MoonMail: Serverless Framework for Sending Emails Using AWS SES and Lambda

It shouldn't matter to the customer, but at its best, serverless can reduce ops and reduce cost.

Lambda doesn't make it easier to use SES. It does make it easier to not rely on ec2 for the same workload.

For low traffic volumes, lambda is better than an instance because it scales back or goes away altogether when idle, so it's pay per call really, instead of pay per instance-hour. It's probably a bad idea for high volumes.

They also have some nice integrations with other AWS components like S3, dynamo and api gateway, if those float your boat. Eg trigger a lambda function if someone writes a file into S3.

SES supports DKIM (and DMARC and SPF). It has reverse DNS, just not for your domain (that's mostly just useful for whitelabeling).

The biggest two problems are that A) You're using AWS SES (which lots of people do, so it doesn't have a great rep) and B) You don't have a static IP address (So again, you're sharing the email IP reputation with everyone else).

So it will work, but you may not get the best deliverability. Of course, if you're users interact with you already it may not matter and get delivered just fine. Also seeing is how this is a shit ton cheaper than the "big" players (like Marketo and Eloqua) it might be a good stopgap for someone who wants to send lots and lots of emails but can't afford the expensive toys.

Reads as $0.7 per thousand for me.

Serverless in this context means a simple stateless function connected to an API endpoint without having to setup your own server for the function to be connected to. I agree that the 'serverless' name can be confusing as ultimately it still uses a server, it's just abstracted away. Perhaps 'stateless API endpoint function' is a better name, but that doesn't roll off the tongue very well...

Sometimes you just have to limit the cynicism and accept that some terms are popular regardless of their literal accuracy or vagueness. Look at how the people who hated on "cloud" are perceived today. Shockingly some of them are still doing it. When those people were saying the cloud was someone else's hardware or servers they weren't really saying anything at all. I'm sure there's anecdotes about clueless PMs to prove the exception but no one actually thinks it's magic pixie dust underneath it all. They just don't talk about it because generally they don't need to think about it.

And as much as it pains the cynic in me to say it, just because something is a marketing term doesn't mean it's bad. Even without a strict definition a single word that replaces several words, sentences or paragraphs is really useful for communication even if it makes it less approachable to people that are new to it. Could you imagine going to "function that runs on demand on someone else's server Conf 2016"? Or how unwieldy discussions during it would be? And yeah, there's probably a better single word out there for it but that's an uphill battle I'm glad I'm not fighting.

Yeah man, people should say what they mean. Like, I bought a new wireless phone the other day, and when I cracked it open, there were a bunch of wires inside! WTF?

Yeah this new marketing speak is really confusing sometimes. :/