[HN Gopher] How not to migrate an email domain
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How not to migrate an email domain
Author : SimianLogic2
Score : 103 points
Date : 2021-10-12 02:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (simianlogic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (simianlogic.com)
| Animats wrote:
| _" 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.
| blendergeek wrote:
| > That's a spammer, by definition.
|
| I don't see any evidence of being a spammer.
|
| According to @SimianLogic, they had 300,000 users. If they are
| sending about 1,000 emails a day, that would mean that each
| user is receiving an average of 1.2 emails a _year_.
|
| There is also a monthly newsletter that goes to 30,000. That
| means that in addition to the 1.2 emails a year each user
| receives, 10% of users receive an additional one (1) email per
| month. Given that only 10% of users receive the newsletter, I'm
| assuming it isn't too difficult to opt out.
|
| This doesn't seem like spam. Rather, IntroCave (now IntroMaker)
| has hundreds of thousands of users and therefore needs to send
| thousands of emails.
| klausjensen wrote:
| Erh... No it certainly is not. People signed up for it,
| probably get value from it.
|
| How on earth would you categorize that as spam?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I subscribe to a bunch of newsletters that have distribution
| lists of much, much more than 30K.
|
| What definition of "spammer" are you using?
| elif wrote:
| CANSPAM defines it by describing the opt-in and opt-out
| nature of the messages.
|
| What he did is upload a mailing list manually, rather than
| curate one with a service. This manual practice makes it
| almost impossible to guarantee that valid unsub requests have
| been honored, among other things. In this particular case, he
| admits accidentally including bounce out addresses.
|
| That's why good email services make it difficult to upload
| 100k addresses and call it a day.
|
| Additionally, permission to email someone with app
| notifications is not permission to send them bulk.
| SimianLogic2 wrote:
| If we're getting technical:
|
| CANSPAM doesn't cover account/privacy/ToS notices -- it's
| not a marketing message (falls into "other content").
|
| I didn't "upload a mailing list manually" -- the emails are
| all attached to user records in my wholly-owned database. I
| send them from a queue on my own server, not through
| Mailgun's mailing list product (which queues a message to
| every email on the list instantly and doesn't allow you to
| ramp it up over time).
|
| "Newsletter" is easier to type than "new content and
| product updates," but again -- these go out to existing
| customers and account holders. There's implied permission
| there from the fact that _they signed up for an account._
| Opt-out is easy, and I don 't feel guilty about emailing
| people who signed up for an account.
|
| I would send this to the whole list if deliverability
| didn't go to hell after about 50k users (or maybe I just
| need to write better emails to keep people
| engaged/opening).
| Ensorceled wrote:
| My reading was that he actually he HAD an opt-in/curated
| list just hadn't removed the bounces and other detritus the
| list had generated over time. I didn't get any impression
| that he was spamming people, the problems were all bounces
| gmail/yahoo "mark as spam".
| SimianLogic2 wrote:
| Not exactly.
|
| These emails all go to users who have signed up for an account.
| Traffic is weird right now (domain migration in progress), but
| I was getting ~250-350 user signups a day.
|
| I send a monthly newsletter to users who have been recently
| active, a welcome sequence of 2 or 3 emails depending on where
| you sign up, and have an abandoned cart sequence of 3 emails
| (here's the link to your video / your preview will expire soon
| / your preview has expired).
|
| Both of those channels (newsletter / automated sequences) have
| opt-outs, but the automated ones see pretty good engagement.
| The max number of automated emails is in the 5/6 range before
| unsubscribes, so it only takes ~3-4 emails per user to get up
| to 1k/day -- especially when you toss in another 100 or so for
| normal password resets, receipts, order emails, etc.
| Aachen wrote:
| 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?
| oriki wrote:
| Mostly to do with making sure their service isn't being used
| for spam, to protect reputation. Bad reputation can mean
| blacklisting which is a bad time when your service is
| centralized on emails.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > I stopped the ToS email with around 70k more users to send
|
| I don't want emails about changing to your ToS
| SimianLogic2 wrote:
| Cool, email support@intromaker.com from your account email and
| I'll delete you. (Which is the same offer I made to everyone
| else in lieu of an unsubscribe button.)
|
| I did weigh whether to send a notice or not, and for me it came
| down to emotion more than economics. My thinking:
|
| It'll end up costing a few hundred dollars to send it out. A
| lot of users have probably forgotten what IntroCave is or don't
| need it any more, and hopefully they'll request account
| deletion (hundreds of people did). I expected to generate
| approximately $0 in sales from the email, but if I can save
| even a handful of users from typing in the old domain, getting
| redirected to the new domain, wondering WTF, and bouncing --
| that seemed worth it.
| jacurtis wrote:
| No one likes them. But they have a legal obligation to send it
| to you so that they can claim your implicit approval of the
| changes.
| kureikain wrote:
| 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.
| Gys wrote:
| > 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
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Surprised this isn't at least account wide or maybe even global
| for all users? Are there really email services that bounce (not
| send to spam, but bounce) email based on domain? (Assuming you
| have SPF and DKIM and reverse DNS and whatever else configured
| correctly, which I assume you must to be able to use Mailjet?)
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Yes, your domain can end up on a blacklist such as SORBS or
| Spamhaus and then you will have deliverability issues across
| the board. I have also heard from many companies and
| individuals with personal domains that have difficulty with
| Gmail and the verizon/aol/yahoo postmaster. They will just
| bounce you out of the blue.
|
| DMARC and friends only help with authenticity. There's plenty
| of fraudsters sending authentic spam out there. The cost of a
| new domain is like $6, and there's plenty of people inputting
| their credentials on fake webmail signin pages for spammers
| that have trouble maintaining a credit card.
| SimianLogic2 wrote:
| Agreed!
|
| I don't know why they don't just keep a master list of every
| bounced email across every domain (or maybe that's what their
| paid verification product is and I just haven't looked at it
| closely enough?) and let me set a flag when sending an email
| to reject anything they know is going to bounce.
| dddw wrote:
| > 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.
| elif wrote:
| 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
| SimianLogic2 wrote:
| I would love to use MailChimp, but it was price prohibitive
| when I first got started. The site was using Mailgun when I
| acquired it, and I stuck with it after evaluating a BUNCH of
| options when I got up to around 30-50k users.
|
| I don't recall what MailChimp's pricing was back then, but 50k
| users would be $640/mo today (vs ~$80 on Mailgun). I'm
| currently north of 300k users, which is up into the "contact us
| for pricing" range. It just doesn't make sense for a site with
| revenue sub-$10k (like, well sub-$10k).
|
| I could've dropped that price by spending a shitload of time
| deactivating contacts and trying to keep my active users count
| lower, but email just isn't that profitable for me. I wouldn't
| say I'm great at email or attribution, but I estimate I drive
| ~$250-500/mo in sales through email (up from $0 when I
| started).
|
| The other points are good ones -- even on Mailgun, I _should
| 've_ had different subdomains set up for IntroCave for
| transactional/campaign/newsletter blasts. I got "good enough"
| results doing it the lazy way, though. I still wouldn't have
| remembered to migrate the bounces, and this might have actually
| increased my bounce rate. Since bounce lists are per-domain and
| not per-account, a signup bounce wouldn't necessarily have
| prevented me from sending transactional stuff later (I've since
| added a bounced flag to my user model which _would_ catch
| this).
|
| (edit: actually the _first_ point is pretty good. i disagree
| with the rest. list was mine, domain was warmed with a week of
| email before the ToS blast, and I manually ramped up volume on
| the ToS blast for the first 30 hours or so while keeping an eye
| on deliverability. This was entirely my fault, so I 'm not sure
| what you mean by blame... I'm not happy with the customer
| support response, but the title of the post should make it
| pretty clear where the blame lies--me!)
| dreyfan wrote:
| sub $10k per month or per year?
| SimianLogic2 wrote:
| Average ~$3500/mo, but that can go up and down depending on
| organic traffic, competition (who's running ads), and world
| events (2-3x'd for a month or two during peak Covid
| lockdown). It was running ~$1-1.5k for a good chunk of the
| time when I was building out my own newsletter system, and
| I wasn't super eager to throw 30-50% of my revenue at
| something off-the-shelf.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" 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.
| SimianLogic2 wrote:
| I'm less mad about the cleaning service and more mad about the
| pace of responses and the fact that I got 3 different responses
| from 3 different customer support reps who apparently didn't
| read any of the prior history in the thread.
|
| I think the shutdown is totally valid and a good practice, but
| my initial ticket started with (paraphrasing): "ooooops, my bad
| for forgetting to migrate my bounces to the new domain. I've
| paused that campaign until I can clean it up." It still took
| almost 2 days to get reinstated after jumping through a bunch
| of unrelated questions.
|
| Sure, it was on a weekend. I'm also slower at responding on
| weekends. But I also choose not to operate a mission-critical
| business specifically because I don't want to be on call on
| weekends. Maybe don't autoban people if you can't respond in a
| timely manner?
| SimianLogic2 wrote:
| Follow-up thought: they _just_ got acquired, so maybe there
| 's some consolidation happening in terms of support or
| business processes that I'm not privy to. This was definitely
| more of a "straw that broke the camel's back" kind of
| response than abject outrage after the initial WTF response
| to the "clean your list before we re-enable you" message.
|
| I started migrating while the service was down and they had
| given no indication that it would be turned back on any time
| soon. By the time my emails were reinstated, I was around
| 80-90% migrated. At that point, it's worth kicking the tires
| on the new service to see how deliverability compares.
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