We have long wanted to improve our email delivery. We've done that now, but we'd like to explain why it's been a challenge and what we've done to ensure all emails are delivered.
The short story
After trying several email delivery providers, we have now integrated with one that focuses on delivery rather than bulk mailing. Previsto now uses Postmark for sending emails, and this ensures that we can deliver the emails we send to a much higher degree.
"But it's easy to send an email"
No, it shouldn't be. We all rely on email to some extent and billions of emails are sent around the world every day. So why couldn't Previsto just make sure that all emails were delivered?
We've been trying to do that for a long time and have delivered the vast majority of emails without any problems. But when a system like Previsto sends so many system-generated emails every day to our customers (people Previsto has no direct relationship with), there are some problems that are best solved by allying with companies that specialize in sending emails on a large scale. This makes it much easier to avoid the many spam filters that emails have to pass through to reach their recipients.
Marketing emails cause problems
As mentioned, billions of emails are sent every day. The vast majority of these emails are ones we don't want and end up in our spam folders. But there are also some emails that are not received at all - not even in the spam folder. The problem is caused by the same problematic emails - marketing emails in the spam category.
When an email system won't accept an email, it's usually because the server sending the email has been used to send spam in the past. Especially email addresses such as @hotmail.com, @outlook.com and @live.com (provided by Microsoft) can be problematic to deliver emails to. This is where a company that specializes in sending emails should be able to do their part to ensure that all emails arrive.
Multiple providers - same problem
When we implemented email sending support in Previsto, we researched the market to see which ones were most commonly used and eventually settled on Mailgun. Unfortunately, after a short time, we started experiencing problems with sending emails. We were often able to resolve this by talking to Mailgun and simply moving us to one of their servers that wasn't blocked by various email systems, but after a short time the problem would reoccur. Eventually, we started looking for another provider.
Again, we scoured the market for reviews and after a dialog with Sendgrid, we chose them. It turned out to be a success - for a while. We have had a few outages, but especially in the beginning of 2020, we started experiencing massive problems with email delivery. Some weeks, up to 8-9% of our emails were undeliverable because Sendgrid's servers were simply blocked. We tried to explore all our options to optimize what we could optimize, but we couldn't improve delivery. At times Sendgrid got better at delivering, but the problem came back with a vengeance. And when Sendgrid was ultimately unwilling to help us improve the quality of email delivery, it was clear to us that we would once again have to find a new provider.
Postmark for the win!
This time we researched far more options and set far higher standards for the provider we wanted. They had to be able to prove their quality, have good support and excellent documentation. And when we evaluated [Postmark](We recently released a brand new layout for employee handouts. As a new feature, it is now possible to invite employees into the company. They receive an email, accept the invitation and will immediately be able to complete work for your company.), we found all that with them - and on top of that, they are a provider that cares about securing their email delivery first and foremost. Just as we make demands on them, they make demands on us about the emails we send - to ensure that as many emails as possible get through. And they're not afraid to advertise the quality of their delivery.
Previsto has already switched to sending emails via Postmark with great success. After 6 days of sending lots of emails, not a single email has not been delivered as it should.
We're extremely happy with this - and we're sure you will be too!