This is how the sandbox domain that they provide behaves, which I assume is for anti-abuse reasons. Did you add your own domain and verify it?
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It means that I’m in a sandbox, like what Simon said.
Unless I subscribe to a certain plan, I can only send emails to several authorized addresses that I inputed manually, I’m not allowed to massively “import” addresses to get them authorized.
No, because adding a custom domain requires me to subscribe to a certain plan first, while the plans that Mailgun offers don’t suite my needs. My community is of small scale, sending in maximum 10k per month. Their plans start from 50k per month at the price of 35$ (a little expensive), and now they don’t offer a pay-as-you-go choice any more.
To be frank, I felt that the free plan Mailgun offers is just too useless for small communities. Sandbox until you pay…
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In contrast, Mailersend is much more generous. They give 12k free emails per month, also leaving me the possibility to scale up. And I’m not forced to pay to add a custom domain.
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Mailgun has a pay-as-you-go plan: 1$ / 1000 emails. A good choice for small communities.
I use it on 3 Discourse instances and never encountered any issue.
That said, if Mailersend is reliable and offers indeed 12000 emails for free without hidden fees or time limit, I suppose that could be a better solution, though the 1 domain limit may be a bit of an issue if you want to use it for multiple forums.
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Ah… is this plan called “Flex / Free”? I wonder if Mailgun treats new clients differently.
But despite this, I imagine that being in a free plan means being in a sandbox, then sending with sandbox domain must be a hard work… Can you share how you simplified the work?
Yes, indeed.
Then I’m the one who test it. I will report to you guys a few months later.
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I think this is how it works now:
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It’s possible, I don’t know. Here’s my current plan:
I did nothing particular, I also created a new Mailgun account in February with the Flex plan, and had no issue since. Adding a domain didn’t cost anything. I’m still in pay-as-you-go, 0.001$ per email.
My last invoice:
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Thank you, now I understand better the situation.
I think this is a pretty reasonable hypothesis.
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I signed up a month ago.
Mailgun has probably made some changes recently, for some reason as @Jonathan5 guessed. 
I should have discovered Mailgun earlier haha.
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Yes, you have to subscribe to a plan and provide a credit card. Their site is confusing and it looks like you’ll have to pay a bunch per month, but you don’t.
But it is confusing.
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… Really, this is really confusing. Thank you for pointing out this. I may try adding a credit card later and see what happens.
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The just time a client complained about this I opened a ticket with them and told them that it s confusing (and I think I linked to a discussion very much like this one here).
They didn’t seem to care.
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Maybe they just don’t want to waste their ressources on customers like me haha. “You don’t wanna subscribe? Then get away, I’m not going to beg for your pennies.”
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When I signed up for Mailgun, (nearly a year ago, some stuff has definitely changed in that time) they made it clear that I could not add my own domain and had to use their sandbox domain until I added a payment method.
It didn’t need to take payment and I didn’t need to select a plan that would eventually cause a payment to be taken, I just needed to add a valid payment method. At the time, the wording was clear that this was to:
a) provide some reassurance that I am a real person not trying to use their system for mass spam; and
b) provide a means of taking payment if I went over the limits
As I understand it, things have since moved around in a confusing and somewhat obscure way but it is still possible to start a trial for the paid plan, (“Foundation”?) then downgrade it to Flex / pay-as-you-go, then add a payment method to unlock own-domains for the same reasons above.
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If it has not changed since February, then you just have to start the trial which is the Flex plan. It’s just not obvious.
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Yes indeed, this is exactly how it works now. I added a credit card today (which got me out of the sandbox), and subscribed to Foundation Trial plan, then I saw the option to downgrade to Flex / Pay as You Go. They are still offering Flex choice to new customers.
Apologies to Mailgun, I’ve misunderstood you. And I’m grateful for you all helping clarify the mechanism of Mailgun. I guess this is the charm and power of communities. 
I’ve edited the first post I posted here to reflect the fruit of discussions and avoid potential misguidance.
(Mailersend’s 12,000 free emails are still attractive though
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Yeah, it’s pretty confusing. I set up a trial and was automatically upgraded to the USD 35 per month plan. I couldn’t find a way to downgrade to the Flex plan, so I decided to switch to another provider instead. But then, when I tried to cancel my Mailgun account, I was presented with this:
So maybe that’s just the way to do it. They keep the Flex option well hidden it seems.
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Hello. May I ask if its 1000 emails per month or in total?
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It’s 1000/month, but their web site makes it impossible to tell that. It looks like their cheapest plan is $35/month, but that’s not the case. I’ve complained a number of times that my clients couldn’t make sense of their site, but they don’t seem to care.
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