Elastic Email Reviews & Product Details

There are a lot of things to like about Elastic E-mail. Very affordable. You get 150,000 e-mails a month for free. We currently send 300,000+ e-mails a month, and it only comes out to around $100. We're growing quickly, so the flexibility of their pricing helps. Interface is very simple and easy to use. When it's working properly, it's working great! Customer service is fairly responsive. I think they are heading in the right direction. As far as I know, with larger companies like SendGrid, they sometimes completely ignore issues and will let bugs fester in your system. I haven't had this issue with Elastic E-mail, so I've stuck with them. I also haven't used any other e-mail platform, so I honestly don't know if everyone runs into problems like the ones I have in the past, so I'm kind of at a crossroads where I don't know if I should ride it out, or look to switch.

Mainly three things: 1. For the past year they have been going through many updates. Several times during this process, our e-mails just stopped sending, and we weren't alerted about it until I noticed the drop. For this past month, their graphs have not been working and I've been unable to track our open rates. As a result, we had to freeze our marketing budget and wait for them to fix it. It's been more than a month, but no progress so far. I have been told the problem has been resolved several times, and then when I went back to check, there was no difference. I've pretty much just been going around in circles with this problem. 2. Customer service is decent, but with notable limitations. First, only a few of their employees are truly responsive (Joshua, Andrzej, Beverly are all amazing!). Rest will try and give you canned responses for hours and hours, or they won't read your query at all and answer a completely unrelated question. I had to go back and forth for weeks sometimes until someone finally admitted there was an issue with something. I recommend specifically asking for certain representatives when you run into trouble. You'll know pretty quickly which ones are good. And second, it's not really 24/7 or as fast as they make it out to be. They respond "within the hour" but it's only with "Thanks for your e-mail, we're looking into this." Usually takes 1-2 days for small issues, and sometimes a week or more for bigger ones to be resolved. 3. We've run into a lot of problems as we've gotten bigger. We started on Elastic e-mail sending only ~5,000 e-mails a month. Now we're sending 300,000+ and there's a lot of issues with our logs being read incorrectly, throttling, deliverability problems, etc. We're considering switching to Mailgun as we scale even faster going forward, but still uncertain about it. Other startups that I know usually just set their e-mail systems and don't have to worry about it. I've had to pour in hours and hours into Elastic E-mail, trouble shooting through logs, making screenshots for their customer service team, etc. I'm hoping the issues get resolved eventually, I'll come back here and update the review if it does. Until then, I'd say Elastic E-mail is a 3/5. Overall, I am fairly happy with them. I will say - by far the most annoying thing they sometimes do is pretend there is no issue when there is, and you have to go a very far length until they admit it and try and fix something. This isn't just prevalent on their support side, they even do it on review forums, where they try and disregard what previous customers have pointed out. It's EXTREMELY frustrating with companies do this. It's like when Comcast tells you "no, no, your cable is working fine," and you have to video yourself trying to turn your TV on to prove otherwise.

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Easy to navigate, but very complicated to set up "server changes" which they say were very simple. NOT.

Way too complicated to setup after free period

Ability to email my customers mass emails without bogging down our servers

Good at helping you maintain a good sending rep

It took way too long to send. From one campaign to the next. We had to wait a tremendous amount of time for the server to be pinged for each outbound email.

We need to send both transnational and email campaigns.

Good service and capability to reach a large number of contacts

Other providers have competitive services

Marketing email can be sent in bulk to reach thousands of customers.

Nothing. Account set up, support, and service are extremely bad.

Support doesn't notify about any system issues. We had a lot of emails not sent for the two days, and we should track it manually. This issue happens four times for three months. There is no status page to track system availability and issues. The filters by date don't work from time to time.

We have a horrible email service. We will change it in three months.

It was easy to setup a campaign and add/edit email templates.

Vague price information. It says 150000 emails are free (per month). I've added 100000 for a campaign but have to pay $0.09/1000 emails, no matter they should be free. Also, it's unclear should I pay and how much exactly the fee for "Contact delivery and optimization tools". By default they are pre-selected so it's unclear after all. After ~10k sent emails my account was blocked due to low open rate...I didn't know you are obligated to have a specific open rate. Sometimes people from the list simply are not interested in the topic/mail subject. How am I supposed to be punished for that?!

I want to send emails to my newsletter subscribers. The cheap price lures me, but after all, it turns out you get what you pay for...

We've been using elastic for transactional emails for the last five years. The system works fine and was easy to integrate with our back-end software. We've sent hundreds of thousands of emails through their service in that time.

Our account was suspended recently and elastic doesn't even send us a notification that that is happening. There is no communication from them about the fact that our email has stopped sending. Critical issues like this should be handled proactively. Rathe than being able to address an issue when it happens I'm instead left to put out a fire when we get complaints from our users.

We were using them to help ensure deliverability of transactional emails.

Allows high volume sending at low cost per email

Massive number of bounces and mail tagged as spam even when sending to a highly scrubbed list of colleagues.

None due to the high bounce/spam tag rate

They had a good support. Very easy to set SPF and DKIM. Has a good monitoring/log system. I having no problem with their admin interface.

No warning when your credit is low that impacting the service. The client still able to send email without error/warning in their Mail Transfer Agent, but the emails going nowhere. No warning (to admin) when (one or more) clients blocked/disabled. The policy that impacting service implemented without announcement. However, I believe they will grow with their innovative product.

I use 3rd party SMTP for transaction. Providing a sophisticated server for sending emails.

Their web interface is nice and simple to use. Very intuitive.

Theirsupport is bad to the best. They are only reading the subject and then reply with a can reply - even if your initial support ticket contained all the info requested. They are also having a not so good delivery. Regardless if they are saying that they do monitor their sending IPs against RBL, that is a big fat lie.

It was suppose to be a great mandril replacement. It turns out to be a nightmare. Bottom line, no benefits at all - only wasted hours and money.