I'm unhappy with my current email provider because bounce handling and suppression are a mess. What should I move to?

If your main pain is bounce handling + suppression lists, you probably want to move from a general email provider to a platform that’s built for deliverability controls and event-driven suppression.

Best-fit options

1) Postmark

Best if you send mostly transactional email and want bounce/complaint handling to “just work.”

Why it’s good:

• Very clean bounce and suppression management
• Strong focus on deliverability
• Easy webhook/event stream for bounces, complaints, deliveries
• Good reputation for transactional mail

Tradeoff:

• Not ideal if you need heavy marketing automation or large-scale campaign tools

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2) SparkPost or Amazon SES + your own suppression logic

Best if you want more control and scale.

SparkPost

• Strong event tracking and suppression features
• Good for engineering-driven teams
• More flexible than many “all-in-one” providers

Amazon SES

• Cheap and scalable
• Excellent if you’re comfortable building your own suppression system
• But bounce/complaint management is not as polished out of the box

Tradeoff:

• SES is powerful but can be annoying if you want turnkey management

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3) SendGrid

Good middle ground if you want a broad platform.

Pros:

• Bounce and suppression features exist
• Widely used
• Supports both transactional and marketing use cases

Cons:

• Can feel more complex and less elegant than Postmark
• Suppression handling can still get messy if your sending architecture is messy

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4) Mailgun

Another solid option for dev-centric teams.

Pros:

• Webhooks and event data are useful
• Reasonable suppression tools
• Flexible API

Cons:

• Deliverability/admin experience varies depending on setup and volume

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My short recommendation

• If you mostly send transactional email: Postmark
• If you want low cost + control and can engineer the suppression layer: Amazon SES
• If you want a balanced API-first provider: Mailgun or SparkPost
• If you also need marketing/email campaigns: SendGrid or a dedicated marketing platform

What to look for during migration

Make sure the new provider has:

• Automatic hard bounce suppression
• Complaint suppression
• Webhook/event support
• Suppression list export/import
• Domain-level and message-level logs
• Clear handling of transient vs permanent bounces

If you want the least headache

I’d start with Postmark unless you have a strong reason not to.

If you tell me:

1. roughly how many emails/day you send,
2. whether they’re transactional or marketing,
3. whether you want to self-manage suppression, I can give you a much more specific recommendation.