Mailjet

Mailjet is quite easy to set up and use. The latest improvements that were implemented this year make the creation of nice looking emails for different platforms very convenient. User-friendly, colorful and intuitively understandable.

The most irritating thing about Mailjet is when the account is blocked for some reason and you message to the support they just say "Sorry, your domain triggered some of our security rules. We unblock your account". They never say what exactly is incorrect with the domain despite the fact that it could help their customer to improve his domain security or change the hosting. Or as another example, when you have just created your account, you may get the message "Sorry, your domain triggered some of our security flags. We cannot allow you to use our system." No any other clarification what exactly their security system didn't like. And you have to go to their competitors.

Mailjet is very easy to setup as long as you have access to your domain DNS settings. I manage DNS through Amazon Route 53 so changes reflect quickly when I needed to verify DNS ownership. Once you confirm ownership, setting up email API is easy, and works instantaneously - as it should.

I started using Mailjet to send out server and website notifications. For this purpose it worked awesome. I had about 20 websites sending notifications out via MailJet and as long as the domain names were verified correctly it worked great. You'll run into problems if don't verify your domain so if you have issues check that first. Mailjet has an easy domain verification tool that will highlight any issues quickly.

For transactional emails and general emails from an email client MailJet worked fantastic - read the cons section for an area of trouble.

Since I had such good success using MailJet for our transactional needs, I started using MailJet a couple months ago to send out periodic marketing emails, it's a native feature within their dashboard so I thought it would be nice to consolidate email providers. Well, very quickly we ran into issues and they temporarily lowered my sending limits.

I was able to quickly provide them with the information they needed and they removed the sending limits after 7-days. From that experience, I limited our use of MailJet as a marketing platform, but recently used them again only to run into the exact same problem. But this time the issue was because of the volume of emails sent - not because of any bounce or SPAM notifications. The suspension this time resulted in a much more complicated process in demonstrating ownership over the list of email under my control.

I don't want to pick on MailJet too much on this subject of marketing emails; they position themselves as a transactional email platform, and for that, they're awesome. I only used MailJet for marketing purposes because they feature it in their dashboard and it's easy to use. But they seem far more strict in their email purposes than say MailChimp which seems to be setup more for marketing/newsletter type emails.

I appreciate how simple it is to use. Despite its flaws, the online email editor is helpful. List administration is straightforward. The scenarios are simple to construct and effective. I use Mailjet's professional servers and am very pleased with the rate of mail delivery.

The interface is not easy to use, especially if you are familiar with other services. A large portion of it does not function as intended. It can take a long time to keep attempting a task before the system responds. The server's response time is excruciatingly slow.