Policy like this is meant to protect sender reputation, not just provider IP pool. High hard bounce rate lowers your inboxing in the long term. If your bounce rate is consistently above 5% consider verifying all new emails before sending them an email > https://www.bigmailer.io/blog/email-verification-service-pro...
Natural email decay rate is 2-3% per month so the goal is to stay close to this range, but the lower the better.
You often pay for "good company" when you choose a more expensive provider. So the cheaper the provider the lower quality of their shared IP pool due to the type of customers they tend to have on the platform. The free tier lowers the customer quality even more. IF you are sending mission critical email then dedicated IP makes a lot of sense, but probably not at a huge price multiple mentioned for Sendgrid.
Amazon SES shared IP pool isn't better than Sendgrid or Mailgun but their dedicated IPs are only $25/month. If your volume is low that might be the only cost since they offer 62k/month completely free and after that it's $0.1 per 1000 emails.
Unfortunately not a lot of providers offer dedicated IP option on lower level plans.
My guess is that how most email service providers handle this - they don't actually delete the email and just have a flag on it - bounced, complain, unsub. This way the list owner can run an export and see all the status code.
The hard bounce status might be stored outside of your lists. I am not sure customers can easily change a hard bounce status themselves. Do you mean you just deleted those records with intent to re-add to reset the status? On our BigMailer platform this wouldn't work as hard bounce status would get preserved.
+1 what Jonathan said. Typically, when email service providers are down the response code indicates a temporary issue with a soft bounce code, so you can still try to send to that address in the future.
The action for rectifying isn't too difficult, but the implications are still pretty big...
Thanks for sharing Jonathan, unprecedented situation. And that's just gmail.com addresses we can see data on, while there are all those business domains that use Google Apps for their email that probably experienced a similar issue...
It really has become a norm and is very frustrating for customers, while there is simply a better way to do this - kill free plan for NEW customers, but grandfather existing customers. Or at least introduce some break-even (low profit margin) plan/tier to move existing customers to, no need to force them off the platform completely.
Yes, spammers are a big issue for all ESPs (my own biz in this space is no exception), but no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.
BigMailer.io isn't self-hosted, but for a list size of <5000 it's completely free, and supports bulk + auto/drip + transactional (via API) campaigns. We also have drag-and-drop template editor, Zapier integration, and live chat support 7 days a week.
ConvertKits is expensive - all plans fall under BigMailer's free plan :-o
+1 for this approach. This was the #1 design decision we made with BigMailer.io back in 2015. It's not trivial to change the model once you go with unique lists approach.
Performance is extra helpful for making real-time segment size calculations. We use elastic search and it's costly.
Many ESPs these days license 3rd party editors that cost them recurring fees on a per user basis. Unlike hosted solutions, like BigMailer.io or SendGrid (both license drag and drop Bee editor), Sendy charges a very low one-time (!) fee of $59 to download the software once.
Sendy's pricing model simply doesn't allow such 3rd party product licensing and I imagine maintaining a heavy front-end application like a drag-and-drop template builder across the variety of clients is too costly (dev and support time) as well.
The issue here is "relating to their products and services". Per GDPR, the consent can not be "bundled". When you signup for an account you consent to communications about your account only and things like product updates or tips for using product should be under their own explicit consent.
Most email marketing service providers don't even support multi-interest opt-out page, or charge a lot for configuring your unsubscribe page this way (like a multiple of list size for each option gasp), so this makes it impossible for email recipients to choose what emails types to opt-out of so marketers in turn don't bother to collect unbundled consent.
It's not my definition, that's how the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (applicable to US only) defines spam and most marketers are familiar with since it's been around for 15 years. Of course the laws are different in Europe and Canada.
One of the factors I didn't mention in previous comment is presence of physical mail address.
Not sure what "unfortunately for me" is in reference to - BigMailer isn't a platform for cold emails (there are plenty others that specialize in cold email campaigns) and Amazon SES doesn't give a free pass on the practice either.
Natural email decay rate is 2-3% per month so the goal is to stay close to this range, but the lower the better.