Verified purchaser
Could be great if there is better support
Ok, I read all the reviews before purchasing this a couple of months ago, and support is one of the main reasons for purchase. My impression is the following:
- you need solid tech skills to have all this up and running, and also, each server has its own rules and things that are not compatible with all the instructions on docs. At the beginning, I tried AWS, but it simply had issues and even emaildelivery team suggested to go off Amazon and go to standard VPS.
- I then used suggested Racknerd. Have in mind if you need both ESP and MTA, you would probably need 2 servers *theoretically it can go on one server but you need advanced server admin knowledge, it's impossible on Amazon
- Support is very slow, I would rather say not existing, it takes days and weeks to respond if any and even than you get partial answers on which you need to wait, I am pretty sure that there is a lot of AI tools on Appsumo that can help with that if emaildelivery team wants to train support.
- The product itself is buggy, we have problems with 2nd mails in sequences, sometimes they are sending sometimes not, I mean, I connected with Gsuite SMTP with just 500 email sent a day and its still 30% soft bounce.
- to get your own MTA up and running you need advanced server knowledge and PTR records and pretty much 2 or 3 months of every day for some time work until you get there so if you are purchasing for MTA, I really doubt that anyone has that much time for IP joining, warming, setting records and etc.
- to get approved to Amazon SES, despite different claims in reviews, is very hard, you pretty much have to withhold information from them, even change AWS accounts (at least email delivery team suggested me to do so) and if you say you are going to use it for sending emails for clients, its a mission impossible almost. I was surprised when I saw Gozen Growth being able to use AWS for sending almost out of the box for example.
- also, there are times when you need to reset your server to start sending emails again
- Good thing is you can connect your SMTP mail and send email, which is for those that were using hubspot sales email before, like a professional type account, that is why its 3 tacos instead of 1.
- sequenced emails lack options like to stop a sequence if someone replies
Overall good product but it needs a lot of time and skill to being able to pay it of. Marketing of the product is great, but in order to achieve that level, be ready to spend a lot of time. My mistake was, I started using it 60 days after purchase so refund was impossible, and now after spending so much time on setting it up for at least one client, I will probably continue to use it, but support is really the issue. I guess this is a great product for those spending 300$ plus monthly on email marketing, otherwise, I wouldn't suggest it. I really wanted this product to be great, but it really isn't, it just ok and than again having in mind it's a LTD, its really ok.
I still didn't come to API usage, I wanted to try Active Pieces with it, it would be powerhouse just to have an option to send email campaigns over SMTP relays and have Active pieces possibilities as steps before or after.
Hope support and automated sequences will get better so I have to change this review in future.
Ian_EmailDelivery
Jun 14, 2024A criticism we've received from time to time is that we discourage people from buying our product and make it sound overly intimidating. This review is exactly what we're trying to avoid by always emphasizing our software requires tech chops overall, and anything related to the MTA you would need a DevOps background for.
A lot of things in this list of complaints we have absolutely no control over:
1) The customer waited longer than the AppSumo refund period of 60 days to try it.
2) Their Amazon SES account was rejected.
Many of our customers are approved successfully as first time Amazon SES users or have been approved already on another platform and move their existing account over to our software. We have a guide in our docs right at the top of the first page explaining the Amazon SES sandbox vs production access, what the Amazon Trust and Safety team is looking for in your application, and how to increase their confidence that you will be a sender of wanted email.
3) They are trying to use Gsuite / Google Workspace accounts and running into the low daily rate limits imposed on them by Google Workspace, and Google Workspace soft bounces their mail when they hit that limit.
We have always recommended against anyone using our software with Gsuite / Zoho accounts like they do with cold email platforms, just this week during the Sumo Day promotion I've continued to answer this question in the Q&A by discouraging this.
Our platform is designed to be used with either major 3rd party email delivery providers like Sparkpost, Mailgun, Amazon SES, SendGrid, Postmarkapp, SMTP.com or on an Ubuntu Linux server using your own IP addresses with our included MTA.
4) "Sending email requires DNS PTR records and no one has the time to setup IPs and warm them up"
What can be said in response to the above? These things are fundamental and universal to email marketing and/or based on technical requirements that have been around for decades.
Customer's valid complaints:
1) Support was slow.
We're a two person team without any employees and sometimes support is instantaneous and sometimes we get backed up with complex and/or time consuming tickets, and we commonly get requests for things which could never realistically fall under our support responsibilities or that aren't about our product but about other semi-related topics.
In this customers case 2 months ago they asked for me to log into their Amazon account and then work with proprietary Amazon services I'm completely inexperienced with.
Examples of the recommended/supported dedicated VPS options is another one of the very first things at the top of our docs page, several FAQs, and in many Q&As here on AppSumo. I simply told them I don't know anything about this, here's a list of hosts commonly used by our customers from the MTA FAQ.
2) They would like a feature native to the software that can process reply emails during an autoresponder sequence.
We've always been up front we don't have this feature or similar features for processing email replies and have answered this question publicly many times, plus we have a canny for features requests and feature discussion.
We have no plans to implement this feature as it just falls outside of the way our product is intended to be used, but it can already be done via any 3rd party tools that can tag a customer that sends a reply to a Reply-To email address, by using our native feature that remove contacts from an email funnel once they've received that tag.
Like everyone else who makes software, we have an uncountable number of feature requests. No one else has ever given us a bad review because we're missing one particular feature we never claimed to have.