Status update: Bubble app emailing via free/shared Sendgrid down

Okay, then don’t use it… this is a limitation of how email infrastructure works, not Bubble. If you use a shared server, no matter the platform, deliverability will always be lower and reliability worse.

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I completely agree. This is shameful on the part of Bubble. Instead of taking responsibility for their previous communications/promotional material, they’re seemingly attempting to recast this almost as “a favour”.

Bubble … take responsibility for this … be much more active in informing your subscribers, who are paying your wages, of exactly what you are doing to fix this … so that we can better see what level of responsibility you are taking for this … rather than relying on our patience.

Stop taking us, our money, and our loyalty, for granted.

I’m always the first to criticise Bubble when they’re :poop: and praise them when they’re not. You guys are way off the mark here :rofl:

  1. It’s not Bubble’s fault, it’s their external email provider that terminated their access without notice.
  2. Email services are notoriously opaque so you can’t predict this kind of thing.
  3. There is a dead simple 15 minute solution by adding your own API key, as is EXPLICITLY stated should be used for live apps.
  4. If you get denied by your own SendGrid account, then use another email provider.

Here’s what they’re doing to fix it… ball is in Sendgrid’s court…

Sorry, but if you’re using Bubble native shared email for live apps, that’s on you :man_shrugging:

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Please read my feedback again. I am very aware of the situation here, and Bubble’s reliance on Sendgrid’s inrastucture, etc., and how subscribers can implement their own solutions. None of that is my point.

In essence, my point is about Bubble’s responsibility, or rather lack of it, in keeping us informed of what they are doing to solve this problem and their seeming lack of doing anything about it.

Their feedback, that you reposted in reply to my comment, is from FIVE DAYS ago – not exactly keeping our fingers on the pulse.

As for your addition “Here’s what they’re doing to fix it… ball is in Sendgrid’s court…”, well that’s simply not enough action on Bubble’s part to find a solution for Bubble’s subscribers.

Passing the buck of responsibility to one of their own service providers, whose service they have promoted as part of their package to entice potential customers into committing to their platform, is simply irresponsible and definitely not good enough.

The buck stops with Bubble. They shouldn’t be shirking responsibility in terms of ACTING to get this solved and COMMUNICATING to keep us informed of how and what they are doing about this.

And frankly, your justifying their lack of responsibility isn’t helping get them to step up and actually take more responsibility.

If you’d read anything I’ve posted on this forum, you’d know how silly this sounds given that I’m one of the most outspoken people here who push Bubble to take responsibility for getting things into shape.

What do you want them to do? Send more emails that fall at the back of SendGrid’s support queue? Build a new email integration by which time the issue has been fixed?

Bubble’s clear in their manual that they maintain the shared email service for testing in development mode and that live apps should use their own API key. Yeah, it’s a pain for it to be disabled for a bit, but you can hardly act shocked. Whenever a company says ‘don’t use this in production’, you really should listen because there’s a reason for that…

We posted this announcement topic, I posted updates as I got them from the team (including a follow up on Saturday when SendGrid told us they had unblocked our account)

Not true

There was honestly nothing more we could do but wait for SendGrid to reply to our emails. The team is looking at ways to set up an account manager with them, or some other form of more direct comms so we can raise issues faster to them in the future

Totally fair! The team was also pretty frustrated with the situation as you can imagine. We aren’t planning on making this feature go away, and the team will look at ways to make this better

All, given the report above from users saying they are still having issues with sending emails via the built-in SendGrid API key, I’m going to raise this to the team.

Thank you for flagging!

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Outspoken on this forum or not, George, or no matter how silly this seems to you, you’re not helping here by continuing to justify Bubble’s display of irresponsibility and seeming lack of action.

What do I want them to do … I want them to be more active in finding a solution for their subscribers rather than excusing themselves by passing the responsibility on to one of their service providers. It’s up to Bubble to be the problem solver here, for their subscribers. Sendgrid do not have a responsibilty directly to us, but Bubble do.

And it’s not inherently the responsibility of subscribers to solve the problems of other subscribers – this is not an open-source platform – it’s Bubble’s.

So again, George, I am sure your intentions are good, but please stop justifying Bubble’s lack of responsibility and action here – it’s really not helping.

It is hard to imagine disagreeing with facts, but okay

Not forced, just advised to do so if you want a higher chance of emails delivered properly. Plus, Sendgrid has a FREE account that allows up to 100 emails per day, which is an account type Sendgrid created for developers to use in development or when market testing their MVP.

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UPDATE (MONDAY JUN 3)

Unfortunately we got an email at some point yesterday (Sunday) from SendGrid saying our account was again suspended (24h after reinstating it).

I’ll keep everyone as updated as news come across, but for now it’s back to square one on this: you’ll need to set your own API key to reliability send out emails.

Sorry all for the trouble :frowning_face:

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I’d be interested in hearing the communiques you will be drafting for your users when Bubble has an outage.

Bottom line here is this, all expert developers that have been active in this thread have continued to point out to the less experienced developers in the thread that there is absolutely nothing wrong with what Bubble has put together, which is simply a preconfigured API call to Sendgrid, and that the ways to solve the issue for ourselves is straightforward, short duration, no technical knowledge really required and FREE.

Bubble putting together a send email workflow action (preconfigured API call) is a very small part of what the platform provides and the fact that the service provider they chose for that provides a poor service is not Bubbles’ fault. What long time users were calling for 5+ years ago was for them to offer other service providers in the send email workflow action, and that yes, does fall at Bubbles’ feet for not listening to the community on that topic. It is because of that, the community does what it does, which is when Bubbles built in features fall short of providing all of our needs, the community will put something together to resolve for that. In this case, that was lots of plugins for other email providers, like Postmark.

I would say @georgecollier has just been trying to help people with less experience to understand the situation better so they could be armed with the simple information needed to resolve the issue for themselves. Other users have already posted tip posts and posts in this thread to provide the simple guidance needed for developers to take responsibility themselves to resolve for the inconvenience, and in fact, make it so they have a better setup anyway since it has always been the solid advice to put your own API keys into your app settings.

It is disappointing to find out that we do have personal responsibilities as developers and that not everything will be simple in app development, but that is just a great lesson to learn and bring forward into the experience of attempting to launch and run a successful business built on Bubble.

Oh, and one more point of disappointment, Sendgrid doesn’t allow you send Marketing emails without a marketing email account, only transactional emails, so if you are sending marketing emails with the send email workflow action, and you start to get blocked from every email client, there is nothing anybody except the developer/app owner can do to remedy that situation.

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I have my own api key and I still can’t send emails reliably…

Yep, you have elaborated nicely on the point of my last three communications. I am active professionally, and have been for many years, in numerous commercially based and/or open-source based development enterprises and from that experience, and what I see in this commendable community, I believe we need to be more firm with Bubble and their acting on this, rather than justifying their past and current lack of action/responsibility (some of which you have noted in your response). Bubble’s community is extremely supportive and, in my opinion, perhaps has done and is doing so much that, instead of encouraging Bubble to take more responsibility/action, it is in fact fostering a scenario where Bubble feels it can/will get away with doing less.

It is just me or others cannot register to SendGrid either? I have tried with 2 different email account and both time I got the same email:
image

It is difficult to implement the 15 minutes solution this way and utilize the 100 emails per day for FREE.

I hope Bubble.io and SendGrid can solve it ASAP.

Email has changed MASSIVELY over the last 4 months. Regardless of why bubble is down they are still tied to sendgrid. They are both impacted by those changes heavily. Being said bubble devs have the ability to use ANY provider they want with their own servers and all. It’s nothing more than a 1-4 hr setup depending on your skill level in most cases. If you choose not to that’s on you.

It’ll be far easier for you to implement your own service and manage it than complain about using a shared server from sendgrid :sweat_smile:

I’ve swapped people over in as little as 30 minutes and they’ve not had the issue. Anyone complaining about it rather than taking action is only hurting themselves.

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I’ll ask around :+1:

The right thing to do is to take personal responsibility/action and to ALSO complain about it, in order to try and encourage Bubble to increase their responsibility/action on this, which seems to be sadly lacking. :slight_smile:

I have not had a need to create a sendgrid account since the issue with Bubble has started, so my assumption is that the reason they are sending an automatic reply with not allowing you to create the account, is tied to your domain being a Bubble domain or they may be able to see it is Bubble built.

I’d venture to guess a follow up to Sendgrid support to find out why they are not able to proceed with signup will shed more light onto why you were not allowed to create an account.

If you’ve seen my past posts I’m pretty outspoken on bubble about taking accountability and the direction they are going on multiple fronts. I’m not a very happy customer of theirs through the past year to say the least.

However, we can’t hold them responsible for this. The issue isn’t in their hands…since Feb when Google/yahoo changed requirements I’ve seen multiple very large emailing outreach softwares shut down including a good friend of mine who was doing $9m/year.

Google now only allows for a 0.3% spam rate or 3 per 1000 emails sent. If you surpass that you will stop delivering completely or start hitting spam consistently. This is on both a domain and IP level.

Being said email providers like sendgrid/mailgun/postmark etc have had to get 100x more strict in order to protect their companies. Shared servers have been getting shut down, dedicated IPs have became almost mandatory, etc. when shut down they are fully reliant on sendgrid manual review process and time is not on their side in these situations.

Bubble even still offering a free shared server is of great risk & complication to them with how email services are heading. One bad actor coming in spamming can ruin the entire shared server & IP in a few hours time.

I can understand peoples frustration and unless you’re familiar with the email marketing space you wouldn’t even know all of this is happening.

The space is changing a lot, stripe is another hot spot right now, they’ve just updated their restricted business list and it consists of most online businesses.

The best option for both bubble and its users right now on the email side is to start setting up your own sendgrid/mailgun/postmark servers meeting all of googles best standards.

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