended one of my domain and took ages to get it back. They told me that their back-end service sometomes does it by mistake... not sure why it took them days and days to reply, and still not resolved after almost a week... (I was using a mid-range package, so not the the free tier.)

Pros: Easy to setup and use in WHM Clean and userful dashboard

Cons: Customer service is slow and useless More expensive compare to others

Alternatives Considered: SendGrid and Mailjet

Reasons for Choosing Mailgun: Ease of setup

Overall: I needed a free solution to send transactional emails on wordpress. And Mailgun came as one of the favourites and also they had a good free plan. Moreover, it has integration with a mail plugin that I was using. So it seemed a good idea to try it. I'm using it for almost 2 years and it was easy to setup and it's working great since then without any need to fix or change anything.

Pros: You can try Mailgun and really use it on your site for free Great customer support that will treat you well even if you're using free plan and don't know nothing about emails. Being one of the most popular company, there is lots of information around the web on how-to-dos. Easy integration with wordpress plugins.

Cons: If you don't have a dedicated IP, your reputation will be influenced by other users. So if someone is using Mailgun abusively and is using the same IP to send emails you may get some problems.

Reasons for Switching to Mailgun: I was using Zoho mail for transactional emails, which wasn't for what it was made for.

Overall: We are more than happy with our deployment of mailgun. It provides a reliable and really reasonably priced service.

Pros: Mailgun are generous with their lower level tiers of service. The most basic of which is free to low volume mailers. The caveat is that support is not premium, but it is definitely provided. We tested some service emails many years ago through Mailgun and are still using them 10 years later.

Cons: The last time we looked at using more of mailgun, some of their back end features did not seem as fully featured as some competitors, although a lot of development was being undertaken.

Overall: I like the no-brainer pricing where you pay for what you use. The UI is very heavy and confusing to use. They also offer an email verification service for the best price from all competitors.

Pros: The app is easy to set up, and emails are delivered nearly instantly. The pricing is very attractive, with a pay-as-you-grow model.

Cons: During the infamous Google Gmail downtime several services around the internet experienced problems, Mailgun included. They marked some of my recipients as invalid (supressed). I only realised that by checking the supressed list manually. They made no effort to undo the incorrect supressions for me and all other users. Support didn't seem to care about remedying this type of problems in the future.

Overall: We use mailgun as transactional email services, their free tier fit with our basic usage.

Pros: API is very easy to integrated, SMTP alternative is a quick start to use in software that require SMTP protocol to send email.

Cons: Current dashboard is kind of complicated, sometime I could not find a setting or where I could set a adjustment.

Reasons for Switching to Mailgun: Their closed their standalone api and require a paid subscription on MailChimp

Overall: We use Mailgun to send emails from multiple domains through our ERP system. Mailgun as given us noticeable improvement to our email metrics and tracking. I would recommend Mailgun to others.

Pros: Our ERP system added integration with Mailgun several years ago and our ability to track and verify emails had been delivered significantly increased. We noticed an immediate increase in our email delivered confirmations. This is significant for us as we send our monthly account billing statements through email. If our emails aren't delivered, we don't get paid. Mailgun also provided much superior email tracking so we can identify which emails weren't delivered and find another way to get in contact with our customer.

Cons: Our biggest limitation with Mailgun is with our ERP system and how they only chose to provided limited support to the many features Mailgun offers.

Pros: Easy to deploy, they even have an iOS SDK. I use it to deliver automated emails for my app (welcome emails, password reset, announcements, etc).

Cons: There are currently no cons for me with this software.

Alternatives Considered: Constant Contact and Mailjet

Reasons for Choosing Mailgun: Easy to deploy and very cheap for start-ups.

Overall: We have achieved great eCPM mailing costs and gained access to higher volume mail to reach our subscribers

Pros: Mailgun allows for a lot of customization. Users use the service on the backend as the infrustructure to mail, while using their own service portal to send the mail and segment their subscriber base. Mail sending is fast, reliable, and they have dedicated and shared IPs for sending.

Cons: Since it is only to be used as the infrastructure to mail, companies will need the know-how of hooking up SMTP connections and have access to a developer and front-end software.

Reasons for Choosing Mailgun: We use Mailgun in sublement to other SMTP and ESPs but it very well could function on its own.

Overall: Overall great value for the free tier, 10.000 emails for free plus great deliverability and integration, great for Wordpress users.

Pros: When developing a custom PHP app or using Wordpress you often face the issue of your notifications and customer emails getting stuck or not passing the mails filters. This is a big issue, when for example you are sending out important information like an order confirmation or a ticket for your event and your users are not getting your emails or they are arriving into their SPAM folder. Mailgun has proved superb on improving email deliverability and their logs are super helpful as well, you can track what went wrong if anything. Their interface is easy to use and to the point. Moreover, their free tier gives you 10.000 emails for use, for free. Something great for companies doing product research, I found their API easy to use and easy to integrate with my projects, Wordpress being the easiest: a plugin + an API key/secret. Regarding Wordpress I found Mailgun the best amongst options tried for email deliverability.

Cons: Cost of the paid tiers is pricey if you compare with the alternatives. Everything in Mailgun goes through their API, so if you need a Full UI alongside the API this might not be the best choice.

Overall: 10,000 free emails a month, easy to use API, easy to integrate and send emails reliably.

Pros: Mailgun offers 10,000 free emails a month, which is much higher than a lot of the competing services in this category. The web interface is clean and provides you with the information you need right on the landing page. Integrates easy with many services and plugins exist for many platforms (eg Wordpress). API is well documented.

Cons: While the Free tier of 10,000 emails a month is class leading, when you begin entering the paid tiers there are much cheaper alternatives available. Email validation service is pricey for what it is.

Overall: Allow me to remove the send-mail function away from the web-server, which can mean mail is affected (classed as SPAM) because of your website (HOSTING) IP address. Mailgun fixes this.

Pros: Like the fact that it helps your emails avoid Spam filters, which it achieves by ensuring the IP address(s) are clean.

Cons: When setting up the DNS (for the first time), if you have any conflicting records e.g. spf then this may / will prevent your account from being authenticated. A 5 min job can take 5 hours of waiting. Fortunately, Mailgun support is brilliant and can spot an error and offer a fix in seconds.

Reasons for Choosing Mailgun: Can't remember specifically the alternatives i looked at, but Mailgun is the best i found! I'd highly recommend it.

Overall: First 10k emails through Mailgun are free, why not give it a try. Transactional outbound emails originating from Mailgun and are less likely to be blocked as spam.

Pros: Free options for small/startup businesses with reasonable prices for larger companies/projects. Mailing lists included. WordPress integration is quite simple with the Mailgun plugin. Once installed and configured, the WP plugin allows websites to send form email responses with relative ease. The mailing list feature is nice bonus. Management portal was updated recently and vastly improved the UI/UX experience.

Cons: Extended log access is only available in more expensive plans.

Overall: We use Mailgun alongside other services such as Mandrill and SendGrid, depending on our clients needs for their site/app.

Pros: Mailgun has a really easy to implement API (for devs) with a bunch of different languages support like curl, PHP, Java, etc. - Within minutes, we were running the PHP API on our app, and sending out transactional emails. Also good for devs: the extremely in-depth official docs provided by Mailgun. Along with case examples, and demos, you'll be ready to go, even if you're a bit less experienced with implementing an API of this sort. One of my favourite features is the email validation API, which easily integrates into your forms via jQuery, and uses the Mailgun API to validate email inputs as users type their email. We use it on all of our forms now!

Cons: It's worth noting that everything that operates through Mailgun is through API, unlike something like SendGrid which offers a full dashboard alongside their API. This may or may not be an issue for some people.

Overall: Overall I have been super satisfied with using Mailgun to handle all the mail processing from my website.

Pros: Mailgun has a great API and ability to configure just about anything you need when it comes to sending email. Their UI is very clean and it isn't super cluttered with things you don't need. It was easy to find what I was looking for and easy to configure the settings.

Cons: Honestly, I haven't been able to find something that I haven't liked about using Mailgun. It is really a solid platform.

Overall: We use Mailgun to send automated emails for people who are registering on our site and to reset passwords.

Pros: Mailgun is an easy platform to automate sending mail. It is really nice that you can set up alias emails so that you don't have to share a personal email on a platform, but you also don't have to set up a new email account. Mailgun did recently update the UI of the site, so it is more modern, but it could still be improved.

Cons: Some of the UI is still a little counter-intuitive. Unlike MailChimp, there is also not the easy interface to customize messages. We have a number of issues with the emails from Mailchimp going to spam and users struggling to find them.