What is MailGun Used for?
We use MailGun as a transactional service to send emails through our APIS, web applications, and scripts. You can use it to send emails in bulk or on-demand. It is recommended to use a service like Mailgun vs your web service for sending emails as it has IPs that has built trust in email clients. It also has full-featured APIs.
In this article, we will review the Mailgun email service. We will discuss what Mailgun is, its pricing plan, features, benefits, pros, and cons. We will also learn how to send bulk emails using Mailgun API in PHP.
In this article, we will cover the following topics.
Table of Contents
- What is Mailgun?
- Mailgun pricing plans.
- Features of Mailgun.
- Benefits of Mailgun.
- Pros and Cons of Mailgun.
- Alternatives to Mailgun.
- Send Bulk Emails Using the Mailgun’s API in PHP.
What is Mailgun?
Mailgun is an email service that allows us to use the SMTP protocol or API to send emails. It also provides us with reports to track the number of emails sent and also allows us to check addresses for typos or spam problems. It has an email validation service that provides accurate validation results on the market.
Mailgun is one of the most helpful email APIs that developers use. We can easily send transactional or bulk emails using Mailgun’s SMTP and HTTP API in PHP. Mailgun gives you the options to choose how you want to send your emails through API or through SMTP.
Mailgun also allows you to create eye-catching emails in minutes. You can create a personalized email targeted at a specific audience. And the Email analytics, based on performance data of your sent emails, lets you know the best time to send your messages.
In Mailgun, you can have the option to choose how you want to send your emails using Mailgun’s API (A popular method of sending emails which can integrate with languages like Python, PHP, Ruby, and more.) or using the SMTP method (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which is an easy way to transfer your emails.)
To use Mailgun API, first, we need to create a free Mailgun account. After successful registration, we will get 5000 free emails to send.
Visit the link to learn more about how to create a Mailgun account.
Digging Deeper With MailGun
This article is part of our series digging into MailGun. Check out the full list of articles below to level up your knowledge and ability in MailGun.
- Complete Guide to Mailgun
- How to Send Email Using Mailgun
- Sending Email in Laravel with Mailgun
- 6 Transactional Email Service APIs Compared
Mailgun Pricing Plans
Let’s look at the pricing plans of the Mailgun email service.
| Mailgun Pricing Plans | Starting At | Features | Extra emails & verifications |
| Trail | $0/month5,000 emails/month included | Email APIs, SMTP Relay, and Webhooks Suppression Management Email Tracking and Analytics 99.99% Guaranteed Uptime SLA5 days of log retention Detailed documentation 24/7 ticket support Drag-and-Drop Template Builder | Extra emails beyond trial volume from $1.00 / 1,000 emails. |
| Foundation | $35/month50,000 emails/month included | All features in the Trial plan + Inbound Email Routing Email address verification access 1 day of message retention 24/7 ticket support 1 Dedicated IP (Foundation 100k and up) | from $1.00 / 1,000 emails from $1.20 / 100 verifications |
| Growth | $80/month100,000 emails/month included | All features in the Foundation plan + 1,000 Email Address Verifications 15 Days Log Retention 3 days message retention Instant Chat Support 1 Dedicated IP | from $0.80 / 1,000 emails from $1.20 / 100 verifications |
| Scale | $90/month100,000 emails/month included | All features in the Growth plan + SAML SSO5,000 Email Address Verifications Send Time Optimization 30 Days of Log Retention Up to 7 Days Message Retention Live Phone Support Dedicated IP Pools | from $0.80 / 1,000 emails from $1.20 / 100 verifications |
Features of Mailgun
The key Mailgun features can help you get the best out of your emails.
Email Deliverability Services.
Mailgun provides the best Deliverability Services to ensure the highest email deliverability possible for companies that send 500,000 emails or more every month. This includes creating a custom deliverability solution tailored to your business needs. And also the Technical Account Manager to provide ongoing support, email best practices, and troubleshooting in case something goes wrong.
Email builder.
In Mailgun, you can build impressive emails with Mailjet’s email builder, which is part of Mailgun’s offering, and thus grab your customer’s attention. You can also create personalized emails for a targeted audience to get maximum benefits.
Advanced Email Analytics.
Mailgun lets you know how your emails perform through informative graphs in the dashboard. You can also get an insight into how your emails are accepted, delivered, failed, opened, and clicked. And beyond simple analytics, Mailgun’s Send Time Optimization feature lets you schedule your emails to be delivered when your users are most likely to engage with them.
Intelligent Inbound Routing.
Mailgun also enables customers to route inbound emails automatically with flexible RegEx rules, either via API or visually in the dashboard. And if any problem arises, 24/7 Mailgun’s customer service is available to help.
Email List Management.
In Mailgun, you can upload your email lists to Mailgun for easy list management, and you can look for the email accounts that have unsubscribed or marked your emails as spam. This can also save you time and money and even maintain your overall sending reputation.
Mailgun also provides you with the feature of List segmentation. This feature lets you divide your email list into parts and send the right message to the right audience.
And you can also get a one-on-one consultation with an expert on List management issues, technical API support, or IP and domain reputation management.
Powerful Email APIs.
Mailgun’s powerful APIs allow you to start sending emails from your application quickly and easily. And all you need to do is add a domain, verify it by adding DNS records, and you can start sending in less than 24 hours.
Its servers can also handle millions of emails every hour, so rest assured that your time-sensitive emails will be sent quickly.
SMTP Services.
The SMTP services provided by Mailgun are cloud-based, which lets you set up marketing campaigns, send transactional emails, track emails, get advanced email analytics, set up email parsing and routing commands, and much more, all without the problems and bottlenecks of legacy email providers.
The SMTP services are easier to work with than the API platform, but if you want more efficiency, you should opt for an API platform instead.
Benefits of Mailgun Email Service
The following are key benefits of using the Mailgun Email service.
- Mailgun gives you options like cloud-based SMTP or an efficient and powerful API platform to choose from.
- Mailgun lets you know the performance of your emails and can also figure out how to increase your number of clients.
- Mailgun partners with email experts to build a custom deliverability strategy for your business.
- Using Mailgun, you can build beautiful and persuasive email designs.
- Using Mailgun, you can send personalized emails to your clients, with their names and order details being the variables.
- The Mailgun’s email parsing and routing features let you have a separate collection of your important emails.
- The Mailgun’s automatic reply feature saves time and brings more efficiency to your marketing process.
- The Mailgun’s email list management through email validation and removing the ones who unsubscribe or spam your emails ultimately saves time and money.
- Mailgun also saves your sender’s reputation by removing the ones from the mailing list who unsubscribe/spam your messages or do not open your messages.
Pros and Cons of Using Mailgun
The following table shows the Pros and Cons of the Mailgun email Service.
| Pros | Email Tracker Email Analytics Easy tools for creating emails Free Plan for three months Easy to use the dashboard 99.99% uptime 24/7 customer support Easy to integrate with programming languages Affordable prices for Established Businesses |
| Cons | Set up can be tough for Non-Developers Limited support for Lower Tier users Prices maybe high for Small Businesses No email Marketing Services |
What are the Alternatives to Mailgun?
The following are the popular alternatives to Mailgun.
SendGrid.
SendGrid is a potential competitor to Mailgun. It is not just a service for sending emails but offers a complete email marketing suite with analytical tools to monitor email marketing campaigns. Among other features, it also provides the ability to use dedicated IPs.
Large companies such as Uber, Spotify, and eBay use this email marketing API. Its biggest advantages are the high delivery rate and analytics dashboards.
Mailgun also offers a free version for a lifetime, which lets you send 100 emails daily. This free plan gives you an email analytics feature. Other plans provide dedicated IP addresses, guaranteed response times, and more.
MailJet.
Mailjet provides an easy-to-use platform for designing and sending email marketing campaigns, newsletters, and automated emails. You can design beautiful responsive emails in a few minutes using Mailjet Email Marketing API. You can start from scratch or select from a variety of pre-designed templates in Mailjet.
There is a free plan which offers you to send 200 emails per day and 6000 emails per month, have unlimited contacts, and provide statistics about the performance of your emails. The premium plan costs $15 for 15,000 emails per month.
Sendinblue.
Sendinblue is an excellent choice as an email marketing API. It is fast, simple, and accessible to everyone. You can send millions of marketing emails in no time using Sendinblue’s robust Email API. Their email API can accept up to 120k emails per minute, and 99% of emails are processed in less than 2 seconds.
Sendinblue also provides digital marketing and sales tools for your business to expand. The features offered by Sendinblue including email designing, marketing automation, launching Facebook ads for a targeted audience, and much more.
The free plan contains 300 emails a day, and the paid ones cost $20 for 20,000 emails a day and $1000 for the business plus plan.
Send Bulk Emails Using the Mailgun’s API in PHP
Here’s the example of sending bulk emails using the Mailgun’s API in PHP.
use Mailgun\Mailgun;
$mg = Mailgun::create('key-example'); // For US servers
foreach ($recipients as $recipient) {
$mg->messages()->send('domain.com', [
'from' => 'sender@gmail.com',
'to' => $receiver@gmail.com,
'subject' => 'The PHP SDK is awesome!',
'text' => 'It is so simple to send a message.'
]);
}
There are several other ways through which we can send bulk emails using Mailgun’s API in PHP. Explore more.
Using MailGun for Sending Emails Explored
We recommend using the Mailgun Mailgun email service. It lets you choose to send email using API (The most popular method for sending emails, which can integrate easily with languages like Python, PHP, Ruby, and more.) or the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which is an easy way to transfer your emails.)
This article explains what Mailgun is and its pricing plans. It also describes the features, benefits, pros, and cons of the Mailgun email service. There is also an example of sending bulk emails using Mailgun’s API in PHP.
This article also focuses on the popular alternatives to the Mailgun email service, and we hope you find this article helpful.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the article. Stay tuned for more at FuelingPHP
