Anvil's Email service vs SendGrid, et al for newsletters

Anvil Q&A
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I’m looking to hear from anyone with experience sending a bunch of email from an Anvil app.

I’m currently building out my newsletter functionality, and am wondering if the choice of email service will affect deliverability, or anything else I should be worrying about but don’t know enough to do so yet.

I know that services like SendGrid will give me some analytics that I’d have to build myself if I used Anvil’s email server.

What other things should I be thinking about?

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Anvil’s Email service has max limit of 100,000 email a month, so if you need to send more email than that, SendGrid might be a better option. I use Mailjet since I can send email easily using rest api.

Also, emails being sent from Anvil’s email service is not likely to be marked as spam and moved to Primary area in gmail rather than Promotion.

Not sure about SendGrid, but get the issue with Mailjet.

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I use Mailgun (https://www.mailgun.com/) because I was using it before I discovered Anvil and have just not bothered to change it yet :slight_smile:

From reading forums and the companies own blurbs (mailgin, sendgrid, etc.), it seems they work to ensure their emails don’t get blocked, as it’s their primary business. Anvil’s email service is convenient but I can’t imagine they would see it as their primary concern to ensure they are not blocked by google and the like when sending out squillions of newsletter posts.

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I use Sendinblue for emails and they have a convenient Drag and Drop builder for making beautiful emails. Of course Anvil doesn’t deal with that as it isn’t their primary job.

Plus, such services can allow users to unsubscribe easily, a feature that has to be done manually in Anvil.

Anvil’s emails are usually good for informing a specific user about something but for mass emails, I’ll recommend other services.

I’m not complaining about Anvil. It just makes more sense to use a service which specifically deals with Email rather than to use one that just has it as a side feature.

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Thanks, everyone, that all matches my instincts.

I also just recently found this post: Issue sending emails - #9 talking about issues with SendGrid emails not getting delivered. After some more poking around online, it looks like SendGrid in particular is a poor choice. I don’t know if Anvil is still using them or not.

Time for more poking around to see what other services’ reputations are like.

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At my last company, after looking at Sendgrid, AWS bulk email, etc. we settled on Postmark. Easy to get started with, special offer for startups, good support. Good deliverability. They support SMTP and an API

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I’ve been playing with Postmark for about a day now, and I do have to say their API is very straightforward, and setup was very easy. I appreciate their general philosophy that deliverability isn’t something you should have to pay more to get.

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For those of you sending newsletters, how do you do it?

I’m imagining a scheduled task or background task that does the actual sending, and the server function populating a data table that serves as a sending queue, but wanted to see what people’s actual practice was.

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I agree. You would think that some of these points would be obvious, but apparently, they’re not. I found the overall logic of Postmark’s approach to be superior, as well as their technical sophistication (recognizing that complicated DNS setups were not actually beneficial). We only used the API, not the high-level interface. Marketing companies seem more comfortable with the bigger players and prefer not to have to learn a new UI. By the way, Postmark has an offer of free service for startups (you have to apply especially to get this). It lasts for several months I believe.

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