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Comment by thesehands | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered what the deliverability of mail is that gets sent out from homespun servers with setups like this? I've always assumed it would mostly all end up in spam folders but genuinely curious if anyone has any experience.

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As others have said, this particular service uses Amazon. But to answer your question, I've supported services where management dictated the process was going to involve an on-premises Exchange server built just for a mail campaign to deliver directly to inboxes.

The answer is, rDNS, SPF, DKIM, abuse.net registry, feedback loops with major mail services - are all memes.

You can do everything right, which is an extremely manual effort once you get as far as building code that identifies the top mail services used by your mailing list and reaching out to ISPs and mail hosts individually and asking them to whitelist you.

And you'll still find deliverability extremely poor.

Even Troy Hunt went in circles trying to get HIBP emails delivered to Microsoft Office 365 users.

It uses Amazon SES as the mail back-end. In other words, Amazon is dealing with the logistics of sending the mails.

And Amazon is pretty aggressive and proactive about spam - if the bounce rate is high (<10%) the SES account gets suspended or shut down, so Amazon servers are not likely to end up on any ISPs black lists.

We (very very small EU NGO) do it. I run an emailing of dozens of thousands emails about once a year - before some elections, we prepare some pre-election tools for people. I use simple php for that, so the setting is actually quite bad with regards to spamfiltering. But we get several percents response rate - people coming to our website and using the tools - the very day I send it, which is very good (and more people later), most of businesses would really like to achieve that, imho.

Set up DKIM and SPF on your domain. Your mails won't go to spam folder.

This is very important and overlooked by many marketers. Your emails need to actually come from the email address you say they are, e.g. the sender should be blah@yourdomain.com and not "via some random server name of your provider".

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