Mailgun

Mailgun — Long-running transactional API with strong routing and inbound handling. Mailgun was the developer-first option before that phrase existed, and its inbound Routes remain among the best implementations of receiving mail as a webhook. Now part of Sinch, it sits alongside Mailjet for marketing and the wider Sinch messaging stack. Log retention on the cheapest tier is short enough to matter, and the deliverability add-ons — validation, optimisation, dedicated IPs — are where the pricing actually lands. Built by Sinch. Founded 2010. Subsidiary (Sinch, acquired 2021) raised.

We track it in 1 comparison — Email APIs — so every claim below is a cell in a table you can open and check rather than an impression. Across those rosters it sits against 12 other tools, and what follows is where it visibly separates from them.

Where it wins.

• Time to first send — 30 min, 4th of 13.
• Event webhooks — delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, complained, deferred, unsubscribed, inbound, tied for best across 5 of 13 tools.

Each of those is ranked against the whole roster on its category page, not against a hand-picked subset, so a first place here means first of everything we list.

Where it gives ground.

• Log retention — 1440 min, 8th of 9. Postmark records 64800 min.
• Dedicated IP — $59 /mo, the weakest of the 7 here. Amazon SES records $24.95 /mo.
• Price / 1k emails — $1.5 /1k, 8th of 11. Amazon SES records $0.1 /1k.

None of these disqualify it on their own. They are the fields to check against your own requirements before you commit, because they are the ones where a competitor genuinely does better.

Provenance. 23 of 25 tracked fields carry a value for Mailgun, and 3 of those cite a document you can open. Last verified 2026-05-18. Every figure keeps its own provenance — measured by us, claimed by the vendor, inferred, or community-reported — and we would rather print a dash than a guess.

Its nearest neighbour in our data is AhaSend. Mailgun is ahead on Hosted templates (visual-editor against none) and Funding (subsidiary against bootstrapped). AhaSend takes llms.txt docs (Yes against No) and GA year (2023 against 2010). That pattern repeats across the rest of the roster — see Mailgun alternatives for the other rivals, each compared the same way.

Company

Sinch

Founded

2010

Funding

Subsidiary (Sinch, acquired 2021)

Fields we track

23 of 25

Last verified

2026-05-18

Pick it for inbound. Routes and the events API remain best-in-class, and if your product receives mail as well as sending it, Mailgun does that job better than anything except Postmark. One-day log retention on the entry plan is a genuine operational problem.

Time to first send

30 min4th of 13

Community-reported

Event webhooks

deliveredopenedclickedbounced+41st of 13

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-05-18source

Log retention

1440 min8th of 9

Inferred

Dedicated IP

$59 /mo7th of 7

Inferred

Price / 1k emails

$1.5 /1k8th of 11

Inferred

IP warmup

●Yes1st of 11

Inferred

Inbound parsing

●Yes1st of 12

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-05-18source

Suppression list

●Yes1st of 13

Inferred

Mailgun is the right call in these situations, each one drawn from a field we actually record:

• Products that receive and parse inbound email.
• Complex routing, tagging and event-driven pipelines.
• Teams already inside the Sinch messaging stack.
• Time to first send is your binding constraint. Mailgun records 30 min, 4th of 13 in the Email APIs roster. We define that field as wall-clock from starting signup on a clean account to a message delivered to a Gmail inbox that is NOT a verified address on the account.
• Event webhooks is your binding constraint. Mailgun records delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, complained, deferred, unsubscribed, inbound, the best figure in the Email APIs roster. We define that field as which message events the provider will POST to your endpoint.

Reach for something else when any of the following is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have:

• Log retention. Mailgun records 1440 min, 8th of 9 in the Email APIs roster. Postmark records 64800 min on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Dedicated IP. Mailgun records $59 /mo, the weakest of the 7 tools in the Email APIs roster. Amazon SES records $24.95 /mo on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Price / 1k emails. Mailgun records $1.5 /1k, 8th of 11 in the Email APIs roster. Amazon SES records $0.1 /1k on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.

We publish this block because a comparison that only lists what a tool is good at is marketing. Every figure above sits on the same page as its source, and the field definitions are on the category tables if you want to check how we measured them.

What we don't know. 2 of the 25 fields we track for Mailgun are still blank: Throughput ceiling and MCP server. Those render as dashes rather than as zeroes or assumptions, because an empty cell and a bad cell are not the same thing and only one of them is honest. If you know any of these figures and can point at a document, tell us.