Mailgun just got better for client management

Here at Mailgun, our main focus is making an Email Sending Platform (ESP) that is scalable and highly integrable so our customers can start sending email as quickly as possible. While we make it easy to get new projects started, managing a large number of client domains can quickly become challenging on any ESP. After speaking directly with some of our highest-volume customers, we’ve come up with a couple of solutions for better client management.

We are pleased to announce two new features that will help manage a large number of clients: IP Pools and Domain Sending Keys. These two features ultimately help you better manage the sending reputation and the security of your clients’ IPs, resulting in happy and loyal clients. 

Due to its flexibility and ease of use, Mailgun is a popular choice for companies and agencies looking to manage email sending for a large portfolio of client accounts. With Mailgun’s IP Pools, users can group dedicated IP addresses together and assign the group a name and a description.

This sounds simple, but it actually unlocks a huge amount of flexibility. Let’s talk about a couple of use cases that IP Pools lend themselves to:

• Reputation management: For larger senders who are managing multiple IP addresses, IP Pools allow you to create a pool for your different sending streams. A good example of this would be marketing vs transactional. As a best practice, we always recommend separating out your marketing and transactional sends on different domains or subdomains, as well as IPs. Now you can group all of the dedicated IPs used for transactional messages into one pool and your marketing IPs into another pool, and simply assign each pool to your sending domains.
• Organizing senders: Occasionally, clients might request or purchase a single dedicated IP for themselves. With IP Pools, you can now assign a name and description to the pools, so everyone knows that pool belongs to that client.
• Manage clients with disparate sending reputations: When onboarding new clients, it’s tough to get insight into those clients’ sending history and reputation. You wouldn’t want a client with a potentially harmful sending reputation to negatively impact your good senders. With IP Pools, you can set up separate IP pools for new senders, high reputation senders, and low reputation senders. As you’re monitoring new senders and see that they’re using good sending practices, you may decide to assign your high reputation senders’ IP Pool to that client. Conversely, if you see a negative trend for a new sender, you might want to assign a low reputation IP Pool to that sender.

More control over IPs means you can more easily control your sending reputation. Keeping things in the green means happier clients and less support tickets for your team. IP Pools are a win all around! 🏆

The #1 most requested product feature from our customers was to support API keys specific to domains. Those who manage multiple senders and want to allow those clients the ability to send messages via Mailgun using our API do not feel comfortable having one API key for the entire account.

Similar to how our SMTP credentials work, Domain Sending Keys will allow you to create multiple API keys per domain that will allow a sender to send messages via our /messages or /messages.mime endpoints. These keys are limited to sending messages only, and cannot make any changes or access any information from our API.

This has a couple of handy use cases:

• Users can hand out API sending credentials to their clients without worry of handing over the keys to the kingdom. 
• Users can have unique API keys for multiple application integrations, so that if one application is compromised (which never happens, right?!), they don’t have to worry about having the same key on other applications.
• In case of a security issue, users can rotate sending API keys without rotating the account API key.

The Domain Sending Keys feature allows you to empower your clients to send email on their own, while giving you peace of mind that your account is not at risk. If the worst should occur and a key is compromised, Domain Sending Keys mitigate the risk to just one client, as opposed to your entire customer base. 

So there you have it—two new customer-inspired features that make it easier to manage a large number of clients. We are so thankful to have loyal customers who will give us meaningful feedback so we can continue to improve our platform. 

How can you take advantage of these new features? IP Pools is available to all senders on our Scale and Enterprise plans. Domain Sending Keys is available on all of our paid plans. Log into the Mailgun dashboard or sign up for free and check them out today!

Author: Chris Farmer Chris Farmer is a Product Manager at Sinch Mailgun. He's an expert feature mapper, dev communicator, and email officianado who tells it like it is. He writes about product developments, and innovative email tips and tricks.