
MailChimp vs. Amazon SES – How I Reduced My Monthly Bill - dreamache
https://coursetro.com/posts/other/95/MailChimp-vs.-Amazon-SES---How-I-Reduced-My-Monthly-Bill-by-92%
======
47
In my experience Amazon SES is great if you only used it for transactional
emails. If you start sending marketing emails you will soon find yourself
being blocked by ISPs and email service providers. You will end up spending a
considerable amount of time getting yourself unblocked. Some service providers
will even block the domain name, so even switching the service won't help you.
Everything will go to spam from that domain name.

I have built the tech for an ecommerce startup
([https://www.article.com](https://www.article.com)) from scratch. Using
different services for transactional and marketing emails is probably one the
best decision i made early on.

Pro Tip #1:

"Use a different domain name for the from address while sending out marketing
emails"

For example if your primary domain is example.com. Use support@example.com as
your from address in transactional emails. Use support@example-mail.com as
your from address in your marketing emails. Off course forward all emails
received by support@example-mail.com to support@example.com (Why? see Pro Tip
#2).

Pro Tip #2:

"Never use fake emails like do-not-reply@example.com for the from address for
any email you sent. Yes not even for marketing emails"

You will be surprised how many time customer just reply to emails they have
received even if it is an unrelated marketing email. You will regularly see
customers receiving a monthly newsletter and they will hit reply asking "Can
you change the shipping address on my order?"

~~~
philfrasty
„Use support@example-mail.com“

Is this really beneficial? With all the domain-spoofing going on I would not
click a single link in an email from a domain I have never visited.

~~~
pilom
We do this and thank God we do. Our marketing emails get down blocked all the
time simply because of the scale (and our marketing team is a little over
zealous) but after our transactional emails got blocked for the 3rd time we
moved all marketing to another domain and gave been happy since.

------
dogas
The article is missing deliverability stats. Sure, you can reduce your bill
significantly by switching to SES, but that means nothing if all of your
emails are being sent to a user's spam box or promos folder. Mailchimp does a
lot out of the box to ensure deliverability and good email placement, and
that's part of the cost you're paying for.

~~~
bobince
Yep. My networks refuse all mail from amazonses, as it is almost entirely spam
and the abuse contact is completely unresponsive.

Mailchimp isn't spam-free but it stops the spammer hitting you straight away
and has human follow-up for problem cases. If that increases the price of
sending mail, so be it.

~~~
kennydude
Amazon’s abuse system is automatic. At work we got a warning and then disabled
after 15 minutes because people reported our emails as spam.

(Apparently notifying someone they are in debt counts as spam to some)

~~~
TallGuyShort
I'm curious - do you work for a debt collector? I ask because I've been sent
to collections multiple times over medical bills, and every single time it has
taken hours of effort to eventually reveal that all of the documentation given
to the debt collector was erroneous. Mentally, I treat it as spam because I've
learned that it's going to end up being someone else's mistake that the debt
collector didn't look at carefully.

I would love to understand better how to deal with it - and if there's a
fellow HN user who understand the debt collector business, I would like to
talk to them :)

~~~
ams6110
Always deal with debt collectors via snail mail, not phone calls or email.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Snail mail is very hard to prove that correspondence happened. State law
requires that I dispute their claims within 30 days via snail mail, which I
did. They then have to provide documentation within 30 days via snail mail,
which they didn't. They should be fined for that, but all I can prove is that
I mailed them _something_ within 30 days, and everything else is he-said-she-
said. I prefer to tell them I'm recording the phone call. Unfortunately, my
state's laws don't require they cooperate that way, and many just hang up
immediately. It does stop the harassment, though.

~~~
sethammons
The US postal service provides certified delivery. It requires a signature and
proves delivery. You show your proof, and if they can't show theirs, you win
in small claims. At least, that is the idea...

------
benmorris
This looks more like a pitch for MailWizz, but I've found that sendy works
well for me.

[http://sendy.co](http://sendy.co)

If you are comfortable setting up your own templates it does a great job
sending and handling unsubscribes/statistics. It isn't simply hooked into the
SES SMTP , it fully utilizes the AWS API. Sendy iteself has a simple api to
add users to lists and do other common things. I've used it for years.

~~~
hill_smith
+0.5 for Sendy. I've been using it for
[http://www.tittietime.com](http://www.tittietime.com) quite successfully for
2+ years now.

There have been a couple of bugs that caused me to have to dig into the source
code - which as others have stated, is a mess. Though I suspect its been
purposely obfuscated to prevent pirating.

If you ever wonder what's going on in functions.php, I've unwound it a bit -
you can see its making a phone home:

[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/cb21dfc35e1d4b74e136ebc694...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/cb21dfc35e1d4b74e136ebc694e42f10)

~~~
nkozyra
Holy God in heaven that obfuscation filled me with dread.

~~~
hill_smith
I think he must have a deployment script that generates all the database
connection calls at the top of every file when he releases a new version. No
one in their right mind would write code like that.

------
nothing-special
We send hundreds of thousands of emails every month. We're by no means a high
volume sender, but we've learned a lot dealing with a bunch of these email
providers.

Years ago we started with AWS SES. The pricing was amazing but there was no
useful customer service outlet. If you were sending via a blacklisted IP it
could be weeks before you we're seeing inboxes reliability again. It wasn't
uncommon for us to devote 20+ man hours per week in dealing with email issues
while using AWS.

Next we moved to MailGun. This was a HUGE improvement, however we were having
to request to be moved to 'non-blacklisted' ip's on a regular basis. The
pricing was great, but we were still having to invest too many hours dealing
with email problems. Mostly fielding 'here is why your emails went to the spam
filter, or why they never showed up' questions from our customers. You
shouldn't need a template explaining to your customers why emails are showing
up in spam boxes!

To be fair, MailGun was fairly new at this point but they were VERY
responsive. IP's that had been blacklisted did not stay that way for long.

Lastly we moved to PostmarkApp. They were by far the most expensive ($1.50 per
1000 emails) but I only now even think of emails maybe once or twice per
month. Emails just get through, no spam lists, no outages, no carrier blocks,
it's amazing. Also, if you do send with enough volume you can drastically
reduce the price. I believe we pay about $0.25 per thousand emails now that we
purchase 5 million at a time.

They could triple their price and I would eat the costs.

I'm not affiliated with anyone above.

~~~
porker
> We send hundreds of thousands of emails every month

With that volume, wouldn't a dedicated Mailgun IP have been worthwhile? You've
got enough mail to gain reputation on it, and the flat fee + lower per-email
charges could match or be cheaper than Postmark.

Long-time Mailgun user here, but not affiliated with anyone either.

~~~
pricechild
Amazon SES also support the dedicated ip option?

~~~
snadwich
Yes, I use dedicated IPs and get 20%-30% deliverability. Same as with
Mailchimp, except my list is over 100k

~~~
pricechild
Eesh, thanks for the data point.

------
pbreit
"The main difference between MailChimp and SES, is the fact that SES lacks
many of the features from MailChimp."

That's for sure. SES only has 1 feature in common with Mailchimp and that is
the sending of an email. Mailchimp's primary function is managing distribution
lists, email templates and receiver activity analytics.

~~~
dreamache
Author here.. yeah, that's why you have to use SES with Mailwizz, which gives
you all of those features from MC.

So, a more accurate title would have been, MailChimp vs. SES + Mailwizz. ;)

~~~
JacobJans
I use Mailwizz, and NO it does not replicate the missing featues of Mailchimp.
It may be cheap –– but you get what you pay for. It's value really depends on
your needs. It is in no way comprehensive.

------
joering2
I keep repeating this and just recently a friend sending large mailouts called
me to confirm: you do not need Sendgrid or Mailchimp or anything else! IF you
are truly not sending spam, all you need is $5/month DigitalOcean's 512MB
server with not previously blacklisted IP. That's it!

Paying for Mailchimp a small fortune is like paying for bottled water where
all you need is $15/year Brita filter and just drink tap water.

Nowadays all major email providers are really good at catching spam. If you
are NOT spamming then you are good to go; the key is to start small and grow
from there. Do not switch overnight and send 10,000 genuine emails letting
your audience know your terms of service have changed; since they don't know
your IP, they will consider spam. But if you are getting your newly subscribed
audience into getting emails (confirm double opt-in) from your new IP, it will
take you 2 months and approx +10% daily raise in sendout to get to $1MM emails
per week from your OWN IP at $5/month rate and delivery rate will be similar
to those big guys that claim they have the best delivery rate (noone can
guarantee you that)! Tested and confirmed!

~~~
sethammons
And if you end up on a blacklist, even if by mistake? And how do you monitor
your system and stats? How do you handle throttling by different MTAs? How are
you measuring opens and clicks? How are you managing unsubscribes, and soft
and hard bounces? This is not to say that all of this is not something you
can't tackle. Instead, many companies prefer to pay a small premium to not
worry about any of that and instead focus on their core business.

~~~
vortico
As someone who's just getting into setting up mail newsletters, this is the
most useful post in the thread for me, since it explains really _what_ you're
buying at MailChimp, SES, etc. I wish they would advertise this. It would be
much more straightforward to someone like me.

------
apocalyptic0n3
Only tangentially related, but I could use some help. We have a nearly 10 year
old newsletter service that was built long before I was hired. It's all self
hosted and we're getting abysmal delivery rates now (~60%...). We're only
sending about 5000 emails a week.

We want to offload, at the very least, the sending onto a third party service
where our delivery rates won't be so bad. The trick here is that we send the
newsletters on behalf of clients that we have built sites for since we
launched our newsletter service and they currently send with a FROM and a
REPLY-TO of the domain we are sending for. Obviously, this does not mesh well
with current spam practices. Third party services usually require you to
verify the domain, but the vast majority of our clients do not have access to
anything related to their domain or DNS and it's not realistic to move to SES,
MailChimp, SendGrid, etc for that reason.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to approach fixing this? I've already
asked about sending out from client-name@ourdomain.com and having a reply-to
of the client's email address, but was shot down for apparent contractual
reasons.

~~~
Ascetik
>It's all self hosted

>Third party services usually require you to verify the domain, but the vast
majority of our clients do not have access to anything related to their domain
or DNS

Do you see the contradiction here?

If you are sending it from your domain there is no issue migrating to
mailchimp.

~~~
apocalyptic0n3
We spoof the client's email. So while we are sending from our IP address, the
FROM is actually john@clientllc.com, the FROM name is John, and the REPLY-TO
is john@clientllc.com.

10 years ago, that passed. Nowadays, it's unacceptable. I'm wondering if
anyone has a solution that doesn't involve any DNS changes for the clients we
are spoofing, because it just won't happen, unfortunately. Our entire
newsletter is built upon email spoofing, which is a terrible practice but I
cannot get management to allocate any more resources to fixing it than "just
make it work again". I'm going to try to push sending out from our (verified)
domain again using SMTP (so we keep our system other than the sending part),
but I'm doubtful I will get the approval for that.

I see the contradiction and realize that the verification process is in place
for an extremely good reason, but actually implementing a fix is not as simple
as you would hope. I was just hoping for someone to have an idea that I had
not already thought of.

~~~
dordoka
I know that you said but I'm afraid a major part of a spam scoring is coming
from DNS related checks (SPF, Domain Keys...). I would concentrate on that...
offer yourselves to configure that on behalf of your customers, get those DNS
things shorted out and your delivery rate will get higher.

~~~
apocalyptic0n3
Yeah, like I said, I realize that's how spam scoring works and that our
methods are just extremely outdated now. Problem is that our clients
frequently do not have access to their DNS and nothing has changed on the DNS
in 5-10 years. The purchased a site and email service a decade ago and they
won't think about it again for another decade.

~~~
gardnr
> our clients frequently do not have access to their DNS

How could they not have access to a service that they pay for?

It sounds like you have a human problem on your hands, not a technical one. I
would think about how to get an updated SPF into their DNS. If the boss said
"just make it work" then to me that means to call the clients and hand hold
them through figuring out who hosts their DNS records and how to open a
support ticket or reset their self-service web portal login password, or
whatever else the client needs to do to get those records in there.

SPF is very easy to configure and will improve your deliverability
significantly. After you configure SPF, mail servers will acknowledge your
servers as a valid sender for your client domain. It will no longer be
spoofing. The only difference between spoofing and not spoofing is domain
validation.

DKIM is not tied to an IP address but the 2 extra steps of complexity involved
with DKIM have allowed for SPF to be the dominant domain verification method
for sending email.

~~~
apocalyptic0n3
> How could they not have access to a service that they pay for?

Generally, they are on autopay and haven't had to sign in for several years.
We often run into an issue where the person who set it up is no longer with
the company and they no longer have the associated email address set up, so
they can't do a password reset (without setting up the email, at least, which
means hunting down how to do that; we're talking <5 person companies that
haven't had a new employee in years)

> It sounds like you have a human problem on your hands, not a technical one.

This is definitely the problem. :/

------
cyberferret
I'm assuming the author is hosting Mailwizz on his own desktop machine? I
didn't see the costings for an EC2 instance in his AWS breakdown.

If it is indeed his own machine, I wonder if he has factored in the data
transfer costs to/from AWS. If he had an EC2 instance fired up, then the data
transfer is free, however there is the monthly cost of the instance to
consider.

Also, what about the stack that Mailwizz runs on? It it available as a simple
turn key virtual or docker setup, or do we need to install a LAMP stack etc.
to get it running? Time to get the stack running (and maintaining it to keep
running) should also be factored into the $54 licence cost of the software.

~~~
gtsteve
If the author is using a micro instance in the first year, there is no charge
[0]. Also, the author only needs to start the instance when he needs it, so
the costs would be minimal.

Furthermore, only transfer out of AWS is billed; there's no cost to upload,
which is what I imagine would be the bulk of the work.

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/free/](https://aws.amazon.com/free/)

~~~
disiplus
how does he deal with unsubscribe if his server is offline after sending ?

~~~
gtsteve
Very good point! I guess the cheapest way to do that on AWS would be with a
Lambda function.

Or perhaps he already has his own web infrastructure not on AWS that contains
the list.

------
edlebert
Aaaaaand that's why I no longer use Amazon SES for transactional mail for
signupforms.com. It is frequently used by mass-marketers, which means my
transactional email was frequently being dropped by some email providers
because of SES's poor deliverability.

~~~
barbolo
Are you sure SES was the problem? Did you correctly configured DKIM/SPF?

~~~
Maxious
We've occasionally got bounces like "554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client
host [54.240.27.56] blocked using dnsbl.sorbs.net".

Amazon say SORBS is worthless but unfortunately someone is still using them
[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/blackl...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/blacklists.html)

~~~
spronkey
Seriously, doing bulk emailing you find that mail services are often the
dustiest, cobwebbiest things on the internet. I swear some of these things
have been sitting untouched for literal decades.

------
nikolay
Hmmm, how about Mailtrain [0], which is free and open-source? I like Sendy
[1], but it's per-domain licensing policy does not work for me - I manage a
bunch of nonprofits on a single droplet and do not have any desired to license
all of them.

[0]: [http://mailtrain.org/](http://mailtrain.org/)

[1]: [http://sendy.co/](http://sendy.co/)

------
jtwebman
It would been nice to see inbox stats. How many emails made it to the inbox vs
spam? Did he see a drop in email opens or clicks?

~~~
mtgx
Random comment on Reddit, if it helps:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/3jnxep/good_ridda...](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/3jnxep/good_riddance_mailchimp_surprisingly_greedy/curewaa/)

~~~
eli
That seems to conflate speed of sending a double opt-in with deliverability.
Ideally you'd want to measure deliverability with something like Return Path.

------
tnolet
Mailchimp === great UI for ad hoc, "unstructered", newsletters, product
updates etc. SES === great for transactional emails if you handle the
templating yourself. As always, and it gets boring, it depends on what you
need. If you're a typical startup you probably need both.

~~~
phonon
SES just launched templating! Seems nice.

[https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/10/amazon-
se...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/10/amazon-ses-
introduces-email-templates-for-sending-personalized-email/)

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-p...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-
personalized-email-api.html)

~~~
tnolet
Dang, I missed that one in the daily deluge of AWS product announcements. The
Mailchimp HTML5 editor is REALLY nice though. Probably the reason everyone
uses them.

Side story: At the former job, we used to create transactional emails with a
marketing swing to them in Mailchimp. Marketing loved it! Then we'd copy and
paste the HTML to our ratty Salesforce backend and replace some tags and BOOM:
super nice transactional emails from SalesHorse!

~~~
phonon
Yeah, I haven't tried them out yet, but I'm a big fan of SES (for
transactional emails).

I use [https://foundation.zurb.com/emails/email-
templates.html](https://foundation.zurb.com/emails/email-templates.html) for
templates, and they've worked well.

------
clairity
are there any services (mailwizz, mailtrain, sendy, email octopus, mailjet,
mailgun, etc.) that supports the personalized newsletter use case (which is
"one level deeper" than the personalized email use case)? it's not obvious
from any of their sites, and i'm hoping someone here might know right off the
bat. =)

meaning that each issue of the newsletter can include a set of like content
items (e.g., articles) but the bundle of content is specific to each user
(user 1 gets content items 1, 2, and 3, while user 2 gets content items 1, 3
and 5). this is one level deeper than just simple personalization like "Hi
Joe, thanks for signing up with us on Saturday, Mar 4...".

i've yet to see a marketing email provider offer this functionality very well,
if at all. for example, sendgrid (which i'm using now) supports it via a
convoluted combination of section and substitution tags that is not very well
documented. but most systems (including mailchimp, constant contact, etc.)
don't even contemplate this use case.

~~~
raphaelb
I use Green Arrow engine + studio, by the folks at drh.net, and it can do that
very well. You can basically get a hook that will execute your arbitrary code
for each contact - database lookup on a remote service, whatever. So you can
build very complex newsletters that are totally customized to each recipient.
And it is fast as can be (can pretty easily push 1M+ messages per hour if you
have that much volume to send)

In order to take full advantage of it you need to be a developer though.

It's got great pricing too, esp. if you get their perpetual license and then
run it on your own dedicated server (they set it up.)

~~~
clairity
thanks, i can code so i'll take a look. =)

------
disiplus
Its not fair to compare mailchimp to amazon ses, mailchimp is a full
newsletter sending platform that handles everything. if you need only email
sending there is 100k mails for 20usd with sendgrid.

~~~
huangbong
Sendgrid also does marketing emails now right? Your thoughts on it?

~~~
chinathrow
You'll ned a dedicated IP as their free plans use shared IPs which are often
flagged as spam sources.

Source: Tried the free plan a few times.

~~~
NearAP
If you use GAE, you get a free plan on SendGrid (up to a max) and I've used it
to send mails to gmail and yahoo accounts. Don't recollect anyone ending up in
spam but I haven't sent them in thousands. Will keep your comment in mind as I
do so..

------
julee04
Check out mailforgood: [https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-
good](https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good)

------
womitt
Lot of the IPs used be SES are already blocked because somebody used it for
spamming...

So would't rely on it for anything business critical to be delivered - choose
a company who only asends mail (Sendgrid, Mailgun of Mandrill (know they are
owned by Mailchimp).

The most annoying part that i's not deterministic, sometimes it works sometime
gmail blocks it or puts into spam ..

------
gabemart
Mailchimp pricing has always struck me as a bit perverse. I have a mailing
list of about 20k people for A Soft Murmur[1] and I send _very_ occasional
emails. A "pay as you go" Mailchimp plan costs about 1 cent per email, so in
my case $200 per newsletter. But a "monthly" plan only costs $150 per month
for 20k subscribers, with "unlimited" emails per month.

So it's cheaper for me to go on the monthly plan for one month, even if I know
I'll only send out one newsletter during that time. If there's any chance at
all that I might send more than one email in that month (rare but it has
happened), then it's less than half the cost.

It just strikes me as weird.

I should really switch to a cheaper provider, but given that I only send a
handful of emails per year, I haven't found the time yet.

[1] [https://asoftmurmur.com](https://asoftmurmur.com)

------
a2tech
We switched from MailChimp to SES+Email Octopus. EO gives us the layout+list
management stuff we needed, and SES gave us a huge drop in mail sending cost.
The costs we were dealing with though was a lot higher-our small list has over
100k people on it and we were sending out multiple emails a month to that list
and bigger.

------
strukturedkaos
If you are looking for an alternative to Mailchimp that uses Amazon SES with
dedicated IPs under the hood, check out Kevy [0]. Full disclosure, I'm the
Founder of Kevy.

We verify the domains of each of our customers and thoroughly review their
sending practices to ensure their email sending reputation stays high.
Futhermore, you can talk to a real person if you have any issues with sending
/ deliverability. If you are interested in a comparison of Kevy and Mailchimp,
check out this blog post [1].

[0]: [http://kevy.co/](http://kevy.co/)

[1]: [http://kevy.co/2017/03/31/kevy-comparison-mailchimp-
klaviyo/](http://kevy.co/2017/03/31/kevy-comparison-mailchimp-klaviyo/)

------
throwaway2016a
Having used both I love SES. It's great. But I also like Mailchimp. One big
gripe I have with SES is that it tends to have more servers on spam blacklists
than Mailchimp.

You also need to code a lot of the stuff Mailchimp has out of the box (like
templates and delivery reports) yourself. But the capabilities are there.

Another great thing SES has is the ability to receive emails not just send.

But overall I like both products. Mailchimp is easy for non-tech people to
use, SES is bare bones, pay as you go, and highly scriptable once you add in
Lambda.

~~~
gtsteve
I personally only ever used SES for forgot password notifications. My mailing
list is really small right now but if I had large lists I'd probably run it
myself using SES and pay for a private outbound IP. The costs aren't
outrageous - $25/mo.

~~~
RileyJames
Wouldn’t spammers just do the same? Does a private IP address on SES
completely absolve the senders of SES’s spam reputation? I’ve just started
using SES and did notice everything going to spam. Looking for a solution.

~~~
gtsteve
I've never experienced an issue with e-mail going to spam. You might want to
look at debugging it [0], to see if it's really SES's fault. It's possible
your outbound domain has a reputation issue, but I have no idea how you
address that I'm afraid.

[0] [https://sendgrid.com/blog/5-ways-check-sending-
reputation/](https://sendgrid.com/blog/5-ways-check-sending-reputation/)

------
blakesterz
That's quite a savings. Has anyone else done this? Do you see more bounces due
to using the AWS servers from using SES? Ending up in more people's spam
folders?

~~~
cuu508
I've done something similar for my side project which needs to _receive_
emails. My side project is a monitoring tool, and inbound emails is one way of
sending "I'm alive" messages to it. Link in profile.

I started with Mandrill inbound emails. Friendly UI, easy to understand, works
as advertised.

Then I moved to AWS SES for inbound emails. I wrote a small Lambda function
which dissects the email and forwards it to my HTTP endpoint.

With usage growing, SES was getting expensive as well. So I wrote a SMTP
server in Go using this:
[https://github.com/mhale/smtpd](https://github.com/mhale/smtpd) It's very
basic, doesn't support SSL, but seems to work OK in practice. My inbound email
handling is now basically free.

------
Mojah
I made the same move last year for my mailing list, but instead of Mailwizz I
choose Sendy. Same setup though, using Amazon SES as the e-mail sending
service.

It ended up saving me $600/year back then and would - at this point - be
saving me roughly $2.000/year.

Here's my write-up from back then; [https://ma.ttias.be/mailchimp-sendy-
saved-600-year/](https://ma.ttias.be/mailchimp-sendy-saved-600-year/)

~~~
andegre
$2/year doesn't sound like much to me ;)

------
bluedino
We use an older piece of software called Campaign Enterprise. It runs on a
Windows VPS, connects to our server at Rackspace that actually sends the
email, and we can send as many newsletters, welcome emails, etc we want -
every day. I think it was a couple hundred dollars to buy outright.

Once every few months you get on a blacklist but an email or quick phone call
gets you removed.

------
zuccs
Does anyone know of a newsletter management system with an actually decent
development workflow? We don't need the WYSIWYG editor. Just something with
git integration for templates that are coded manually in Zurb Foundation for
Emails.

You can import zipped templates into MailChimp manually. But if you made a
typo, it's painful to export and reimport each time.

~~~
fonziguy
Check out this Grunt workflow [https://github.com/leemunroe/grunt-email-
workflow](https://github.com/leemunroe/grunt-email-workflow)

Automates most of the painful tasks of putting an email together. You could
also add a task that sends the templates to Mailchimp once built.

~~~
zuccs
Yeah, I pretty much have that with the Foundation stack
([https://github.com/zurb/foundation-emails-
template](https://github.com/zurb/foundation-emails-template)) but it's the
MailChimp import that is painful!

------
0xCMP
While very impressive, always nice to save a lot of money, I hope someone can
explain why SES is not good enough many times as I seen here on HN before.

There are supposed to be issues with deliverability from SES that many can't
accept and so they use other services (of which, the main one, I'm blanking
on) that handle sending mail better.

~~~
kogepathic
_> There are supposed to be issues with deliverability from SES that many
can't accept_

I don't know about this. At my previous employer we used SES to send service
emails to our users on two domains (Office 365 hosted) and we didn't notice
any delivery issues. Our volume wasn't huge though, above 10k but under 20k
emails per month.

That being said, Amazon will really quickly suspend your SES account if your
bounce rate is too high. They also don't keep hugely detailed logs, so
restoring service generally relies on you keeping good logs from your app/MTA
and figuring out which email addresses are bouncing.

------
neeraga
That is the exact reason why we launched MailGet which is a hosted solution
for sending emails using Amazon SES.

Check it at [https://formget.com/mailget-app/](https://formget.com/mailget-
app/)

------
neximo64
Anyone who uses Amazon SES knows deliverability isn't that great. When you use
mailchimp you're practically paying for a higher chance for any of your emails
not ending up in the spambox (even if they're transactional).

------
cordite
Has anyone has a weird issue where a recipient gets emails delayed by up to 45
minutes via SES, but sending via Google is received immediately?

They aren't ending up in a spam folder, just delayed.

Note that the email address domain is the same between these two.

~~~
homero
If you're new to ses, they can throttle emails to the same domains to protect
you

~~~
cordite
Mmm, this recipient has their own domain and they only get one every two to
three business hours. Other places with public (gmail, yahoo) or personal
domains work just fine.

Sendgrid exhibited the same behavior, last I heard, sendgrid is also using
SES.

But sending from a gapps email was instant.

~~~
sethammons
I work at SendGrid. We don't use SES. All our receiving, processing, and
delivery software (and more) is developed in-house. We also run our own data
centers. However, we are looking at how we could leverage Amazon for more
elastic scaling and faster API response times for our customers. But nothing
with SES.

~~~
cordite
Thank you for the clarification.

------
ajohnclark
I did this with Sendy/SES and switched back to MailChimp. You can possibly
watch your inbox rate plummet with your costs if you do this, maybe they
improved SES since two years ago though. "You get what you pay for"

------
patsplat
the absence of delivery stats is a key omission

~~~
dreamache
Mailwizz provides all of the delivery stats. Here's a screenshot I just took
of a recent campaign:

[https://imgur.com/a/PSMm3](https://imgur.com/a/PSMm3)

~~~
cpncrunch
Delivery stats aren't really very accurate these days. It's impossible to get
stats for gmail web users (due to the new image caching), or for non-gmail-web
users who haven't clicked "load images".

~~~
jazoom
Isn't that "open stats"?

~~~
cpncrunch
Yes, but that's the only way of knowing that it hasn't gone into the user's
spam folder.

------
MistahKoala
Forgive my simplistic question, but... if SES creates issues with
deliverability/spam flags, is Pinpoint an option for MailWizz, Sendy etc? It
looks like it's more appropriate for non-transactional email.

------
laktek
Does MailWizz or any other similar service that support the same with Mailgun?

------
homero
I did the same and saved like 100x

