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Comment by azca | Hacker News Reader

There is a deep misunderstanding of the intricacies involved in actually delivering an email to the inbox, repeatedly, with the lowest risk. What you are paying for with ESP services is mostly that expertise.

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Most of the plain ESPs like AWS SES, or mailgun accomplish that same reliability for comparatively peanuts.

The main thing you lose with them are UX for sending newsletters, handling bounces on those lists etc. that's what sendy covers.

There's also GDPR/CAN-SPAM/CASL/etc compliance and abuse handling. Those can be costly in terms of time, money, and access.

These can be costly if you're using Mailchimp et al. Mailchimp's compliance features only handle compliance within the Mailchimp lifecycle, not at the entrypoints. The primary part being subscription management. Using Mailchimp doesn't guarantee compliance.

I think I'm agreeing with you, but I think that 99% of people who end up using AWS SES will find they'll need to write a bunch of handling code on top of it to deal with bounces (i.e. if your bounce rate is high, SES will kill your ability to send emails).

I found it incredibly frustrating that there was functionality that should have been easy for SES to implement, and that pretty much everyone will need at some point, but they don't really make it easy to add on after the fact.

It sounds like a great idea for a potential feature request for Sendy and software like it.

SES uses SNS for bounces, complaints etc. So _really_ you need a http(s) endpoint that receives these notifications and can act on them in a way that you'd like. (Unsubscribing from a mailing list, analytics, etc).

Sendy handles bounces. By default it stops all future transmission to that address, IIRC.

There are free alternatives to Sendy et al.

I've used phplist feeding to AWS SES for many years now without issues.

Yes, but you've read Sendy is connected to SES right? So you're still getting the benefits of solid deliverability. Or are you saying SES deliverability is not as good as Mailchimp et. al?

SES is as good as Mailchimp and very inexpensive. Too bad Mailchimp phased out Mandrill, which was reasonably priced and had a nice interface. SES has no interface at all but works great.

This. I will never touch mailchimp again after what they did to us when they shut down (priced out) mandrill.

If you like SES you should check out Email Octopus. It hooks up to SES and gives you a nice GUI for putting the messages together. We moved a good sized client over to them and their marketing people wanted a GUI and it filled the niche nicely.

There are many such interfaces - including free options like phplist...

We used to use Email Octopus and switched to Sendy. We like Sendy's interface a lot more.

The biggest problem is large companies blocking small servers... otherwise it would not be that hard

Sure.

Except MC doesn't provide this one, mission-critical feature of inbox delivery.

Most of my friends and family that subscribe to the PhotoStructure newsletter found their email in their spam folder.

And yes, I set up all my domain records properly, at least according to MC, and there aren't any warnings or diagnostic failures on their side. Each campaign has said there was 100% delivery success.

Delivery success is usually based on the download of a tracking pixel. Problem is, Gmail downloads and proxies all images (including those tracking pixels). So anything that doesn't get completely filtered out before showing up in the inbox or spam box is going to be seen as -received- by, as far as I know, any software out there.

There are quite a few messages that never even make it to the spam box, which I have never understood because plenty of very obviously sketchy spam messages get through to my spam box. Yet, occasionally we have trouble getting very legitimate transactional emails through to some customers.

I came here to say exactly that ... with the addition of the fact that MailChimp is run as an enterprise service while hosting your own on a $5 DO machine is clearly boutique. I'd like to see an up-time comparison as well as the delivery % noted above after 5 years. You're now also in charge of making sure your emails aren't considered SPAM and dealing with the ramifications of people who signed up for your newsletter forgetting and thinking that your emails are unsolicited.

AWS SES does all of that. With the exception on handling unsubscribes. But any cheap or free mailer software worth anything does that as well.

You are paying for glitzy UI, marketing, and some nice features as far as email themeing and then of course, support.

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