Policy like this is meant to protect sender reputation, not just provider IP pool. High hard bounce rate lowers your inboxing in the long term. If your bounce rate is consistently above 5% consider verifying all new emails before sending them an email > https://www.bigmailer.io/blog/email-verification-service-pro...
Natural email decay rate is 2-3% per month so the goal is to stay close to this range, but the lower the better.
You often pay for "good company" when you choose a more expensive provider. So the cheaper the provider the lower quality of their shared IP pool due to the type of customers they tend to have on the platform. The free tier lowers the customer quality even more. IF you are sending mission critical email then dedicated IP makes a lot of sense, but probably not at a huge price multiple mentioned for Sendgrid.
Amazon SES shared IP pool isn't better than Sendgrid or Mailgun but their dedicated IPs are only $25/month. If your volume is low that might be the only cost since they offer 62k/month completely free and after that it's $0.1 per 1000 emails.
Unfortunately not a lot of providers offer dedicated IP option on lower level plans.
>Amazon SES shared IP pool isn't better than Sendgrid or Mailgun...Unfortunately not a lot of providers offer dedicated IP option on lower level plans.
I think the main problem I have with SendGrid here is that they knowingly offer a paid product with such abysmal shared IP deliverability out of the gate, then offer no meaningful mitigation except to upgrade to a plan that includes the dedicated IP at a 6X premium, along with features many customers don't need (primarily send volume). Many customers will say "that's overkill, I don't need that send volume".
Very much a bait-and-switch feel to it. If they're going to offer the lower cost plans, then they need to be forthcoming about the disparity in deliverability. Instead, they say vague things like "own your reputation with a dedicated IP", when the truth is actually "12%-15% of your emails may suddenly stop being delivered unless you choose a dedicated IP plan".
My guess is that how most email service providers handle this - they don't actually delete the email and just have a flag on it - bounced, complain, unsub. This way the list owner can run an export and see all the status code.
The hard bounce status might be stored outside of your lists. I am not sure customers can easily change a hard bounce status themselves. Do you mean you just deleted those records with intent to re-add to reset the status? On our BigMailer platform this wouldn't work as hard bounce status would get preserved.
We use SendGrid and Mailgun right now, and both of these expose the suppression list, email address, time, and reason code + description. In Sendgrid you can filter, and mass select to remove suppressions easily (which was great). In mailgun I had to export a CSV and just removed them manually as there was not too many across my accounts.
Customers generally cannot change this on their end as far as I can imagine -- this is on the ESP end and is a protection built in because you are sending from their IP / Server and they don't take kindly to that.
+1 what Jonathan said. Typically, when email service providers are down the response code indicates a temporary issue with a soft bounce code, so you can still try to send to that address in the future.
The action for rectifying isn't too difficult, but the implications are still pretty big...
Thanks for sharing Jonathan, unprecedented situation. And that's just gmail.com addresses we can see data on, while there are all those business domains that use Google Apps for their email that probably experienced a similar issue...
Natural email decay rate is 2-3% per month so the goal is to stay close to this range, but the lower the better.