We've switched our default email sending provider from Postmark to Amazon SES.

Starting 14th April 2025, we won't be sending any more emails via our Postmark account. Instead, emails will be delivered via OnVoard's Amazon SES account.‍

If you are sending emails with OnVoard via your own domain, you will need to re-verify your domains with new dns records as we've switched from Postmark to Amazon SES.

Please refer to the guides below to setup a new SMTP profile for Amazon SES and verify new dns records.

The whole setup can be done within 15 minutes. If you need assistance, please contact us at support@onvoard.com and we'll be happy to assist.

SPF and DMARC Requirements

On top of that, we now also require senders to setup spf and dmarc records for dns before you can send emails via your own domain. This is part of your dns setup mentioned above.

This was initially optionally but I've decided that we need to make it mandatory since ESPs like gmail, hotmail, and yahoo now have stricter requirements for deliverability.

‍

Why we had to switch from Postmark to Amazon SES?

After Postmark got acquired by ActiveCampaign, they choose to heavily increase price on existing customers. The new pricing would costs us almost 2X more to send additional emails. For us, the new pricing would meant a net loss for us unless we increase price on our existing customers.

And unlike those folks at Postmark, I know how it feels like to run a small business. I know how every price hike would impact my customers. I know my customers would prefer us switching to another provider rather than increase price.

That's why even when everyone raised their price over the past few years, I've always kept the same prices for existing customers, for almost 5 years.

I want to be transparent with everyone. I have tried everything I could to persuade Postmark to maintain a workable price for us, even to the extend of reaching out to the founders. But unfortunately they don't care about old customers who've recommended and brought them business throughout the years. Plus the fact that existing customers won't cost them anything to acquire on top of our word of mouth recommendations throughout the years, it's really a bad move from them.

Below are screenshots of my attempts.

I dropped them a message to explain our situation

‍

Advocate gave a good response but unfortunately, it's ActiveCampaign management who will make final decision

‍

I responded further to highlight the importance of treating existing customers fair

‍

In the end, they were adamant on keeping the price hike. That's when I decided to move.

‍

I even emailed the founders of Postmark because as a founder, I know I will care if all the goodwill I've built up collapses.


Eventually, Postmark wanted to keep the price hike for us, and it won't work unless we raise price to our customers. I eventually decided to spent 1 month to switch our whole email infrastructure from Postmark to Amazon SES. I won't be renewing our plans with Postmark after April 2025.

I want to also mention that so far in terms of deliverability we are very happy with Amazon SES. The biggest hurdle with Amazon SES is that setting up can be quite complex but I managed to get everything setup and migrated. We have also setup our own dedicated IP to deliver OnVoard emails. Now even our own transactional emails are delivered via Amazon SES.

In the future, I will also add support allowing our customers to connect and use their own Amazon SES account for sending.