I'm not a huge 'review' giver unless it is 5-stars (or 5 tacos). I love being a part of startups and small business and totally root for their success. I was super excited to get Acumbamail deal, I went 'all in' and got the highest package!

I liked the interface and the general working environment was user-friendly and made sense. After what I thought was a good amount of testing, I decided to leave my existing system and move over to Acumbamail. This required thousands of dollars for me to pay our tech to properly setup our integration with e-comm, etc. We then connected our store's transactional emails and all was good to go.

Next, I started to get our GDPR campaign setup so our customers would all qualify as 'double-opt-in' so we could start with a fresh, active list. Once I started the campaign, using segments, so only starting with less than 4000 sends; Acumbamail stopped and said we need a list clean-up for safety (we sent less than 1000 before the alert, that seems good and cautious). Okay! I get it, let's error on the side of caution. We said, please proceed with your quote for our list cleanup (translated to approx. $300 USD). We waited a week+ for the cleanup. Before we got our 'cleaned' list, our store transaction emails started soft-bouncing! We said... whaaaat?

1) Starting on a Saturday, all our transactional emails were soft-bouncing (we couldn't figure it out)
2) I reached out to Acumbamail with an urgent request... no responds, by the way, usually take 3+ days to get a reply from someone and they are typically with entry level knowledge.
3) Our hosting provider did the hard work for us and tested the transactional ip's to figure out what's wrong... problem = blacklisted ip's sending our order confirmations.
4) I quickly jumped off the transactional connection and used our other source. After switching, all transactional emails were fine.
5) We never got our campaign moving after the cleanup since the ip issue with our transactions brought up serious concern.

Since then, I've tried to get some sort of assurance that they do have ip addresses that are healthy. I got 1 list and every one produced a blacklist alert when tested.

BUT, the final straw was... remember the list cleanup for about $300? Well, I got charged twice for an apparent simultaneous list cleanup. I've spent a week trying to get someone to refund for 1 of the charges. After 6 days, I've just been told "maybe you hit a popup that started a second cleanup". Hmm. Yeah... just hmmm.

Sigh! So, I am counting my losses with my time, our tech costs and list cleanup costs. Now I'm dealing with our cc company to get the 1 'unauthorized' cleanup charge refunded and it looks like my next step is to head over to my appsumo product list and hit for a refund.

Oh, yeah, all the tech fees I had to pay for Acumbamail connections, etc? Yup, paying those now to return back to our old, but reliable system. I guess I didn't know what I had until I discovered the world of blacklisted ip's.

I hope by the time someone reads this, they've resolved their ip cleanup. That was by far, the biggest issue. What's the point in working so hard on a campaign and getting qualified followers, just to have their system soft-bounce because of the sending ip being on a naughty list!

Best wishes moving forward Acumbamail! I'm sure improvements are coming soon.