Mail for Good
github.com
github.com
https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good/commits/master
there is an issue open still about the status of the project:
We haven't made any big changes to it recently because it hasn't broken. There is definitely some maintenance we could do as far as updating libraries.
We're hoping to re-write parts of it to use AWS Lambda instead of a Linux server, so we can further simplify use of it for less-technical users (a lot of nonprofits don't have developers on staff).
Not saying this necessarily means this project is alive and well, but just noting!
Oh oh.
I was under the impression that one of the big value adds of the more expensive email services is that, basically, they work on solving the issue of avoiding your email landing in spam, whereas if you use a more 'direct' commodity service like AWS Simple Email Service or other cloud equivalents you have to kind of solve that problem yourself which is really, really hard and hence not worth the saving.
Is that roughly true? Or do I have it wrong?
In any case, I decided to build myself an SES email client which reads emails from S3. I'm looking for collaborators @ https://github.com/saiorama/ses-email-client/.
The idea is to make an App Store for emails. The first use case I've solved for is give users unlimited disposable emails on their own domain - like your personal Mailinator.
If you would like to try it out for your own side project, drop me a note @ https://shared-inbox.landen.co/.
Similar, you should have caps on the number of simultaneous outbound SMTP connections to the same domain. And things like knowing which failures are temporary, which are permanent, and when to automatically unsubscribe an email. (after X temp failures over X time period, etc).
* Setting up DKIM and SPF - Amazon makes this relatively painless, particularly if you're managing DNS in Route53
* Not spamming
Typically for low volume sending it doesn't matter. For high-volume sending you need to get the IPs, domains, and security controls set up correctly to reduce how much you're seen as spam.
AWS SES will allow you to configure this all, but you need to know how. Something like SendGrid (not a small player) will be more expensive, but will provide usability features on top and guide you through that setup of that solid foundation a little more.
Ultimately the reputation comes down to the organisation authoring the email (not the email service provider), as they are the ones doing well or badly on the quality of the email they send.
So yes, own the IP [and do all the regular SPF, DKIM and such], but be aware that is possibly nowhere near enough.
> Mail for Good is fast and memory efficient, currently sending over 100 emails per second on a 1gb Digital Ocean VPS.
> We've used Mail for Good to deliver newsletters to hundreds of thousands of campers per week.
... Good? YMMV, but personally, I'm not a fan of spam. Never will be.
> I'm not a fan of spam. Never will be
This isn't spam. It's a newsletter subscription people opt into by joining their website as a user. Users can opt-out of this specific newsletter in their FreeCodeCamp settings page and be fine and dandy afterwards.
Spam is something else entirely.
Regarding newsletters, the majority of those are opt-out (as opposed to opt-in) and the opt-out process is intentionally convoluted ("untick this checkbox if you would prefer not to subscribe to our newsletter"), so as far as I'm concerned it's indeed spam.
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/privacy-policy/
> We'll ask you for your email address so you can use it to sign into freeCodeCamp, and so we can send you announcements and helpful programming-related links.
Essentially, this is an "opt-in" process because you are opting to create your account and you agree with the site policies.
Granted, I'm in no way a legal professional and I could be wrong about everything I said here. Corrections are welcome.
A FreeCodeCamp account presumably offers more functionality beyond just the newsletter, and the majority of people would sign up for that functionality and not the newsletter.
Yet, there is no way to opt-out directly, and you have to go through extra steps to do so after the fact.
This is also in breach of the GDPR which mandates that consent for non-essential data processing (marketing communications fall into that) should be opt-in (so pre-ticked checkboxes are already forbidden) and freely given (so there is no penalty for declining, you can’t refuse to open an account for them if they decline consent).
I run a paid service that attempts to deal with exactly this problem - a key feature being to never think twice about giving out an email address.
I recently implemented "one touch" blocking to minimize friction in the process: https://kopi-cloud.atlassian.net/wiki/x/IoCvKg
I voluntarily subscribed some of the Cooper Press weekly newsletters https://cooperpress.com/publications/ They are definitely opt-in, not spam.
I regularly unsubscribe newsletters I didn't opt-in, usually from unknown sources. Not many of them lately and the opt-out usually works. I remember a couple of times I had to send an email with a mention of GDPR in it. It worked.
So "the majority" of newsletters are modern spam, not really.
There is definitely a minority out there like yourself that knows how to manage it and only subscribes to a few select newsletters, for I think for the majority of people, newsletters are a net negative otherwise you wouldn't see people with thousands of unread emails and there wouldn't be so much hype around tools like Hey.
This was quite disapointing.
You mean "Mail for Good"? I think it's because they are focusing on non-profits.
I don't have any details other than 1 credit card with them... So I'll never have a "balance", so their email is spam to me.
I never signed up for correspondence from PayPal about this. That they refuse to fix it is weird.
I get exactly zero bulk email in my inbox... Except for this PayPal nonsense.
That seems to be dramatically more expensive than SendGrid, at least based on playing around with the pricing slider on their website.
Plus you're paying some other costs like bandwidth and mailing list maintenance. Most of these email providers have the idea that you can create a mailing list, and then ask them to send mailings based on some template.
Also, this quote seems to be based on using AWS Simple Email Service. Lower down they say:
> We're currently sending weekly email blasts of over 800,000 emails in 4 hours on a $10 per month Digital Ocean VPS with 1gb memory and 1 core processor.
Ever heard the one about the non-profit activist orgs that had to send emails to tens of thousands of people who had already opted into receiving emails and had to allocate substantial portions of their budget to sending out their donation drive emails because the system keeps breaking and different companies and government departments keep finding new ways to make things worse, requiring regular mail-outs, and there wasn't really any near-zero-conf, _actually_ cheap off-the-shelf solution for that?
It's hilarious, the punch line involves being called false altruists and spammers.
Out of those people that did intentionally opt-in, would they still opt-in if they knew the frequency of the e-mails?
I remember being on the receiving end of exactly the same scenario you describe - non-profit entity sending spam. I actually intentionally subscribed when signing a petition and assumed they'd e-mail once a month or so which I would've be fine with.
I was so wrong - they were sending some crap every few days, and even worse they attempted to make them look personal (sent from a real-looking name) even though it's the same garbage they email to hundreds of thousands of other suckers that assumed good faith on their part. In a handful of weeks my inbox was dominated by their spam.
Another case was for a tech-related non-profit that I donated to and explicitly unchecked any opportunity for them to spam me. Well guess what, one year later they still did. They apologized afterwards and said it was a mistake (fair enough), and yet some time later I got yet another spam campaign from them I had to unsubscribe from.
Did you click the unsubscribe button?
Nice to have the option available, but making this too easy can be an organizational footgun if someone doesn't know what they're doing.
Spam has effectively ruined DIY mass-emailing, whether you like it or not. There are multiple other providers if you don't like mailgun.
There are a lot of ways for organizations and non-profits to save money, and I wouldn't recommend doing so with email if it's important to them.
Spam means unsolicited email. There is nothing about this that means you have to send unsolicited email. An people who genuinely spam wont use a tool like this, as they would prefer a network of compromised machines and email accounts to using Amazon SES.
There is a middle ground, a grey area, as others have mentioned with dark patterns to trick you into opting in for things. I am not a fan of these, but this tool isn't really for encouraging that practice.
Sorry.
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