
Sendy - Send Newsletters via Amazon SES - dwynings
http://sendy.co/
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fomojola
A small point, but your API doesn't appear to use any kind of
authentication/authorization:

$handle = fopen("$sendy_url/subscribe/$sendy_email/$sendy_list/".str_replace('
', '%20', $sendy_name).'/true', "r");`).

In theory, anyone who knows you are using Sendy (I'll assume looking at the
headers in the emails sent would reveal that) could subscribe/unsubscribe any
email address and possibly wreak havoc. You should secure that somehow: either
an authorization scheme or a secret or SOMETHING.

~~~
wildmXranat
If this is true, it's like a 'fun mode' for an API.

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sudonim
Other than spammers, who is concerned about sending email newsletters cheaper?
Your service looks like a great tool, but I'd encourage you to ask your early
users why they like using you. I'd guess that "It's cheaper than mailchimp"
won't be the answer you hear.

\+ You don't really want to tout yourself as the low-cost-option. You have
nowhere to go but down.

~~~
jeff18
Sending to 1,000,000 subscribers costs $55,000+ per year on MailChimp and
other premium services. A cheaper option with the same deliverability would be
extremely attractive to anyone who doesn't like setting their money on fire!

~~~
bherms
Exactly this... People seem to jump on the bandwagon of SaaS services and
don't really realize that, as a business, you should be trying to minimize
expenses and maximize profit. Granted there is flexibility here in the
products you use -- ie, the feature/cost tradeoff needs to make sense, but the
fact remains, every $1 of money the company saves helps the company last
longer, increases its chance at a future, and benefits both the employees and
investors (if there are any). People seem to get sidetracked in our industry a
lot of times on this startup mantra that makes people feel like their company
is a failure if it doesn't buy everyone an Aeron, have a quirky office in
SOMA, and utilize all the hot startup tech services that exist.

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sudonim
Your biggest expense as a company is employees. Every purchasing decision that
won't keep you alive for another month is a decision that isn't worth thinking
about.

"I could switch from A to B and save $100 a month". Each human being in your
startup costs $5000 - $10,000 a month in salary excl. benefits. Saving $150 a
month on mailchimp is chump change.

~~~
bherms
Definitely true... I was speaking to the example of spending $50k/yr on
mailchimp with 1,000,000 subscribers. If you're only dropping $150, then it's
not as big of a deal.

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duck
_Disclaimer: I use MailChimp for Hacker Newsletter and Wayback Letter_

I guess it depends what type of newsletter you're sending out, but pricing is
hardly the reason I would pick one solution over another when it comes to
sending out emails. The features and deliverability that someone like
MailChimp provides is really invaluable if your newsletter is an important
part of your business.

That being said, I always like the idea of a self-hosted solution as an option
in any segment and I'm sure there is a market for something exactly like this.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
Mailchimp gets brutally expensive at the higher tiers, especially if you have
a large list but only send 1 or 2 newsletters a month.

We switched to sendgrid for our newsletters even though their interface is not
as nice. Their pay-per-delivery pricing fit our model much better than the
pay-per-subscriber.

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cmer
This looks great!

If I buy it, are updates included? Do you have a demo we can play with? Can we
send multipart emails?

Thanks!

~~~
sendy
Yes updates are included until the next major version, just like desktop apps.
And yes you can send multipart emails. :)

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hurrycane
Did you know that Amazon SES is built in Romania ? <http://romania.amazon.com>

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hurrycane
Also on the same street a division of SendGrid works too. Iasi, Romania a
little Silicon Valley :)

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chadyj
As the founder of a new email company, actually sending emails is the baseline
and assumed part of any ESP service. Whilst deliverability is absolutely
important it is assumed that a professional service has this covered.

The real value I have seen is in managing the world beyond deliverability,
especially in composition and content creation, design, subscriber management,
better workflows for editors/developers/designs, innovative data-friendly
tools, and above all features that drive metrics.

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sawyer
How is Mailchimp $200 / 10,000 emails? With their monthly plans you send
unlimited (to a limited number of people in your list).

~~~
eli
True, using the pay as you go price is slightly bogus because I'm sure most
people sending newsletters would be better off with a monthly plan. But it
depends on how frequently you send messages, I guess. The monthly price is
still $75/mo (and at 10,001 addresses it's $150/mo).

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evanwalsh
Why should I use this over Mandrill? <http://mandrill.com/>

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Kudos
Mandrill's "mostly RESTful" API isn't remotely RESTful and only knows the POST
HTTP verb.

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nodesocket
Wow, Mandrill is significantly cheaper than postmarkapp who we use now.
Anybody using Mandrill in production?

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argarg
Going to use it to send a couple of thousand of emails with attachments like,
tomorrow. Up to now it works great in my tests.

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jicktroyat
This is an awesome idea.

I might be wrong but I thought Amazon SES was meant for transactional emails
only. I browsed their FAQ and they never talk about email marketing. I don't
think they will let you send multiple campaigns with an audience of more than
100.000 contacts.

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ceejayoz
<http://aws.amazon.com/ses/>

> Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-
> effective _bulk_ and transactional email-sending service for businesses and
> developers.

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nhebb
I noticed a reference to .htaccess in the Get Stared Guide. Can this be
configured to run on nginx?

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ceejayoz
I can't speak for the app, but I've yet to discover a .htaccess config that
couldn't be converted to nginx.

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nhebb
Other than rewrite rules, I don't have any experience with this, so it'd be
nice to know what's in the .htaccess before buying.

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sendy
The .htaccess contains rewrite rules for pretty urls.

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magic5227
Would be nice to get a sense of how this handles large volumes. I would be
wary to try this for anything serious as it might not be set up properly for
large volumes 100k, 500k etc. Maybe speaking to this concern would help
business.

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eli
Very cool. I've been waiting for someone to add a layer on SES for sending
newsletters instead of transactional emails.

The only bummer with SES for serious newsletter folks is that you can't get a
dedicated IP address.

~~~
ceejayoz
Some argue that dedicated IPs aren't all that important:
[http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/14127210172/the-false-
promi...](http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/14127210172/the-false-promises-of-
dedicated-ips)

~~~
eli
Interesting link. I agree that perhaps the value is sometimes overstated and I
agree that we are moving towards domain-based reputation, but I've personally
been bitten by other customers getting my shared IP on a blacklist.

While it's true that ISPs and spam filters will take the reputation of
neighboring IPs into account, surely having a dedicated IP insulates you from
the actions of others better than sharing the _exact same_ address as them.

I agree with the bottom line, though: use an ESP that has a low tolerance for
shenanigans.

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ceejayoz
Presumably, systems like SES have direct lines to the major ISPs, and
religiously monitor the blacklists. I'd imagine any affected IPs get pulled
out of the pool within a minute of going on any of the major lists.

If the provider is responsive to spam, you've probably got more benefit from
their IP block being considered very safe than you'd get from a dedicated IP,
and having a dedicated IP doesn't protect you from your ISP's entire range
getting flagged if someone else in it goes on a rampage.

~~~
alexknowshtml
Disclosure: I used to work at Postmark.

ISPs are way more interested in maintaining relationships with ESPs that keep
junk from getting to them in the first place than the ones that "quickly fix
once the damage is done". It's one case where "asking for forgiveness" isn't
preferred over the more careful approach.

SES is more like outsourcing sendmail on your own server so you don't carry
the burden of maintaining/securing it, except that you don't have control over
it when something goes wrong and you have the same lack of customer support if
you don't know how to fix it. If you value your messages getting to the inbox,
it's the _least_ desirable option. For sending low-value emails, though, go
nuts!

~~~
jeffbarr
I'm not sure what this means. SES focuses on deliverability.

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sendy
Hey guys! Great to find a discussion here.

Lots of people has been requesting a demo, we'll definitely put this up.

And yes, free updates are included up to the next major version (just like
desktop apps).

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ceejayoz
I like the looks of this.

Any chance of a read-only demo to poke around in?

~~~
ljd
I second that, I like the product and would love a demo.

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chrowe
I'd like to see some actual high-volume tests done with SES, anyone got any
links to something like this? I've Googled — nothing.

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stevencorona
Very cool. Would have been supercool if it could have all been implemented in
JavaScript and hosted on S3 (with Dynamo for the list storage), though. Having
to host a server makes it less appealing for me.

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slig
Host it on phpfog.com for free. (I'm not sure if it's possible to host PHP on
heroku yet.)

~~~
fomojola
Actually, it is possible to host PHP on Heroku. For some reason, it is not
particularly well advertised (unlike the Python/Node support) but if you push
your PHP files they should do the right thing:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7947499/deploy-php-to-
her...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7947499/deploy-php-to-heroku). I
believe this is what they use for their automatic Facebook integration (see
<https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-php>).

