Also, TC, sigh. If you can't find someone to articulate the value proposition for not hosting one's own email, I can help (+). Saying "young devs can't figure out email" once makes you sound ageist, saying it three times makes you sound stupid.
+ Email makes businesses a lot of money. Delivery optimization is a full-time job. Securing a new email server is highly non-trivial. Existing options for controlling first-party inboxes and outgoing email with a web application rely on brittle shell scripts and Deep Magick. There are operational inflection points in administering email servers; navigating one incorrectly means the business dies until addressed; many quickly quickly growing companies will hit three to four of them. (Some popular web app genres can hit three to four within weeks of launch - coupons or social anything, for example.)
Completely agree (and that TC headline is terrible). We're an email startup (not the delivery side). I had the pleasure of speaking with Ev @ Mailgun early on in our life. He gave us tremendous help figuring out how not screw up delivery.
That conversation also made me realize we didn't want to worry about all of the things that companies like mailgun do well. I'm more than happy to leave the intricacies of email delivery to the experts.
I congratulate the Mailgun team and I wish them all the best, but Rackspace's previous acquisitions bode ill for the future of Mailgun.
Rackspace acquired CloudKick in late 2010 and Anso Labs in February of 2011. Both teams must have been put on other projects, because their products have stagnated. CloudKick no longer lets people sign up. Their blog, https://www.cloudkick.com/blog/, has broken images and few updates. I couldn't find any products by Anso Labs, so I googled the founders. It looks like they no longer work at Rackspace: http://gigaom.com/cloud/openstack-developers-leave-rackspace...
Again I wish the best for Mailgun, but I really hope they know what they're getting into. If I were a customer, I would be wary right now.
I work at Rackspace and the CloudKick team (now augmented with a lot of other Rackers) has been heads down working on improving their product. The intial results can be seen here http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/monitoring/.
EDIT: Removed some text about fixing the broken site. I just checked and it looks like it has been updated to point to the Cloud Monitoring solution. If there are broken links or images, feel free to post them or send them to me and I'll see what I can do.
Just to be clear, Mailgun is still offered as a stand alone service and existing customers do not have to make any changes. Some more info is available on our blog: http://blog.mailgun.net/
Rackspace has a nice deal with SendGrid (free SendGrid for Rackspace customers)(https://sendgrid.com/products/rackspace). I wonder if this remains as well as if there were any discussions on a SendGrid acquisition? I suspect SendGrid might be aiming higher.
Congrats Roman and co, but I am not surprised. Your enthusiastic support and the effort you have poured into the product is something I will learn from.
Also, TC, sigh. If you can't find someone to articulate the value proposition for not hosting one's own email, I can help (+). Saying "young devs can't figure out email" once makes you sound ageist, saying it three times makes you sound stupid.
+ Email makes businesses a lot of money. Delivery optimization is a full-time job. Securing a new email server is highly non-trivial. Existing options for controlling first-party inboxes and outgoing email with a web application rely on brittle shell scripts and Deep Magick. There are operational inflection points in administering email servers; navigating one incorrectly means the business dies until addressed; many quickly quickly growing companies will hit three to four of them. (Some popular web app genres can hit three to four within weeks of launch - coupons or social anything, for example.)