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Mailgun vs Postal: What are the differences?

Mailgun: The Email Service for Developers. Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly; Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid. Postal is a complete and fully featured mail server for use by websites & web servers. Think Sendgrid, Mailgun or Postmark but open source and ready for you to run on your own servers. Postal was developed by aTech Media to serve its own mail processing requirements and we have since decided that it should be released as an open source project for the community.

Mailgun and Postal belong to "Transactional Email" category of the tech stack.

Postal is an open source tool with 9.02K GitHub stars and 533 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Postal's open source repository on GitHub.

Advice on Mailgun and Postal

For transactional emails, notifications, reminders, etc, I want to make it so writers/designers can set up the emails and maintain them, and then dynamically insert fields, that I then replace when actually sending the mail from code.

I think the ability to use a basic layout template across individual email templates would make things a lot easier (think header, footer, standard typography, etc).

What is best for this? Why would you prefer Mailgun, SendGrid, Mandrill or something else?

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Replies (4)
Justini Powell
Lead Developer at Watermark Community Church · | 4 upvotes · 92.5K views
Recommends
on
Twilio SendGridTwilio SendGrid

If you need your emails to be sent in a time-sensitive manner, I'd recommend SendGrid. We were using Mailgun and the lag because they aren't "transactional" in nature caused issues for us. SendGrid also has the ability to do dynamic templates and bulk send from their API. I don't know that they have the shared layout ability you mentioned, though.

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Mika Henriksson
Coder at mhenrixon Consulting · | 4 upvotes · 92.4K views
Recommends
on
PostmarkPostmark

The only transactional email service that I've been able to stomach is Postmark! It is by far the easiest (and quickest to get feedback from) service that I have come across. While drowning in attempts to debug Mandril, Mailgun and others I get quick feedback from Postmark in what I need to do.

Postmark for the win!

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Vit Ulicny
Recommends
on
MandrillMandrill

We are using more extensively Mandrill.

It is a ok tool, which gives you the power for emailing with nice set of features.

The templates editing and management is a bit tricky, but this is mostly related to email templates in general, which are hard to create and maintain.

I do not think you can share the parts of the templates. You can have your predefined templates with possibility to insert dynamic content.

They provide a limited possibility to preview and test your templates.

The template editor is text only. For the better editors checkout http://topol.io or https://mosaico.io

Unfortunately, I do not have experience with the other tools and possibilities to manage templates.

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Aric Fedida
Founder, CTO at ASK Technologies Inc · | 1 upvotes · 91.8K views
Recommends
on
Twilio SendGridTwilio SendGrid

At this stage, all of the tools you mentioned do email delivery pretty well. They all support email templates as well. Here are some considerations:

  1. Twilio owns SendGrid. If you're an existing Twilio customer, in my opinion that's a good reason to use SendGrid over the other solutions. The APIs are solid, and Twilio has excellent developer tools that allow you to create interesting automations (which is important for scaling).
  2. Mandrill was created by MailChimp, who have massive experience with email delivery and specifically with emailing beautiful email templates.
  3. Mailgun is a tool on its own. Like the other two, it supports mail templates and is built to be controlled almost exclusively via APIs.

SendGrid and Mandrill have pretty nice WYSIWIG template editors as part of their platform. Not so sure about Mailgun.

So for me the considerations would be: 1. How easy is it for you to integrate with their API? How complete is their API in terms of your own specific needs? 2. Prices: Which one works best for my budget? 3. Am I OK with editing the templates elsewhere (or even by hand), and then pasting the code into Mailgun? Or do I want the comfort of Mandrill or Sendgrid with their WYSIWYG editors?

Personally I'd go with Twilio, simply because it's such a massive ecosystem they are less likely to go bankrupt, and their APIs are rock solid.

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Decisions about Mailgun and Postal
Imelda Garcia

We did a quick test on the reliability of these three common email services, sending a few emails an hour at random intervals.

Unfortunately, none of them had 100% availability over the 30 day test. I don't understand why this is so hard?

Mailgun performed the best with the most reliability and fastest response times. Mandrill was notably bad.

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Slawomir Pucia
Head of Product at Coresender · | 5 upvotes · 83.3K views

Of course we chose Coresender to send our own transactional emails :) So I thought I'll let you know how we use it.

  • We set up separate sending accounts for all company needs, eg. transactional emails, monitoring alerts, time to inbox. We even configured our office printers to send emails through Coresender.

  • We have a real-time and extremely usable view into what emails go through each account, so each time anybody reports an email not arriving we're able to assist them in a few seconds

  • We utilize our message timeline feature, so we can learn eg. if people are clicking on password reset links

  • We always know how many of our onboarding emails are being opened which helps us improve them

  • Finally, we have full controll over our suppressions lists, so we can add (and remove!) from them whenever necessary.

To sum up, at Coresender we're eating our own dogfood and it helps us stay connected to the product and understand our customers better.

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Migrated
from
MailgunMailgun
to
PostmarkPostmark
at

While building our authentication system, we originally picked Mailgun. However, emails took minutes to arrive and some of them didn't get delivered - or got delivered to spam.

We started looking for a new provider, and settled on Postmark. We love that they track time-to-inbox, it makes me feel they really care about going above and beyond to provide a good service.

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Pros of Mailgun
Pros of Postal
  • 178
    Quick email integration
  • 148
    Free plan
  • 91
    Easy setup
  • 67
    Ridiculously reliable
  • 53
    Extensive apis
  • 30
    Great for parsing inbound emails
  • 25
    Nice UI
  • 22
    Developer-centric
  • 15
    Excellent customer support
  • 12
    Heroku Add-on
  • 4
    Easy to view logs of sent emails
  • 4
    Email mailbox management for developers
  • 2
    Great PHP library
  • 2
    Great documentation
  • 2
    Great customer support, love rackspace
  • 1
    Better than sendgrid not ask too many question
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    Cons of Mailgun
    Cons of Postal
    • 2
      Cost
    • 2
      No HTTPS tracking links supported
    • 1
      Emails go to spam due to blacklisted IP's of mailgun
    • 1
      Cannot create multiple api keys
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      What is Mailgun?

      Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly.

      What is Postal?

      Postal is a complete and fully featured mail server for use by websites & web servers. Think Sendgrid, Mailgun or Postmark but open source and ready for you to run on your own servers. Postal was developed by aTech Media to serve its own mail processing requirements and we have since decided that it should be released as an open source project for the community.

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

      What companies use Mailgun?
      What companies use Postal?
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      Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

      What tools integrate with Mailgun?
      What tools integrate with Postal?

      Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

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      What are some alternatives to Mailgun and Postal?
      Twilio SendGrid
      Twilio SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. Twilio SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability & real-time analytics along with flexible API's.
      Postmark
      Postmark removes the headaches of delivering and parsing email for webapps with minimal setup time and zero maintenance.
      Mailchimp
      MailChimp helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results. It's like your own personal publishing platform.
      Mailjet
      Mailjet is a real-time Cloud Emailing platform: scalable, agile and flexible. Our unique algorithm boosts your deliverability and our platform provides in-depth insight so you can optimize more than ever.
      SparkPost
      SparkPost is the world’s #1 email delivery provider. We empower companies with actionable, real-time data to send relevant email to their customers which increases engagement and both top and bottom line revenue.
      See all alternatives