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Starting on 2020-08-17, Sendgrid IP addresses were listed on Spamhaus for sending phishing emails. Shown here:

This has dropped our email delivery to about 50%, as opposed to the usual 99%.

Is there anything I can do to resolve this, besides sending support tickets to Sendgrid or switching email providers?

Wouter Florijn
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    Same here. What's going on with Sendgrid? – Tim Murphree Sep 04 '20 at 00:23
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    @TimMurphree I've jumped ship to Mailgun. Sendgrid is having major issues and won't respond to support tickets about them. Not a good sign. – Wouter Florijn Sep 04 '20 at 08:35
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    We are also getting tired of Sendgrid... We are on a paid plan since 2017, we have 99% reputation (and 0 spam reports) and still our important emails are not delivered. Many Sendgrid IPs are getting blocked (e.g. by Spamhaus, Hotmail, Outlook, Yandex). Their support is totally useless and only gives canned replies. – collimarco Sep 11 '20 at 12:12
  • @WouterFlorijn I think we will have to move to Mailgun as the issue Sendgrid seems to be never fixed before a long time (almost 2 weeks and no improvement). Have you been able to do the transition to Mailgun easily ? Missing some features ? – blackarcanis Sep 18 '20 at 15:43
  • @blackarcanis yes fairly easily. Although using Laravel, which has a Mailgun integration out of the box, did help. We also only use it for transactional emails, so no entire campaigns to be migrated etc. – Wouter Florijn Sep 20 '20 at 12:20

5 Answers5

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To summarize, these are the options I could come up with:

  1. Attempt to get the issues resolved through support. We've tried this, but they were very slow to respond, or responded with irrelevant/false information (e.g. claiming that they had gotten an IP address removed from Spamhaus, while they hadn't).
  2. Get dedicated IP addresses. This would likely prevent blocks, as you have control over all emails sent, but does cost extra.
  3. Switch to a different email provider.

I went with option 3 and switched to Mailgun, which was quite easy to set up and works very well so far. Of course, no provider is perfect, so if you want more peace of mind, go with option 2.

Wouter Florijn
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I find it a huge shame Twilio and SendGrid have not been more transparent with this whole affair. They have a fantastic product.

For anyone not on the Pro plan (starts from $89.95/month) that allows dedicated IP addresses, so I suspect the vast majority of their customers, it has rendered SendGrid un-usable. Yet nothing on their status page or incident history page and as far as I can tell no public message about it. It seems the blacklisting happened around mid August and we're now in October.

I have contacted support and got a couple of replies

Thank you for contacting support. We want to assure you that we're working closely with Spamhaus to resolve the addresses listed on their site and lift any blocks. We're making progress and communicating with Spamhaus on daily basis. There's a good chance that this blocklisting may already have been resolved.

This is the nature of shared IP pools unfortunately.

This was a couple of weeks ago. I doubt Spamhaus will delist IP addresses without assurances it won't happen again. Perhaps they need to see MFA implemented for example. Who knows!

Again, it's a shame, the answer seems to be to migrate away from SendGrid. This seems like a pretty comprehensive list of alternatives to weigh up based on your own use case.

Simon Ness
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    I got exactly the same answers today! – rGiosa Oct 01 '20 at 14:00
  • Looks like it's solved – andrea.spot. Oct 13 '20 at 10:06
  • Spamhaus lists 70 SendGrid IP addresses at the moment: https://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings/sendgrid.com – Simon Ness Oct 15 '20 at 20:33
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    It's November and I'm getting the exact same canned response. In addition Sendgrid now writes: _We appreciate how this could be frustrating but please know that Spamhaus will only communicate with our internal Twilio SendGrid teams regarding delisting._ – Alex Suzuki Nov 02 '20 at 13:44
  • Ok, now I got the line _This is the nature of shared IP pools unfortunately_ as well, along with a hint that domain authentication can improve deliverability. I already have this configured, thank you so much. I'm moving to Mailgun. – Alex Suzuki Nov 02 '20 at 15:14
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I had to abandon the use of Sendgrid, cannot find any way to resolve this matter. My configuration is blocked by: https://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/query/SBL494715

Michael Olsson
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https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/08/sendgrid-under-siege-from-hacked-accounts/

It seems that SendGrid is having problems with hacked accounts sending spam mails.

Simon Christiansen
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I have experienced the exact same thing with SendGrid. we have been a paying customer of SendGrid for 5 years now and we use it for all of our transactional emails - about 50k per month.

The majority of our mail is being marked as deferred or blocked due to the listing on Spamhaus. I opened a support ticket 5 days ago but the issue still persists.

The final nail in the coffin was when the SendGrid support agent told me that because my account was set up through Azure I needed to contact Azure support and not them!

I looked at various options including upgrading the account and having a dedicated IP address with Sendgrid. The downside of this is that you need to "warm up" the IP address and sending all our mail through would probably cause its own deliverability issues.

In the end, I opted for AWS Simple Email Service. The logging out of the box isn't as nice as Sendgrid but it's definitely one of the most cost-effective options.

Definitely won't be trusting SendGrid with our transactional email again!

JdeC
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