
Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service - Yrlec
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2011/01/25/introducing-amazon-simple-email-service/
======
DanielBMarkham
I love what Amazon is doing with AWS, and I like this new service a lot. Plus
I'm a happy customer.

But damn this is all getting very complicated. First they turn off email, so
you have to find a provider, then they turn it back on, but you have to pay
them. Looking at my AWS console, I've got 8 or 9 tabs on there -- each
representing a little piece of what I might want in an app. Each has it's own
help section with bunches of docs to read to get up to speed. Each has it's
own forum category. Each has a usage policy.

Don't get me wrong -- it's all good stuff. But good luck trying to guestimate
what kinds of prices you'll be paying. You're paying for data transfer in and
out of the cloud, you're paying for disk storage, you're paying for a
database, you're paying for basic email services, etc.

So I'm kind of stuck looking at the monthly bill and saying "Does this look
about right?" instead of having some firm idea of what's going on without
having to use a spreadsheet and 3 whiteboards. That's no good. It's probably
completely acceptable for BigCorp, who has a guy dedicated to figuring all of
this out and managing it, but I'm busy and pressed for time all I want is the
big red button to push -- and a known price for pushing it.

I love what they're doing. Just wish they'd put a little more "simple" back
into it, especially in terms of pricing and bundling.

~~~
kevin_morrill
Seems like a white labeling opportunity. Though I am not sure if their TOS
allows it.

~~~
ez77
Could anyone explain the usage of 'white label' here? The Wikipedia entry (+)
doesn't help this foreign speaker.

(+) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-label_product>

~~~
detst
"White label" in this context would basically be a middleman. Customer pays
the white label for the AWS services and the white label pays AWS.

The white label would obviously have to offer something of value and in this
discussion, that value would be predictable pricing and maybe simplification
of the services.

~~~
corin_
Actually white label doesn't quite describe it correctly, as white label is
normally just that - a relabelling.

Typically, in addition to releasing it as a different brand for the same
services, pricing might be altered, customer service would be seperate,
different marketing, and so on. It's not a term designed for creating a new
service that happens to use AWS underneath it.

(Depending on how much the "simplification of the services" changes the AWS
offering, maybe I'm being pedantic, but maybe not. Dropbox, for example, is
not a white label solution, it's a completely seperate example, even if it
100% uses AWS services.)

------
markessien
Sendgrid & other such senders will be shaking in their shoes now. Personally,
as soon as I have more time, I'll switch to the amazon service. Also, any new
app I make will use Amazons service by default.

Sending email out is quite important for growth, and such services really help
businesses.

What impresses me about amazon is that they are not looking at what the
competition is charging or trying to charge high based off the fact that there
are not too many such services, but are simply providing the service at a
reasonable price.

~~~
plusbryan
The thing is, Sendgrid et al will continue to innovate in terms of feature
set, and AWS never will. And that's a good thing: They focus on the absolute
_core_ of a product need - and let providers like heroku or dropbox grow like
a vine on top of them, providing things people want.

~~~
zacharypinter
> Sendgrid et al will continue to innovate in terms of feature set, and AWS
> never will

Seems to me that Amazon has been quite busy innovating and expanding their
feature set.

~~~
plusbryan
You're right, I misspoke when I said "innovate" - what I meant was, Amazon's
goal is to create reliable base-level services for the developers of the
world. Whereas a Sendgrid might provide unsubscribe management and fancy
graphing, I don't see Amazon adding on additional services like this.

~~~
dangrossman
They already added fancy graphing to EC2, EBS and RDS just recently. What used
to be CloudWatch services became free and integrated into the dashboard of
those other services. Elastic Beanstalk is also a layer above their base-level
services. Seems like Amazon is willing to move up the chain and will continue
to in the future.

------
bromley
I wonder how they will respond if an account gets over the allowed threshold
of spam complaints. I could see them responding either by:

a) Cutting off the customer's use of Simple Email Service; or

b) (Much much worse) cutting off the customer's AWS account, including EC2 and
so on.

I'm guessing a), but it would be nice to have assurances against b). Otherwise
a false positive on the "they're using SES to spam" detection system could be
catastrophic.

The SES docs just point to the standard customer agreement -
<http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/> \- which doesn't appear to make any
specific mention of SES terms and conditions.

~~~
fooandbarify
How would legitimate use be falsely flagged as spam in large numbers? Other
than a malicious conspiracy of some sort, I don't understand why a
disproportionate number of e-mail recipients would target legitimate mail as
spam. Am I missing something?

~~~
tedunangst
People sign up. People get tired of your email. Clicking spam is easier than
clicking unsubscribe (which people are also taught not to click on). Both AOL
and Yahoo have been pretty aggressive about banning mail servers that send too
much "spam", which in several cases was a legitimate mailing list people had
to ask to subscribe to.

~~~
Travis
I've seen some aggressive stuff out of Excite, as well (although I only know a
few people who use them).

One other reason someone might hit "Report Spam" rather than unsubscribe: your
unsubscribe page requires an account login (rather than unique hash) to unsub.
If I can't remember that login, and I'm exasperated by the company already,
I'll hit the Report Spam button just b/c it's so much easier.

Email unsubscribes that are behind login screens are the devil.

~~~
danudey
For years, people have been told 'don't click on "Unsubscribe" in spam, it
just tells people that your e-mail address really exists'.

Except that people can't tell the difference between 'e-mail I don't want and
never asked for' and 'e-mail I signed up for but don't remember', so they
click the 'spam' button automatically. For a lot of people, the 'spam' button
is actually the 'I don't want to get these e-mails anymore' button.

This is why companies like AOL, etc. have feedback loops. You register
yourself with them, and you set your system up to handle spam complaints. When
a user complains about a legitimate message, you just remove them from your
list. If you don't have those feedback loops set up, then AOL assumes you're
being a dick (and/or the spam complaints go to the IP address owners, who've
registered themselves already).

------
ladon86
You get a daily quota of 2000 messages if you're an EC2 customer. That's
pretty competitive, and nicely within the limit of what I'm sending at this
stage of my startup. Sold, well played once again Amazon.

~~~
kordless
I can send up to 2K messages a day with a premiere Google Apps account.

~~~
bryanh
That may be true, but from what I remember, the transition past 2000 was very
difficult with Google Apps. In the end you'll have to go with a email provider
like SES (or the now troubled PostmarkApp).

~~~
pkulak
Wait... troubled? I use Postmark...

~~~
kijinbear
Which is now almost 15 times as expensive as Amazon SES. (Almost, because
Amazon also charges a small data fee.)

------
jeffbarr
Here's my blog post:

[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/introducing-the-amazon-
si...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/introducing-the-amazon-simple-email-
service.html)

If you like to solve puzzles, be sure to read the PS!

~~~
ROFISH
The bitstream converted to their ASCII value is ".zncf anug erggro fv abpno".
When reversed and ROT-13ed, it is:

"Bacon is better than spam."

~~~
jeffbarr
Indeed it is!

------
vladd
It seems they implemented a gradual increase of daily quota to protect
themselves against spammer abuse.

Here's the link to the document describing the system:

[http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/...](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/ManagingActivity.PlanningAhead.html)

~~~
aonic
And also, after you sign up for SES, you can't actually use it to send out
emails to your customers until they grant you 'production' access. This
process seems to be done manually as they say it can take up to 24 hours after
an initial request, and from the sounds of it, someone contacts you personally
to confirm your email usage.

~~~
aonic
Just an update, I requested SES production access 4 hours ago and just
received notification that I was approved.

Maybe they ramped up support to handle the launch day? Or maybe it's because
I've been an AWS user for years, or maybe because I've been using $1000/m
worth of AWS services for a month, and the SES account was for the same
website hosted on my AWS.

Update: switched all my web servers to use SES via Postfix. So far so good!
Setting it up over postfix took ~10 minutes including installing the perl libs
needed

------
pilif
I wonder who's going to be the first to announce a SMTP proxy for this?

More seriously:

While I can kind of understand that Amazon has their API and probably wants
this to work similarly, but there is already a wide-spread protocol for
sending out email (SMTP) and I just can't understand why they can't provide an
endpoint for that.

Many applications which I really see making use of this already have built-in
SMTP support (and are using that today), so why force developers to work with
another, completely different API to send email over Amazon?

~~~
devicenull
If they use SMTP, they run the risk of a compromised server sending spam
through them. With the API, it makes it a bit more difficult for a compromised
machine to start spamming, unless it already has API keys for this service.

~~~
pilif
Nothing prevents them from requiring SMTP-Auth for authentication to make sure
that the sending is coupled to a specific account.

If we are talking compromised machines, then the key would be compromised as
well at which point a spammer can use that key to send spam regardless of
protocol.

I'm not saying to use smtp auth with your amazon username and password, but
with some token derived from the API key, but just SMTP.

~~~
dalore
Except they already have auth setup for all their other webservices. Why not
make email yet another service and the auth infrastructure is already there.

------
jonknee
If it works like they say, this is a godsend. Email is a royal pain and the
pricing of SES is well below market rate. Postmark (<http://postmarkapp.com/>)
is similar and is $1.50 per thousand, compared to $.10 per thousand from
Amazon.

~~~
Jabbles
Mailchimp appears to be offering unique emails from $5 per thousand! They
appear to have significant discounts for emailing lists, but even at $12903
for 24.8 million emails, that's still $.52 per thousand.

<http://www.mailchimp.com/pricing>

Data transfer rates still apply for Amazon, but still... am I missing
something?

~~~
jsdalton
These are not really comparable products.

MailChimp is an email broadcast and subscription management service. It's for
sending things like email newsletters and marketing campaigns.

SES/Postmark/Sendgrid are more for one-to-one type communications, e.g.
delivering your application's forgot password email.

~~~
Jabbles
Ah, thanks for that clarification.

However, I would have thought that the "one-to-one type communications" would
be more expensive (per email), than sending to lists. Amazon seems to allow
both, at a much lower cost.

~~~
jsdalton
Yeah, well keep in mind a few things:

* Until today, MailChimp was by far the cheapest option, esp. if you compare them against similar services, e.g. Campaign Monitor.

* Mailchimp is a lot more than a dumb email server...it's a list management service, it offers stats, a pretty robust API, etc. You'd have to spend a lot of time to build up those capabilities around SES.

* I'm not sure SES is meant to handle the volume MailChimp handles. (I don't mean technically, I more mean what is allowed by Amazon.)

Just a few thoughts from a pretty well satisfied MailChimp customer. (I'm also
a SendGrid customer, and you can bet I'll be taking a close look at SES as a
replacement for that service.)

------
ordinaryman
Seems Amazon wants to fight it out with Google, by matching the new services
with Google App Engine's free quota.

$0.10 per thousand in SES -> $0.0001 per email recipient // Same as in GAE.

 _You can send 2,000 messages for free each day when you call Amazon SES from
an Amazon EC2 instance directly or through AWS Elastic Beanstalk._ // Same as
in GAE.

This, along with the recent AWS Elastic Beanstalk release and Amazon's intent
of making Java hosting easy and without restrictions
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119104>) all point to the day when I
will be able to upload my Python app on GAE directly onto a pre-configured
Amazon service (possibly making use of AppScale or TyphoonAE), which
internally uses all these new services with free quotas.

~~~
tybris
I actually doubt that they really care about competing with Google App Engine.
I mean, AWS has NetFlix, New York Times, Dropbox among their customers and GAE
has.... who?

What I do think is that services like GAE have set a standard for the ease of
use and price. People are now looking for free tiers, instant deployment, and
traffic-based pricing. Customers are expecting Amazon to provide the same and
so they do.

------
maverhick
I like this. They are priced at 25% of sendgrid, which we use as we send a
million emails a month or so. But sendgrid provides a dedicated IP address.
Having a dedicated IP over a period of time helps with delivery as the IP
'reputation' increases based on your delivery rates.

A lot of EC2 Ips are blacklisted by ISPs because people just create instances
and spam away using exim/sendmail. If amazon and keep its IPs clean and also
manage the service well, this is going to be THE email sending service to use.

~~~
jsatok
I'm in a similar situation. Sending hundreds of thousands a month with
SendGrid, and while it'll be more than Amazon, I think the dedicated IP makes
it worthwhile.

------
d_r
It amazes me how quickly AWS iterates and adds new features. Also, this is
just what I needed for a site I am building (I was trying to figure out which
third-party mail provider to use.)

~~~
latortuga
One of my coworkers remarked that it's amazing how Amazon just takes their
existing infrastructure and repackages it to be sold as a service. When you
look at it as something that they already had built for themselves, while
still being awesome, it helps keep perspective.

~~~
smokinn
That's not how AWS works at all.

Werner Vogels (Amazon's CTO) explains it well here:

[http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-
clo...](http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-cloud-
computing-business)

And the history is well presented here:

[http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-
computing/am...](http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-
computing/amazons-early-efforts-at-cloud-computing-partly-accidental/)

The tldr; is basically that AWS was a skunkworks project within Amazon with
its own completely separate infrastructure. Its success is mostly independent
from Amazon.com's success. (Amazon.com funded it but mostly left it alone
until it hit it big.) As Vogels points out, within 2 months of launch AWS
would already have surpassed Amazon's excess capacity. I imagine now with some
of the huge customers such as Netflix and NYT on AWS the AWS traffic may dwarf
Amazon.com's.

------
aristidb
So I was immediately looking at their REST API...

And true to form, Amazon adds yet another slightly incompatible request
signing method.

Consistency is for wimps.

~~~
eli
I _dare_ you to look at the API for some of the "traditional" email service
providers. I've had the displeasure of working with a few from some of the big
names and they are real DailyWTF material.

~~~
jonknee
I have worked with Constant Contact and it was a Constant Headache. My
favorite was when they took the API down for maintenance and maintained HTTP
200 OK status codes for requests but instead of XML returned it was an HTML
page saying they were down. I took a screenshot of the page because it was so
surprising:

[http://www.jongales.com/blog/2009/10/17/constant-contacts-
in...](http://www.jongales.com/blog/2009/10/17/constant-contacts-insane-api-
downtime-practice/)

~~~
eli
EmailLabs/Lyris decided to invent their own XML-over-HTTP API format rather
than use REST or even SOAP or anything else you might already have a library
for. They combined this with a very poor understanding of how XML is supposed
to work (lots of <DATA> tags) and return results that aren't guaranteed to
validate. Dates are represented in one of six different formats depending on
which particular function you're calling. If there's a problem, you might get
an error, you might get back nothing. I could go on.

Silverpop is similar.

~~~
biot
Have you had any experience with Exact Target, at the API level or other? And
don't get me started about a certain email broadcaster vendor out of Seattle
that starts with "what" and ends in "counts"... their idea of XML is to parse
an entire file line-by-line and treat each line independently of the whole. So
it kind of _looks_ like XML... to a kid who just learned Java I suppose.

~~~
eapen
Care to explain what you think about Exact Target - I might have to deal with
them and would appreciate any feedback you have of them.

~~~
biot
I'm in the same boat as you. :)

------
nolite
I wonder how well their mailing reputation is for high deliverability with
this new service.. I've heard that mailing from EC2 was almost pointless due
to its low reputation score

~~~
pfarrell
I work as an engineer for an email service provider. I can tell you that
deliverability is one of the core things you bring to the table when you are
doing sending for a lot of people. It's the sloppy, people oriented aspect
that developers ignore (imagine you've got a huge send going out and gmail
just flagged you as a spammer, you better have a contact there to fix it
fast). Sure, you can write an app to send a million emails in a few minutes,
but your work (and bandwidth costs) are pointless if it never makes it to the
customer's inbox.

There are a lot of dirty details in sending at volume. But like the old saying
goes, "where there's muck, there's brass."

------
scrrr
I suppose this will hurt the competition, sites like sendgrid and mailchimp.

~~~
jasonkester
It might just help them. If Amazon just undercut their infrastructure costs,
they can ditch their own servers and simply route mails through Amazon.

Regardless, MailChimp does a lot of stuff besides just sending mail. I suspect
that most of its customers are there for the list management and campaign
management pieces rather than just the .send() bit.

------
mgw
AWS' pace of innovation is simply stunning. It shows that the business is not
an afterthought for Amazon but rather treated as being of the same importance
as their core business.

Compare that to AppEngine and you have to say they leave them behind in the
dust. (I know it's not an Apples to Apples comparison.)

------
d_r
On the topic of sending e-mail, I discovered the following note on my utility
company's bill payment page. I'm guessing they have never heard of SendGrid or
the like.

[http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dennis/GGBF...](http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dennis/GGBFG75hiG3uBWhtFRwldtwQed8zbwHzVsQBpp6M872kvawj6D7ZqxfLrLfu/conservice.jpg)

(They did not reply to my friendly e-mail about it. Or perhaps their box was
over quota...)

------
rozim
Obvious followup: "Amazon Simple SMS Service". Watch out Twilio...

~~~
johns
They announced they'd support SMS when the launched SNS awhile back, so I
don't think this would surprise anyone.

------
retube
> Start sending email in minutes through Amazon SES using the AWS software
> development kits for Java and .NET

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the java ecosphere in terms of
libraries and resources is unparalled.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Perl/CPAN wins hands down.

And I am both a Perl and a Java programmer.

~~~
tybris
Well, except in code quality.

~~~
astrodust
There's some awfully shady Java code out there, but since it looks impressive
with all those abstract bases and factories you can't see the real problems.

A 12,0000 line Java program with the same features and the same bugs as a 500
line Perl script is going to look clean in comparison even though it's just as
crappy.

~~~
tybris
Sure, but in case of Perl the shady code is on a big pile with the good code.
In Java you have projects like Apache commons that generally produce fairly
good code as long as you steer clear of the experimental stuff.

~~~
chromatic
_Sure, but in case of Perl the shady code is on a big pile with the good
code._

Does Java have anything comparable to CPAN Testers?
<http://www.cpantesters.org/>

Note that commits to Perl 5 get tested against the whole of CPAN for
unintentional breakage.

------
leftnode
I'm not so sure Sendgrid, Postmark, and other email senders should be shaking
in their boots.

There's plenty of other businesses that leverage AWS technology and resell it
for a higher price. I bet they add AWS as an option as a value added reseller.

If you have an existing email host integrated throughout your site, it might
make more sense to just stick with them.

It will force them to lower their prices though.

~~~
eli
Agreed. I use Silverpop for high-volume sends even though I pretty sure
they're just a front-end for PowerMTA

~~~
megaman821
We used to use SilverPop but then we just bought a PowerMTA license and wrote
our own front end. If you are a small company with a large list, SilverPop is
too expensive. Amazon is cheap but it doesn't look like it has any mailmerge
(email personalization) capabilities.

~~~
eli
If you don't mind my asking, how much of a pain is it dealing with spam
complaints and deliverability issues on your own versus through Silverpop?

~~~
megaman821
The pain is all up front. You configure PowerMTA to slow down its sending due
to the responses of the various email providers so they never block you. As
the trust for your ip goes up you can send at a faster and faster rate. Also
you then store all the email bounces and run a cron job to clean your list.
Usually I stop sending to emails that return hard bounces and ones that have
soft bounced three times.

------
hazelnut
bye bye postmarkapp, critsend, sendgrid, authsmtp, cloudsmtp ...

~~~
bryanh
I don't know about that... In preparing to launch a high volume email startup,
I have a few problems:

* How reputable are Amazon's IP's? Will my emails get flagged as spam due to reuse and general abuse?

* Another cranky API to use. Why not STMP?

* Sendgrid (and several others) have wonderful built in statistics and other quick n' easy apps.

* Also, those services' core business is deliverability, not volume. I feel AWS's offering may be the other way around...

------
koevet
There is really no excuse to not launch a web application!

------
aonic
This is excellent. I recently moved a production website to EC2 at the last
minute due to contractual disagreements with a hosting vendor. My next step
was to sign up on SendGrid and configure postfix to use that for emails, SES
will be better integrated into the AWS ecosystem.

As a lot of you may know, emailing out from EC2 is mostly impossible as all
ISPs bounce them back

------
blhack
I want to be excited about this, but amazon basically destroyed any trust I
had in them (at least the people that handle AWS). I signed up for the amazon
free usage tier of AWS, excited to try it out, and really really loving amazon
for doing something like that (giving away service for free).

I signed up, spun up an EC2 instance (careful to make sure that this really
_was_ free), checked it out for a few minutes, then moved back to my linode
and slicehost boxen. I was excited to have another spare machine to try stuff
out on for the next year (I really wanted to try nginx as a reverse proxy).

About a month later, I got a bill for $60 from amazon. I tried to find a
support chat for AWS (like what slicehost has), but couldn't...tried to find a
way of calling them...but couldn't. Finally I sent them some sort of feedback
saying "Hey, was this a mistake? Why are you billing me for something that is
free?"

The response that I got back was something like "The cost for AWS is $60/mo!
Thanks for using AWS!"

To me, this is absurd, and is borderline fraudulent (although I'm sure it was
a mistake). Luckily for me, I have a good job, and while eating $60 worth of
amazon making a mistake is annoying, it isn't a catastrophe. This wouldn't
have been true for me while I was in school though, and wouldn't be true for
some of the friends I recommended give AWS a try.

I'm starting to think that stuff like this is where "the cloud" falls apart on
people. If I have a problem with my Verizon Business internet, I can call them
and talk to somebody until it's fixed. If I have a problem with one of our
AT&T telephones, same thing. If the power goes out at our building, I can call
down to APS and find out why.

From what I can gather, this _absolutely_ isn't true for google, or amazon, or
any of the other "cloud" providers. If I build an email system myself, buy
bandwidth/power/rackspace from a colo myself, and manage it _myself_ , there
aren't going to be any surprises. If it goes down, I can just look at why.
Nobody is going to surprise me with a bill (except maybe the colo).

To be honest, amazon, I don't even plan on building anything on your
platform...ever. Same goes for you, google. While I really really love the
idea of cloud computering (or elastic computering), I definitely _don't_ love
the idea of some faceless company with no customer service of any kind who can
arbitrarily just take money from me and doesn't care if I leave.

To me, stuff like this is a massive step backwards.

While not related to AWS, but more "the cloud" in general...look at what
happened a few months ago when facebook's OAuth system bailed out for a few
hours. Anybody dependent on facebook for login handling was simply SoL without
really anything that they could do to solve the problem until facebook fixed
it.

How is this desirable?

There was an article here yesterday (an it seems like something like this pops
up just about every week) about how the days of the system admin are over. I
wouldn't be so sure. You can yell at system admins until you feel better, you
can call them endlessly at 3:00am until they wake up, you can tell them that
they have to come in to the office RIGHT NOW and fix it RIGHT NOW. (I'm a sys
admin, btw)

You can't do this to amazon, you can't do this to google. If amazon email
service bails out...sorry, but call back later and maybe it will be fixed.

~~~
bromley
If I recall correctly the free tier enables you to use one micro EC2 instance.
$60 for a month sounds about the cost of a small EC2 instance.

~~~
deno
I'm pretty sure I know why it's happened to him:

Basically micro instances are ESB-only and if you select distro intended for
instance storage the first option on the list in the wizard is "Small
instance."

------
gdesouza
Well you have to love Amazon's focus on KISS (keep it simple, stupid) -- heck
it's even called the _Simple_ Email Service! I can only imagine the number of
(illustrious) tech companies that would have tried to dress this up like a
revolution in computing.

------
slig
Does anyone recommends a self-hosted webapp to manage and send the newsletters
through AES/SendGrid/etc?

I would love to use mailchimp or campaignmonitor, but I only have users, not
customers, and the high price ins't justified.

------
JoelSutherland
It seems like Amazon is friendlier than SendGrid about bulk marketing email.

Does this lower the barrier to entry for MailChimp/Constant Contact/Consumer
Newsletter Service competitors?

Or are there other high technical barriers as well?

------
jgroome
The future: Everything run by Google and hosted by Amazon.

~~~
mono
plus: Everything you need to own, you buy at Amazon (rhymes!)

------
sdh
hopefully, this improves the deliverability of email that originates within
amazon's environment. the service can be easy, but if the messages aren't
getting through, then there is no point and sendgrid and others will continue
to survive.

------
joshfraser
Amazon's IP's have terrible email reputations and are blocked by lots of
services. Unless they are opening up a new block of IP's, I'd be very
concerned about my deliverability rates. SendGrid give me a dedicated IP which
helps a lot over time.

------
sunny36
I can't find it but can you send attachments as well?

~~~
tomstuart
Yes, there's a SendRawEmail action
([http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/APIReference/AP...](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/APIReference/API_SendRawEmail.html))
in the API, which allows you to send a multipart MIME message.

------
elvirs
considering the fact that 95% of all email is spam, the email service
providers should implement a similar quota system to fight spam. actually it
would be great if entire email ecosystem had something like this in its core.

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nolite
no attachment support.. no mimetype support for anything but text and html..
not evident from the docs.. just errors when you try to send a jpeg

definitely still in beta

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sojourn
they are seriously taking over the world

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infocaptor
I guess this is a great opportunity for individuals to provide services like
aweber, mailchimp etc. Think about it, now you don't need to worry about the
hardware. Provide a killer interface, make it super super easy and have a low
monthly fee and let the user pay the amazon bill. ofcourse there are multiple
revenue models but now is the opportunity.

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gaiusparx
It is also now simpler to create competitive alternative to mailchimp as you
can just focus on the user experience and features rather than delivery. Great
opportunity for startups.

