Welcome to the next installment in our blog series highlighting the companies in SoftLayer’s new Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we’re excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer VP of Community Development

Scroll down to read the guest blog from Ev Kontsevoy of Mailgun, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner providing hosted email infrastructure and APIs for sending, receiving and hosting mail. To learn more about Mailgun, visit https://mailgun.net/.

The Story of Mailgun: A New Kind of ESP

Like most useful things, Mailgun was built out of necessity. We were sick of building email servers for apps, and we couldn’t find any services that offered fully-functional email servers with APIs. There were plenty of solutions for sending messages, but we needed more. We felt that applications needed to be proper mail servers themselves and wanted to use email as a way to expand the user interface of our software. So we decided to build it.

The first time I needed Mailgun was for Pikluk. Pikluk is a web browser and email client for kids. We spent some time looking for a 3rd party mail hosting company but only Google Apps was available for $50 per year per user. Pikluk was bootstrapped, so there wasn’t a lot of money for a solution like that. I ended up hacking the email functionality together and it worked well enough. However, it was very clear that developing email is a big pain point. I spent most of my development cycles just on building and maintaining email.

Our next startup, Dunegrass, was an enterprise application designed to be a bug tracker for business executives. Business executives do everything in Outlook, so tight email integration was essential, and this time we had more money, so I was going to stay clear of the email morass and purchase a SaaS email solution. One problem: It didn’t exist. Everything available either just sent email or was priced per mailbox, which wouldn’t scale for our users … So we ended up building a mini version of Mailgun again.

The last straw was when I was doing some contract work and they asked me if I would configure and integrate an email server. That was it. I decided I was going to do this the right way and build a service so developers wouldn’t have to worry about email.

When some developers first hear of Mailgun, they think, “Sending email’s easy. Just set up postfix, and you’re done.” Yes, sending email is fairly straightforward, but receiving it is not … That’s why you see a lot of solutions that focus just on delivering email. Sending is only half of email, though. Things start getting a lot more interesting when you can not only send but also receive, parse and store email. These functions weren’t being adequately addressed by any of the available solutions.

Receiving and parsing email is a lot more complicated. You have to deal with different encodings, office auto-replies, bounces and incoming spam. If a developer decides to let users email into an app, he’ll quickly find himself building an email server, and it’s not an easy feat. Email has been around longer than the web, yet there is a dearth of tools and industry expertise. Most programming languages in widespread use today don’t even have proper MIME parsing support!

All of these issues have hindered the amount of innovation in email, and that’s a shame because email is a very powerful tool. It’s the one universal method of communicating with users, yet few applications leverage it properly. Every Internet company wants to create more engagement with users, and then they send out emails that say ‘Do Not Reply.’ We think businesses need to think about email as an extension of their web interface.

You can’t force your users to go to your website, but they will always check their email, so you should be able to leverage that fact to push relevant and engaging information to your users. Unfortunately, most companies abuse this privilege and send out mindless spam. We hope Mailgun allows companies to think more creatively and develop solutions that foster a two way conversation to really engage users.

To host Mailgun, we chose to use Softlayer. They have an incredible network and a unique ability to mix and match VPS (cloud) with dedicated hardware. We needed to be on raw metal because our application requires a lot of I/O. Knowing our hardware allows us to predict performance and removes a lot of the uncertainty usually associated with building software on an abstract cloud. Running on SoftLayer infrastructure actually makes it cheaper for us to build software, and there are fewer corner cases to worry about.

So that’s the story of Mailgun. We think there is a lot of room for innovation using email, and we hope Mailgun is the spark driving that innovation.

- Ev Kontsevoy, Mailgun