Sending mail with AWS SES and Route53 | Hacker News Reader

Sending mail with AWS SES and Route53

chrisanthropic.com

116 pointschrisanthropic33 comments

If you just enable DMARC like that you'll receive a XML report every day from every major provider. To reduce the noise and do something useful with this data consider using an aggregator tool e.g. https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com (free and from a trustworthy source)

Great info, thanks, setting up my account now and then I'll update the article.

EDIT

The article has been updated to include this.

+1, we use it despite not being users of Postmark itself (we just don't send many transactional emails), and it's great. Very clear and reliable.

I use https://dmarcian.com

Does anyone really do anything useful with said reports though?

In my experience...

In the first week you identify a web server or two some marketing team put together with a contact form that you never realised spoofed your domain and never got past SPF filters. After that, you get hundreds of alerts a day about some server in China sending spoofed emails to a server in Vietnam, neither of which you can do anything about.

That is why you should throw the reports at an aggregator. I'm very happy with Postmark's weekly digest.

Dada Mail [0] (which I wrote, and have worked on for 15+ years) supports sending via SES, and it works great. The instructions to implement it [1] are quite similar. I set up SES for a ton of clients, and the majority of them seem very happy using it.

One thing this article doesn't touch upon is that SES does have a limit on how many messages you may send in a timeframe per second, as well as per day. If you go over these limits, your message will not send out correctly. Make sure your software supports enough of the API for SES to fetch these limits are correctly send your messages, below these limits.

[0] http://dadamailproject.com/

[1] http://dadamailproject.com/d/features-amazon_ses_support.pod...

An issue that recently hit us: if you're going to be testing mail, then use the SES test addresses. Don't use your own or fake addresses. If SES get x% bounces on any outbound address, it will cut off your SES access across the board, and it doesn't come back on quickly.

We had a test address that was purposefully undeliverable. A test script sent out thousands of mails when it shouldn't have, and those undeliverable mails got treated as bounces. So, we got our SES cut off for two days, despite our clearly test/undeliverable mail being the cause. Regular AWS support can't do anything, only a special email unlock team can (they protect the 'deliverability' of AWS mail), and they're not exactly responsive.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/mailbox...

>_< Yeah. Bounces are bounces, and the mail reputation score probably won't care that you're testing things when it penalizes Amazon for its IPs sending bogus mail.

To clarify, I meant undeliverable as in "domain is not in DNS", not "mail is rejected by recipient", sorry. There was nowhere for the mail to be delivered to.

Always use mailinator.com

There are a solid handful of these "newsletter/marketing over SES" services these days. Sendy, Moon Mail, EmailOctopus and a few others (last did a large search a few months ago). Sendy even has a value-add service piggybacking off them (EasySendy Pro), though it looks like they've significantly added features since the last time I looked.

But where most people tend to see "Amazon == No Need To Think", I also see a looming "all your eggs in someone else's basket" and the first thing I look for is whether I can plug in an SMTP provider that isn't Amazon SES. In the FAQ, in a sub-note on a Features page, or anywhere. Almost without fail, none of their sites address this, even though it seems like it wouldn't be much harder than being SES specific.

Perhaps spam reports and bounce tracking might be sacrificed (i.e. requires outsized effort to implement) if it was via generic SMTP and not SES specific?

Does anyone know the answer to the "any SMTP" question for any of these services?

I've spent the last few months researching this and the only one I've found that offers that is https://mailtrain.org/

It's self-hosted and from their FAQ: "Amazon SES, SparkPost, SendGrid, Mailgun – you name it. You can use any provider that supports SMTP protocol to send out your newsletters. Bounce and complaints handling via webhooks is supported for SES, SparkPost, SendGrid and Mailgun."

I remember finding Mailtrain in my search, but the last time I looked, I don't remember seeing some of the details that I'm now reading on their Github. Apparently they can read bounces from more than just the services you named (which itself is a good improvement over Amazon-only), but can read from ZoneMTA and Postfix logs as well which is awesome and solves my "someone else's basket" concerns.

Thanks for prompting me to take a look at them again!

No problem. Honestly, the only reason I didn't go with that is because I work with AWS and wanted to see how they're setting up a 'serverless' newsletter via SES.

Sendy offers this, uses php mailer that you can plug other transports into. As you guessed you lose the spam / bounce tracking.

I looked into Sendy for quite a while but I like EmailOctopus' tech stack (and dev speed) better. My personal opinion only of course.

EmailOctopus is only SaaS right? Sendy is one time purchase so much cheaper if that's important.

This is really useful - DKIM/SPF/DMARC setup is way trickier than it should be.

I'm a co-founder of EmailOctopus so happy to answer any questions on the integration side of things.

I have moved over all of my clients who use transactional email over to SES from Sendgrid and honestly they couldn't be happier.

SES Pricing is amazing and deliverability seems to be good all across. (Not to mention you get around 60k free emails monthly if requests are coming from a AWS server)

I tried (bought) sendy.co and it seems quite buggy. I'm still looking for something self-hosted, where any SMTP provider can be plugged into, and that does not look like its 1993. As I have some non-techies that need to work with it.

Like I said further down, give mailtrain.org a look. It's self hosted and you can use multiple SMTP providers.

The problem with mailtrain is according to them it's not viable to use in production. There's also no tests and very little documentation.

I can get around that but the main thing preventing me from using it is there's no success stories associated to the application.

Sendy has dozens of unbiased blog posts, and even some posts where people are sending millions of e-mails without issues. That instills a lot of confidence in using it.

You would have to be a madman to trust an untrusted application with managing your email subscribers.

Just for the record, Mailtrain is used in production by several marketers with very large lists (from hundred thousand subscribers to a million subscribers) and Mailtrain seems to work fine for them

Is there anything to read that's public where those marketers comment about using it?

Have any of them done any audits on the code base and traced all incoming requests through Mailtrain vs their SES backend to ensure everything was delivered as expected?

Try Mailwizz. It has tons of features and the author is very active on the support forum.

What do people do these days for easily handling contact forms with a shared host? They come from my server name which then I change, so sometimes could be marked as spam. Simple php post. To/From

Always send those mails from a specifically configured real email address at your application's domain, not involving the name of your server. For instance, send the mail "From: contact-form@example.com", and "To: wherever-that-mail-goes@example.com". And send the mail using the actual mail server that handles @example.com mail (ideally not one you administrate). Don't include any user-supplied email address in either From or To; that'll get your mails either marked as spam or used as a vehicle for actual spam.

Mailgun.

This.

Did this exist when Mandrill decided to boot their customers? I migrated all my clients that were on it to sendgrid but this would have been a good option for the cheap ones

And just in case anyone is feeling frisky all of the sensitive info in the screenshots was removed and replaced.

whats the Google Cloud (first-party) managed mail service for personal domains?

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