This gotta be against AWS's term... When you sign up for AWS SES, they ask you very detailed questions about how you'll monitor bounces, deal with spam reports, etc. I don't see how you can do that and then hand your keys to another service to do things in there own way.
Also, what is the point of giving this service your AWS creds rather than them using AWS directly? Since they charge you anyway?
> Also, what is the point of giving this service your AWS creds rather than them using AWS directly? Since they charge you anyway?
Presumably so that if/when the service gets abused and Amazon decides to ban the offending account, it doesn't take down absolutely everyone on their service.
Seems like the in between of a managed service and raw AWS trying to take advantage of individual AWS accounts having a free tier.
So have the customer make the account, take advantage of the free 10k emails a month to claim a lower price.
I don’t see the point in it. I doubt there will be much customer service if problems happen. Maybe if you’re trying to launch a free newsletter or something but otherwise it’s worth paying for peace of mind and potential lost time. You don’t want to deal with emails not getting sent or issues with the service when you’re focused on growing your company.
For most email senders, it is not the cost that is most important but deliverability. Ensuring your emails do not land up in SPAM is way more important than saving money, especially when you are still small or early in the business.
For bigger businesses, the cost is solved - either by using their system, processes, and people, or the ROI is good enough to pay someone to do it for them.
My bank and insurance companies can't regularly and reliably deliver their "paperless" email. Not sure anyone can unless they own the infrastructure. Just getting 50% of your sent mail to their readable inbox is difficult enough. Google groups can't even deliver mail to Yahoo (blacklisted).
I take advantage of paperless options everywhere and got burned by the "Paperless DMV Vehicle Renewal Notice" going to SPAM. I had to pay pretty hefty late fee (a few hundred dollars).
Since that event, I've flipped the switch back to "snail mail" and will resist the constant nagging until they implement a paper fallback (i.e. notify by email first and if it's not paid within X weeks of deadline, fire off a paper notification).
Tell your government to create an electronic mail service that you log into using your ID for all your government communication. Spam doesn't exist there.
Except that inbox deliverability is not "oh your domain is verified? free pass". So many things nowadays play a part into whether you hit spam filters - the content of your post and how 'spammy' it looks, whether or not you have an unsubscribe button (if not, your message better look extremely transactional), the history of click-through rates on your domain (if you send stuff for a week straight and nobody ever clicks on it, chances are you're sending unsolicited emails).
DKIM/SPF is only to validate that the sender isn't masquerading as your domain, and is what enables your emails to have a fighting chance of creating and maintaining good reputation status with the spam filter algorithms/ML models. Past that, your emails need to be useful and solicited or you're just sending spam from a verified domain.
For those looking for a self-hosted solution which doesn’t require a monthly payment, there’s https://sendy.co/. I never tried it, just remembered it exists.
Mail Layer does seems to have a bit more features, so pick your tradeoff.
As for feedback on the page, the mobile design isn’t exactly broken but it does have a number of problems. It’s so squished at the top it reads:
Mail
Documentation
Layer
Playing the video, its right side is entirely cut off. The “Frequently Asked Questions” title overlaps the questions themselves.
Here is another great self hosted solution that I came across. Really high performance (written in Go). No affiliation but well done open source product.
I have been using sendy for an year now. While it does have most of the features one would need, it starts to choke. I have a mailing list with 700k subscribers and it's been a pain to use sendy.
Same here. Can't manage to increase send speed in a significant way. Do you mind sharing what you optimized on your server to be able to send a mailing list to such a big number of subscribers?
I am thinking of using sendy, why is speed an issue? Aren't the emails delivered by SES? Can't you just send to SES a template and a list of emails and let them handle it?
Seems like most are bringing up the issue of spam filter bypassing as the real business value, I'm very curious if any "email 2.0" systems have been devised to combat the spam issues of SMTP?
> if you send 50,000 emails per month, you would pay $5 to AWS (as AWS charges $1 for every 10,000 emails) and $12 to Mail Layer. Therefore, to send 50,000 emails, your total cost would be $17.
the web site makes you get down the page, then open up FAQs to really understand how the pricing works.
It tells you what you’ll pay to them, but you’ll also be charged by AWS at the AWS rate (this is stated later in the FAQ, but the blatant marketing lie really grinds my gears)
This looks pretty neat. When I used SES at a previous company we had to do a lot of stuff like bounce tracking and monitoring ourselves so I definitely see the value.
One recommendation would be to use have customers create an IAM role and use cross-account role assumption to access SES on their behalf. That way you don’t have to deal with handling long-lived credentials
Nice. ListMonk is by the CTO of a very popular company in India, Zerodha. Another of his tool is right now on the top of HackerNews - DNS.Toys - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38899290
There was another service that did this pretty well and much simpler. Unfortunately, suffers from the same “deliverability is now your own problem“ problem.
AWS is pretty aggressive about banning senders with high bounce/report rates. I know from working in an industry where customers had terrible email systems
This is fine if we’re talking about spam, but lots of people are trying to find good solutions to send newsletters that people actually ask to have delivered via email.
I mean, the guy built a DIY mailchimp. That seems hackernews relevant. There's tons of services like mailchimp that are all varying costs. A low cost DIY solution may be interesting to some people.
Also, what is the point of giving this service your AWS creds rather than them using AWS directly? Since they charge you anyway?