
Show HN: SESS – Simple Email Sending Service - jath
https://sess.email/
======
a13n
Amazon's email service is called SES, simple email service. Since these names
are quite similar and could cause confusion, you are probably infringing on
their trademark.

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finaliteration
At first glance I thought this post was going to be an SES feature or
something. So...

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sloka
Looking this up on mobile. I hope you're considering making it more mobile
friendly. But then I'm not sure how many would prefer composing newsletters on
mobile. Good luck though.

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CodeWriter23
Composing on email might be a thing. But for me, I can’t even view pricing or
terms on my iPhone 8 Plus.

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insomniacity
My only concern with trying this as someone just starting out with email
marketing is that I don't know my SBUR rate... in fact I would assume that the
first ever email to a new population (even if legitimate) is bound to have a
far higher rate given errors in data collection (say collected on paper,
leading to bad email addresses and bounces) and keen unsubscribers.

Then I'm successfully banned and have to go to another platform with my
slightly cleaner email list!

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sessy
Let me rephrase your query. If you send 2 emails and 1 bounces, then your SBUR
would be 50% and so will you be banned?

NO.

We predicted this would happen. The SBUR doesn't kick in for the first few
thousand mails. Over time your list gets cleaner (because we keep track of
bounces, unsubscribes and dont send them emails from next time on.)

(I'm one of the engineers who developed SESS.)

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massaman_yams
Dirty spammer hack: include 50% of recipients as addresses you control, and
that won't ever bounce, complain, or unsubscribe. That pushes SBUR down,
likely below threshold.

These are often addresses created manually by 'click farmers' so they don't
have obvious patterns which could enable an email service provider to identify
them. (I'm still working on figuring out ways to detect this...)

Or, send spam to a new address via another service, then only use SESS to send
to the ones who had opened or clicked on the other service. This is known as
'waterfalling'. Using this method, bounce rates can approach zero, and
complaints/unsubscribes are likely to stay below 1% each - but make no
mistake, ISPs can and will often still detect the email as spam.

You will need more complex ways to detect approaches like these, as well as
other forms of spam/abuse. I would suggest starting with looking at thresholds
for bounces, unsubscribes, and complaints independently - sometimes complaint
rates of 0.1% can be a strong indicator of spam.

Related - don't limit your contractually-defined recourse to just SBUR rates.
I would recommend including terms that allow you to ban or suspend users for
any form of spam or abusive activity, "in the sole judgement of SESS.EMAIL" or
similar. (I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.)

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sessy
Hey, thanks for the points. Will be sure to factor these in.

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conquistadog
What constitutes a "valid business email", exactly? I entered one, clicked
"verify", and was warned to "enter a valid business email." I assure you, I
did. What's the trouble?

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sessy
A valid business email is one where you should be able to receive and send
mails. If you have a 'catch all' email id, the system does not accept that.

Having said that i must say our algorithm is deliberately a bit aggressive (so
as to prevent spam).

Your email could very well be a false positive. Could you write to
support@sess.email from the business email in question. I'll be happy to look
into it and whitelist it.

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conquistadog
What technical means do you use to detect a catch-all address? I know of no
reliable method for that purpose, since receiving server cooperation would be
required and could not be trusted.

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massaman_yams
This won't detect a catch-all address, but will almost always detect a catch-
all domain: send email to [long random string]@domain. Does it bounce or is it
accepted?

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conquistadog
How does the existence of a catch-all, of any kind, make it not a "valid
business domain?"

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massaman_yams
I'm not commenting on whether it's a good heuristic or not. Just a possible
approach.

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cmjqol
I don't get what problem is this solving compared to :

AWS SES , SendGrid , JetMail etc... and the hundreds of others provider in
this domain.

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FfejL
Looks great, but email composition is only half the battle.

The page is silent on what, if anything, is being done to help deliverability.
Does the site have any kind of relationship with the big ESPs? How 'clean' are
the IPs right now? What, if any, mitigation is in place for the sending IPs
inevitable reputation degredation? Or is a EDS being used to actually send the
emails?

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sessy
SESS is tightly wired to use SES (AWS). We do a bunch of algorithmic checks to
validate email/domain validity plus assessing the risk-factor of uploaded
email list. If you have a clean list deliverability is closer to 100%.

Edit: Thanks for the note. I will make a mention of the deliverability on the
site.

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pwaai
nice, I'm working on something similar with something like this:

    
    
       <script src="//email.js.fo">
    

and then you can design your own forms and add email functionality, basically
a backend as a service.

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mahesh_rm
I get a: 'e {code: "app/duplicate-app", message: "Firebase: Firebase App named
'[DEFAULT]' already exists (app/duplicate-app)."' in console when trying to
verify my email.

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sessy
Could you write to support@sess.email with a screenshot. Im curious to look
into whats happening here. Thanks.

~~~
mahesh_rm
done!

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samdung
How are you validating business emails? I see you don't allow a lot of those
disposable emails. Thats a good thing. Take care of the spammers before they
drag you down.

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mito2
Neat app. i kind of like the simplicity. I would suggest there better be a
nice reason for not having the login. Having to verify email every time could
be a pain.

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patan2
I’d like to use this but i see i have to manage my email list on my own.
Probably could do it in Google sheets as suggested but its a small hassle to
overcome.

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nik736
I think this is a nightmare, even sending 1000 spam mails multiple times can
ruin whole IPv4 prefixes. How do you deal with that?

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sessy
Hi, im one of the engineers that built SESS.

We knew we could become a potential spam magnet. Like ive been mentioning in
other comments here, we have an algorithm that does checks at multiple levels
before a campaign is sent. If the algorithm deems the list as risky it
triggers an automatic payment refund. The algorithm is also self learning.
Over time its designed to assess the risk-function of an email list. (I'm from
a data science background and SESS is a side project which uses learnings we
get from elsewhere).

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ttul
This is going to become a spamming service in 3.. 2..

How will you be dealing with that inevitable problem?

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sincerely
From the about page:

>You are not allowed to send unsolicited emails. If your SBUR (Spam + Bounce +
Unsubscribe + Reject) rate is >=5% you are automatically banned without any
prior intimation.

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mockingbirdy
They will need to add machine learning based classification of mails _before_
sending them. Spammers will just create the next account until they get
detected again. Their servers will be faster on a blacklist than they can
spell Spamhaus.

I recommend ULMFiT [1].

[1]: [http://nlp.fast.ai/classification/2018/05/15/introducting-
ul...](http://nlp.fast.ai/classification/2018/05/15/introducting-ulmfit.html)

~~~
sessy
Like i mentioned in an earlier comment, we have a nifty little program that
checks both the validity of the business email as well as the domain. Then a
sampling of the list is done to weed out troublemakers. We do a little bit
more. Unfortunately i can't get into specifics here :)

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mockingbirdy
Ok, nice to hear that. It seems that you've put some thoughts in it. Mail is
very easy to mess up, so I wish you all good luck!

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sessy
Hi, i'm one of the engineers that made SESS.EMAIL as a side project. AMA.

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chrisper
Is the website not mobile friendly? It acts really wonky on my side. Firefox
Beta on Android.

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sessy
I must agree that we have not given particular thought to making this work on
mobile. We made the assumption that people composing newsletters would mostly
be working on desktops than on mobiles.

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greglindahl
That's probably true for actual customers using the service, but when people
discover your site, they're more likely to be on mobile. You can have a
different landing page for mobile that focuses on the "about" without having
the huge composer page.

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floatingatoll
I was unable to read the terms of service on mobile.

