Mailgun Review
Running email servers sucks. You need to deal with spam, hackers and often unhappy customers when the email servers go down. Not to mention if you already use an email service you love, like GMail, it is often easier to be able to just use it for all your email. Mailgun helps take away the pain and stress of email for your domain, especially if you are using a service like DigitalOcean or AWS.
Price: $0.000 - 10,000 emails free, pricing starts at $0.00050 after that.
Pros:
- Easy to setup.
- Can route email for domains hosted on DigitalOcean, AWS etc.
- Free for first 10,000 emails/month.
Cons:
- Hard to know if this is a con of the service but it is more than most people will need.
The Great
For most people Mailgun offers more than they will need, especially if they are just looking for a service to route emails for their domain from their web server. If you don’t run your own email servers or use a service like G Suite (Google Apps for Domains) and just want to forward email from your DigitalOcean or other server then Mailgun has you covered. You just need to sign up, make a few small additions to your DNS settigns and you can start forwarding mail from your website to your favorite email provider.
The first step is adding a domain to Mailgun. Once you have your Mailgun account created you can add a domain. Mailgun recommends you use “a subdomain with Mailgun, like ‘mg.mydomain.com’”, but I have found that just complicates things later. The Mailgun recommendation might be a good idea if you are using more than just routes, but in my experience if you are just using routes to forward mail, don’t bother with a subdomain. Once you add the domain you will need to make changes to your DNS entries. Mailgun gives you all the settings and provides you with some links to help articles for several DNS providers like GoDaddy, Namecheap and more. After the DNS settings are added you will need to wait for the domain to verify.
Adding routes (forwards) on Mailgun is easy, and if you have ever created a forward on cPanel or other control panel you can easily master routes on Mailgun. Depending on whether you want a catch all or to match a specific email address you can easily create routes to forward mail for users. I recommend creating routes that match specific email addresses, no point in forwarding mass email for tons of spam, that will just end up costing you money. Once you have your route setup email for that person will be forwarded on to the email address you added.
The added bonus of having easy to read logs and reporting is also a great feature of Mailgun, and has come in handy on multiple occasions to see if mail had been forwarded along to to clients.
The Not So Great
Honestly it is hard to find a problem with Mailgun. If there is one problem it is that I don’t use Mailgun to its full potential. That is not a problem with the service but the fact that I simply don’t have a need yet for their other features.
Overall
I highly recommend Mailgun for just the forwarding services alone, especially when you are hosting on your own DigitalOcean or AWS servers. Running email servers for clients and managing email is just way to much work for most small companies to handle. Let the bigger companies manage the email and you can focus on just making sure the email gets to them. Mailgun lets you do that.