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Comment by tehbeard | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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