I'm surprised by the other comments here that I'm in the minority thinking that the sales approach was pretty terrible. You're trying to sell something you don't understand to a company you don't understand. Why? If you actually want to "help" a company (by selling them your product... not really sure how that's "helping", but...) then at least do some research into the company and provide something that looks useful rather than some crappy "Hi, I like you, let's chat!"

In this specific case, someone somewhere is lying about services being provided. If that's sales then that's not great. If that's accounts/billing then that's probably worse. In any case it's a pretty terrible look for the company concerned, and understandably results in an erosion of trust.

Evan, your response was needlessly rude, and if I were Mailgun I'd let you go as a customer. The idea that you'd drop a company over this is overly dramatic. I would encourage you to be nicer to relatively low-level employees, and Joe did seem reasonably knowledgeable about Mailgun's processes

Everyone here is talking about Evan's response, so I may be misunderstanding something, but... If I'm billed for a dedicated email for years and it hasn't been provisioned for me, isn't that a major problem with the service?

The only thing questionable I see here is that random sales employees seem to have access to customer information. It's not clear to me that the information they have access to is actually all that sensitive, though. Delivery rates and whether or not they've purchased a dedicated IP address? Eh, not sure that's a big deal.

Of course, we have no idea what other customer information this sales guy might have access to. And it's concerning that the information he had access to was incorrect, or he was somehow very badly misinterpreting it. Or, worse, he was confused and actually looking at another customer's dashboard, which, if true, would be pretty concerning. These things are perhaps worrisome, but it's not clear what was actually going on here.

I agree that the sales guy was more pushy than he should have been, seems like he was poorly-trained and not good at his job, and I too hate vague requests for agenda-less meetings, but this whole thing seems like an overreaction.

If I were mailgun, I'd be okay losing Evan as a customer.

I agree with the sentiment, though not the execution.

Time is certainly the most valuable asset, and if someone is wasting my time/energy then I just ignore them.

If I see an email that's coming from a random sales-related channel and not from my support rep, I'm ignoring it. If I'm using a service incorrectly, and the email is vague and gives the same vibe when someone asks "Can I ask you a question?" on slack and waits for a response, then I'm not going to bother replying.

Waste your time, but don't expect the same from me.

Interesting read. While the general consensus on the comments here so far are "why be so rude" -- I don't think this was rude at all.

I'd be similarly upset if I was treated this way by someone from marketing.

Edit: From a second read, I really don't see any of this as rude. You know how it's poor etiquette to start a chat message with "Hey, do you have a moment?", And it's much better to just write the question and wait for a response?

This is the email equivalent. "Request too vague, I don't want to meet. Please specify further, unless this is a sales pitch, in which case, preemptively not interested." It's not passive aggressive, it's just business.

If I had received, "You're right, this is a low effort sales pitch, and it works", I don't think I'd bother replying. That is an extremely passive aggressive response.

Sorry to say but Evan does not come across as particularly pleasant or likeable to anyone he corresponds with. Common courtesy would go a long way.

I was expecting something worse.

Could the sales outreach be done better? Sure, but I've seen a lot worse and I feel like the initial email setting the tone with "This request is so vague and nonspecific..." was already more passive aggressive than it has to be and set the tone for the rest of the thread.

> Despite the incident in 2018, Mailgun appears to be giving an excessive level of access to customer data to employees who do not need it in 2020: Joe had access to specific customer domain information, and didn't hesitate to use it purely to try to sell me something. From this, I infer that it is likely routine that sales staff examine customer data without any kind of control or approval. I don't think this is acceptable.

Same thing happened with me on GoDaddy. I used GoDaddy's domain purchase system to negotiate and buy a domain, and transferred it to Cloudflare. A few years later, a GoDaddy buyer contacted me about buying the domain. The only way they could have gotten my email is to trawl through their past purchase records since the domain wasn't using any GoDaddy systems (DNS, email, etc) after it was transferred out.

I sent a very unhappy email back to them and I've been transferring my domains out to other registrars. I no longer recommend GoDaddy.

From the comments it seems like there's a bit of an information gap in terms of how email service providers (ESPs) like Mailgun operate, what data they must have routine access to, and how the space evolved to make money (this last part of my info is dated as I left the space about a decade ago).

First, ESPs send email on a client's behalf. One of the primary benefits of using an ESP is co-opting their email reputation and their contacts with real time blacklist (RBL) operators, postmaster organizations at major email providers and third party email reputation groups. A good reputation keeps a sender's email out of the junk folder (or worse refused/dropped on the floor) and is really all most folks care about (especially at an API driven company like Mailgun).

In order to do all of the above, an ESP needs access to the details of the email that's being sent, including recipient email addresses and the contents of the message being sent. This is because both of those things can potentially be dangerous and the ESP is the ultimate responsible party in the eyes of the receiving email provider (i.e. Google holds Mailgun as the responsible party for what Phabricator sends).

Now, as to this sales call, sometime ago (circa ~2004 I guess) it became apparent that ESPs could work with their problematic clients to improve their sending habits, thereby improving their reputation and collect more money from the client in the process (via either direct consulting fees or increased sending volume). This kind of win-win made a lot of sense, but as the price-per-email sent was dropping ESPs were looking for ways to reliably generate more revenue and, well, "deliverability consulting" became a thing. My guess is that this is what this email exchange was about, and like any consulting effort, it's only as good as the last interaction and here I agree with Evan that "Joe" fumbled the ball fairly badly.

Personally, I would have just reached out to Mailgun support and asked what's up with the incorrect billing and Joe's problematic responses, but that doesn't appear to have been Evan's first choice.

Source for the industry insider info is that I used to run the technical side of a small ESP from about 2003 to 2009, was an active participant in MAAWG and generally had to work with my peers across orgs to navigate deliverability problems regularly.

I kind of dislike everyone in the email exchange.

This Evan guy reminds me of the worst customers I have: rude, know-it all, overreacting. Just because you're a customer you're not entitled to be an ass.

Of course they have data about the customer performance, it's part of their job, it doesn't mean it has access to private data.

Ugh, that salesman is a sleeze. lol

I thought Evan had stopped working on Phab. Does anyone know Phabricator's status? Is it still under active development?

As possible explanation of the initial response, I understand the frustration as I get dozens of these 'how does Tuesday at 3', 'time for a call next week?', etc emails every week as part of sleazy companies' spam email drip campaigns to more than one of my email accounts. That said, continuing to send email to 30,000 suppressed email addresses means you need to spend some time cleaning out old emails from your list. I do this semi-regularly for the confirmed opt-in list for PortableApps.com which is sent via mailgun.

I don’t know, this interaction kind of makes me like Mailgun. Sounds like they were seeing some weird stuff with a customer and reached out to see what was up. That’s what I want out of an email infrastructure provider. It’s hard to maintain high deliverability if you don’t keep careful tabs on things.

I was kind of expecting the complaint to be about how the API only allows a single API key (which is terrible for multiple projects), and doesn't allow generating multiple API keys w/ multiple types of access (kind of like what Cloudflare's API allows you to do)

I went from mailgun to gsuite. costs went up 3x and almost all of my emails are going to spam folders even when the contact and I have been emailing each other for ages.

Would definitely recommend mailgun/sendgrid over gsuite for emails and not entirely agree with this blog post.

Well, we use Mailgun at work and it’s pretty great. I’ve only ever had one issue with it and it and their support was outstanding.

As somebody who used to work in enterprise support, I don’t see them as having done anything wrong here. It’s just somebody reaching out to do their job.

I laughed out loud when I saw the last email on the page misspells Evan's name as "Even"- as someone named Evan who gets people misspelling my name that way constantly.

I discourage using them because they never seem to be able to deliver to hotmail addresses.

Does not admire Evans. Unclear axe wielding. If you really want help be specific. Mailgun is not a very good service in general from my experience but it works. A good alternative if price is relevant.

Lol why does this guy complaining of a salesperson emailing them end up on top page of HN?

Like honestly, who the duck cares?

I came in against mailgun, and came out astonished at how poor Evan’s behavior was. I’ll never touch any project he is involved with.

what is the male equivalent of Karen?

> This request is so vague and nonspecific ("Let's take a look"?) that it feels kind of like a low-effort template sales email. If it is, and your primary goal in sending me this email is to get me to purchase more Mailgun services, please do not send me any more emails like this.

This entire sentence was unnecessary..

> Mailgun's hiring or training process for sales employees doesn't seem to be very good: Joe didn't seem to understand the Mailgun system. Beyond not needing it, I also don't think it is acceptable for staff who can not consistently demonstrate a high level of competence to have access to customer data.

He blames the training AND the hiring, lol