This is a big reason for sure. As you can see in this post, those IP addresses can be hit or miss depending on the provider. At Postmark, we don't really believe in dedicated IPs for all customers. We think that our customer base should not include any bad actors, and instead manually approve every customer to ensure our entire CIDR ranges are clean. The benefit is not just clean IPs, but clean IPs that have an incredible transactional-only reputation with the ISPs. This is how we are able to delivery so fast to the inbox. We only really believe in dedicated IPs for higher volume senders, especially since reputation is moving toward the domain more and more. I wrote about this six years ago, and it is even more true today (https://postmarkapp.com/blog/the-false-promises-of-dedicated...).
At the same time, if you are willing to install and manage Postal on your own servers, it's not that hard to maintain your own IP with a great reputation. You just need a good hosting provider (probably not AWS), you need to set up your infrastructure like DKIM, SPF, DMARC, rDNS, and Return Paths, and most importantly you need to maintain good engagement (low bounces, high opens). At a glance, Postal looks like a nice option if you want to do it on your own for cheap. You just might lack the stability, support, maintenance, and performance that goes behind an ESP.
Hey everyone, Chris Nagele here from Wildbit. For some background, I wrote about our reasons for moving to a private office plan. In short, it's more than putting on some headphones.
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc do not use Sparkpost, they use their on-premise installable software that many ESPs use and pay tens or hundreds of thousands for, which indeed is a dumb pipe MTA. Those big companies still have a full-time staff managing delivery and infrastructure. It's basically a replacement to Postfix, not a full fledge, multi-datacenter, multi-tenant hosted application to support many thousands of concurrent customers.
A hosted "product" is a different animal. Sure, it needs to have great delivery, but the work that goes into making it easy to troubleshoot when you have issues, minimize developer work, and bring useful data back into your application is something else. This only becomes painfully obvious when you deeply rely on email for your business.
There is a reason why Sparkpost left Postmark out of their comparison. We have the same data sources (eData), and we came out on top.
1. Our pricing reflects the quality of delivery due to being transactional only. With much higher engagement rates, our speed and delivery is superior. Customers never have to wait behind a bulk campaign.
2. Dedicated IPs are a way for ESPs to pawn responsibility onto customers instead of themselves (and get a few more bucks in the process). They only make sense if you are sending a huge volume, but we do offer dedicated IPs for free for higher volume accounts. Instead, most people use our shared IPs and benefit from the volume of great engagement to get their emails delivered to the inbox faster.
3. We're the only ones to offer an extended full content history of every message for 45 days. You can search and see the exact email sent at no cost, which comes in handy when sending so many unique messages.
Full disclosure: I'm the founder of Postmark. Any questions, just email me: [email protected].
Thinking of "email delivery as a commodity" is the first mistake people make - all ESPs are not created equal. If this were the case, there would not be such a huge variance in not only getting to the Inbox, but how fast you get to the Inbox. This is why we've focused on transactional only, knowing fully well we will grow slower as a business (and why we are more expensive), but have superior delivery since transactional email has a much higher engagement rate and reputation with ISPs.
The entire idea of "dumb pipe" or "commodity" needs to go away. There is a reason why companies like Asana, Desk, and Minecraft chose Postmark, since their email is critical to their business and choosing the right providers makes a real difference. Now, if your emails are not critical, I can see how any service might work. I have yet to come across a product owner who is comfortable letting their customers wait for their transactional emails though - no matter the size of product or company.
Full disclosure, I'm the founder of Postmark - the best "dumb pipe commodity" money can buy.
At the same time, if you are willing to install and manage Postal on your own servers, it's not that hard to maintain your own IP with a great reputation. You just need a good hosting provider (probably not AWS), you need to set up your infrastructure like DKIM, SPF, DMARC, rDNS, and Return Paths, and most importantly you need to maintain good engagement (low bounces, high opens). At a glance, Postal looks like a nice option if you want to do it on your own for cheap. You just might lack the stability, support, maintenance, and performance that goes behind an ESP.