EDIT (1): Good Potential But Is It Production Ready?
***** EDIT 1 *****
Jiri, thank you for your assistance and for taking the time to sort out my concerns.
I can confirm that the Events page is now loading in a second.
After speaking to Jiri via email and hearing that they are already working on webhook improvements, I have more confidence in his project.
One of the most important things when it comes to transactional emails is good and reliable notifications and logs. It's not that bad when the email can't be delivered because an error happened, but it is bad when you don't know about it, so you can't resolve it afterward.
Thus, I insist on reliability.
After all, maybe my 3 tacos were too harsh, but I wanted to get their attention. Now, I've changed my rating to 4 tacos and I'll surely come back here after 60 days to set 5 tacos if I decide to keep the software. I've already set up 2 domains and I'll connect them to live sites to test the reliability in the production. I'll make sure to output the results here in "Edit 2" after some time.
***** ORIGINAL MESSAGE - SHORTER VERSION *****
Firstly, I'll add that I have intermediate experience with Amazon SES and Mailgun. All my sites are connected to those services via API and it has worked flawlessly for years.
I took time to test Emailit and it also works as intended - emails are delivered. But, what concerns me is the RELIABILITY and the FUTURE.
*** Is Emailit here to stay? ***
*** Is it going to work without hiccups when 1.000 users start maxing it out ***
Don't get me wrong, the Emailit is OK and I'm not even saying it's half-baked. But, it comes with a few issues.
ISSUES:
1. The Events page loads for 20+ seconds.
2. There is only one webhook available for ALL EVENTS. I propose a solution similar to one found in Mailgun. Every domain can tweak webhook settings independently. I can choose to receive just bounces and complaints and nothing else.
3. I have purposely sent the message to a non-existent email address and I was receiving webhook notifications for each failed delivery every 30-60 minutes. After all, that email was marked as suppressed after 7 failed deliveries.
4. There is no solution for inbound emails.
5. I purposely sent an email to the tokenized email address from the return-path and it was received and logged by system. Maybe it would be better if rejected.
There are also other smaller things like not being able to save the username and email address in settings and there isn't a field to insert company data and VAT ID.
There are also good things about Emailit.
GOOD STUFF:
- Every email is logged in the system with the server response and the actual content preview
- API and SMTP worked in my tests
- Campaign scheduling worked
- Custom fields and their dynamic insertion in the newsletter
- One-Click unsubscribe button works in email clients
- Great content editor (email builder)
OK, so, what is the verdict?
*** I hope it can succeed in the long run. ***
I don't want to be overly critical because this software is nice and easy to use, and it's obvious that the founder knows a thing or two about emails and coding, but what bothers me is if Emailit is here to stay and be reliable in the long run.
The email is a serious business. I'm not sure if I can switch my sites from MG and SES to Emailit right now. How it will work under constant pressure? Will it glitch here and there? How can I have peace of mind knowing all sent emails are received by Emailit and delivered to the destination? Are webhooks fully reliable in the current state?
That is the reason I gave it 3 tacos only.
*** My words to the founder ***
I hope you won't get me wrong here. I'd like you to succeed. But, this isn't a random software that I'll use here and there. This is about the email which is used every day and the business depends on it.
I see you have tried to stretch on both markets - newsletters and the API service for transactional emails.
Maybe it's too much. At least for the start.
It would be better if you develop just the API service to be 100% reliable and scalable, and then create a newsletter service on top of that. Or as a separate product.
Also, I see you have one other tool here on AppSumo - Dragit. It concerns me how much can you dedicate to this Emailit service and the API part of Emailit while you jump between all those tools.
Just my 2 cents.
P.S. Please, consider removing the cap of 1.000 emails per day until someone reaches 10.000 sent emails, because it's not possible to send newsletters via API in that case. With transactional emails, we'll need like 6 months to reach 10.000 emails, while with newsletters 1.000 emails per day is too small if the lists are like 5k big. This cap seems illogical and constrains testing the service.
BR,
Miljenko
George_Dragit
Edited Dec 6, 2024Hi Miljenko,
Thank you for taking the time to write such a long feedback!
Reliability
We have our own data center, servers, and software behind Emailt. At this moment, we are adding a few new servers to this platform every month.
We are not dependent on any other provider or software, so we control the whole platform.
Issues
1/ We had no reports of any delays in loading the Events page; I will write it down and look into it.
2/ This is already being improved and should be available soon. You will be able to select the events that you want to receive.
3/ This will be also resolved by you choosing not to receive "Soft Fail" events.
4/ Inbound emails are on the roadmap for Q1 2025
5/The Return path address is used for receiving bounces, so you will indeed see this email as incoming and accepted since each message has its own token, but it will be "pending" or "error" since it is not correctly referencing a bounce.
6/ This is disabled on purpose, as with 100s+ of new customers, we need to keep track of all the spammers. If we would currently allow the instant change of email addresses and names, it would just make it harder to keep track and ensure good deliverability. This will be allowed once we finish the internal automatic monitoring that will be able to do this work for us.
7/ As we discussed via email, the new workspace 1000/h rate limit is for everyone and can be increased once you send your first 10k emails. Our platform still accepts all the emails you send, even when going over this limit, and delays them, so you don't have to worry that your emails will be dropped when you send a 5K campaign. It would just be sent within 5 hours.
I hope this helps!
UPDATE: Events loading delays have been fixed.