Show HN: Send email via Amazon SES and Sendgrid from your Google Sheets | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Send email via Amazon SES and Sendgrid from your Google Sheets

sendsimple.app

Looks good from a first look at it, congrats on launching it!

Just checked if you mention bounces and saw that you track bounces; how does your app show / keep track of the bounces and more importantly of the bounce rate in general?

I'm mentioning this since Amazon SES will place your account under review if your bounce rate is 5% or greater; you can find a few useful links on this comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21955614

Best of luck with your app!

Disclaimer: I was responsible for the implementation of an e-mail notification system using Amazon SES.

Could just use the SES dashboard I guess:

https://i.imgur.com/htmcpUP.jpg

yes

No, this is not the way to handle this. Please read up on how you must treat bounces on AWS SES or you face an account stop/closure. E.g. you MUST remove addresses from future sending once they permanently bounce.

Offering a software solution without offering a feature for correct bounce handling is just naive.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/monito...

I made my own SES mailer...

You can subscribe to post backs from SES. These post back tell you message-by-message if a message was delivered/bounced.. so "simple" process of storing the results. Need to track the unique message ID, some you might get multiple responses for the same message (e.g. delivered, then marked spam)

There might also be a CLI call to get summary stats.

Exactly, that's what we did with our solution, too; we maintaned our own bounce list with a TTL that we kept up-to-date by subscribing to SNS notifications generated by SES.

My question was aimed towards the bounces feature presented on the app homepage [0]; if you ignore (or don't realize the importance of) the bounce rate you might shoot yourself in the foot.

[0] https://www.sendsimple.app/#features_div

Thank gui, we don't track bounces right now but i will surely add it soon, thanks for sharing about amazon ses its helpful

Your features list is a bit misleading, then. On your app's homepage you specifically mention the tracking of bounces as part of the app's features.

I'm all for launching early and so on, but I have a feeling that this is a rather important feature to simply be omitted in the beginning, especially in regard to Amazon SES and their handling of exceeding bounce rates.

gui i added extra 10 percent discount for hackernews members just use "hackernews" on checkout

removed LTD thanks for feedback

This looks great - well done!

My two cents - I personally get put off by business models that include a lifetime access one time purchase option.

From my personal experience (as a prolific SaaS early adopter) it typically indicates that either; the software is a get rich quick scheme (e.g. spin up/spin down VPNs), or the founders haven’t accounted for scaling/recurring organisational costs in their business model.

If your product is good and it continues to provide value, people will continue to pay to access that value. There is no need to short change your business model with an infinite customer commitment ;)

its just for the first few customers, i am good dev but not too good at marketing i have some good distribution channel for LTD customers to whom i sold blurweb.app to 1000 customers the ltd revenue will fuel and accelarate the growth

Looks like a complete copycat of Mailmeteor (same wording, same interface)

as a human we can see face in bread with two tomato slices and some ketchup, yes they have similarity in ux but no they are not same check landing page demo video please

are you joking? you copied everything from their website to the interface. I've been using MM for 3 years now and can say this is a very lame attempt at copying a great product.

sorry i should not joke, professional answer: i will request to give sendsimple.app a try i have made it free to try no card or anything and see yourself the difference please

No it's not. Mailmeteor seems to be mail merge for gmail.

as for comparison:

With MailMeteor you are limited by gmail limit of sending while sendsimple you can use SMTP's like Amazon SES and sendgrid to send unlimited mail every day.

We have text messaging in road map too with twillio overall my plan is to make sending simple

Where is the Mailmeteor for SMS?

sendsimple is for mail with Gmail and SMTP + SMS + WhatsMessages (will take time) overall making sending simple and affordable

There's a ton of mail merge for Sheets that all have the same basic interface and wording (including mine). Mailmeteor certainly wasn't the first: https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/search/mail%20merge

nah, if you look at this app, they use the exact same wording and interface

What wording is similar? Interfaces also look different and their homepages look completely different. Using your logic, Mailmeteor looks as much like YAMM as this one does to Mailmeteor. Like I said, they all kinda look similar and do the same thing.

I made something similar in Excel:

- an email like template with input fields (to, cc, bcc, from, body, etc).

- a table where the user can specify the column headers and add a list of values. The headers are considered keys. The keys can then be referenced in mustache quotes anywhere in the template.

I also added attachment functionality since it was for a very specific use-case.

The tool would then create 1 email per entry in the user table, filling in all wildcards. As you can imagine, it doesn't use SES or Sendgrid .. it uses Outlook for the sending :) Good times! the business loved it, but coding in VBA is a bit of a PITA.

so is it still around?

Love the idea. I am using Mailchimp right now but can get quite expensive.

If I send mails using Sendgrid, or some other provider, using Sendsimple, can I review bounce rates and click rates as well?

Sendgrid provides this in their dashboard views.

You will need to add some CNAME records for ‘prettier’ link-tracking URLs.

thanks for sharing will see if i can show that info in the app do you know if they have api for that info?

for clicks you can use bitly links for now will add bounce rates if possible

i am using convertkit for one of my product blurweb app now i am crossing 1000 soon

i. just send product updates so their pricing can get so expensive when i don't even have a much need for automations and other hence using sendsimple its simple and affordable

I'm using SendFox (I'm not affiliated). For my limited use (< 10k list), Mailchimp was getting way too expensive.

You may want to take a look at https://sendportal.io, which integrates with SES, Postmark, Sendgrid, Mailgun and shows full info on opens, clicks, bounces, etc.

Disclaimer - I work there.

Wow, I've never heard of this platform! I'll be looking into this; thanks for sharing!

Been using it with mailjet. Since it's open source I just have a job in it that pulls my clients/subscribers from my main app and segments them automatically. I also define some number goals and can send out deals, updates automatically and just check in when I want. Really good tool, I also updated the template previewer so it's more realtime without the preview click.

Nice!!!

It looks nice, but not really sure who the target market for it is?

It's pretty easy for a dev to send emails from Google Sheets using Apps Script. If you want to send bulk, custom emails, then something like MailChimp can do this for free/cheap.

If you're looking to send thousands of emails, then you likely have a large customer base or a big marketing budget and can afford a proper tool.

I mainly use Sheets to automate internal processes, linking to Google Forms. Plus there's free tools out there, for example AutoCrat[0] that can do a similar thing, albeit without the SendGrid/SES link. But then again, if you're aware of SES you're probably technically minded.

I may be wrong though, good luck with it either way. If it doesn't gain traction, open sourcing it with a tip jar may be a nice touch and help keep it alive.

[0] - https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/autocrat/539341...

i think cold emails is a good usecase, with gmail if send 100s of email at a time or have bounce rate more than 5% you will get blocked so SMTP's can be really helpful

this is the Version 1 i have a lot planned to be added and improve

If you have a 5% bounce rate or more, you're already doing something wrong - i.e. your emailing addresses no longer existing. Make sure you have permission to email a recipient.

No offense but this is a very naive perspective on certain types of emails. For example for one-on-one cold sales emails you don't need their permission to email them. And there is an entire industry built around that.

true

> For example for one-on-one cold sales emails you don't need their permission to email them.

That depends on where the recpient resides. In the US maybe. Other countries have different rules and regulations.

That was my point. Your blanket statement of "Make sure you have permission to email a recipient." was not correct in all cases

Thanks for amazing response,

here is extra 10% coupon : hackernews

Give it a try for free for next 7 days without card or anything if like then i will share the pricing via email

Isn't Sendgrid still blocked by half the Internet because of all the spam from them?

I've found this isn't an issue if you pay for a dedicated IP.

Some filters I've seen are regex-matching the Sendgrid paths used for their link-tracking feature.

We have four dedicated IPs with them and have found there are a variety of providers (such as Comcast and, oddly, a lot of French ISPs) who use systems (such as Mimecast or Symantec) which basically mark down the entirety of Sendgrid's IP address space. So we now have Postmark as a "fall back" for failed deliveries which is working quite well.

Yeah, there's been a lot of talk about mail admins simply dropping all packets from Sendgrid's range. At least one of my customers assign a higher spam score to mails simply because they're from Sendgrid.

i don't think so

Don't think so. Doesn't seem like SG would be in business very long if that was the case.

We use sendgrid in production. Once in 2 years, we got the report that our shared IP had spam come from it, but was handled automatically by SendGrid once reported.

Really excited to see this! I have some small indie projects and often end up making something in Google Sheets to handle basic CRM functions.

Really excited to see a productized version of the hacky things I make in Google Sheets + Integromat haha.

I'd add that something like this for SMS would be killer. There are tons of email sending tools, but I have found far less for SMS.

SMS is a great marketing/messaging channel. Much better than email for a number of use cases.

i am adding sms too will update this next week

Is there a pay-as-you-go pricing (OK to be a higher than monthly) too? I'm looking for something like this but am willing to pay when I need but won't use it regularly.

can you message me via contact widget on website please?

messaged you on twitter please check

Interesting! Do I need to have my own SES or Sendgrid account?

yes

basically this helps to make it affordable

Surely not - SES costs $0.0001 per email plus $0.12 per gigabyte of data.

This helps make it easy to integrate with google docs etc.

Typo on the homepage if anyone from the app is reading: "Scale your online bussines without increase in overhead cost of email marketing."

thanks let me fix it asap

There's more:

> Unlimited Subscriber's

> Send personalise emails

english is not my first language, so thanks a lot its really helpful

Please fix the content. It should be "Unlimited Subscribers", not Unlimited Subscriber's".

Thanks for letting me know let me fix it asap

Yet another mail merge in town! The site looks very new though. Most links are broken in the footer.

we just launched yesterday, will be completing them all

We have plan to be not just "mail" merge i am trying to make sending simple so will be adding text messaging with twillio and even discussing partnership with some whatsapp api to send whatsapp message from google sheets

i agree that tracking bounces is critical for this. that said, I'm already a big fan and would love to give this a try.

I would also love to see if a pixel can be added to emails so emails and link clicks could be tracked as well.

will do for sure

Does this include list-unsubscribe headers and unsubscribe links?

its in the roadmap will add it soon (in less than 2 weeks)

Have you spoken with a lawyer yet? You may be facilitating CAN-SPAM violations in the USA, and possibly violations of similar protective legislation elsewhere, if you don’t take proper precautions immediately. If you’re worried, I would suspend operations until you can get a sign off on what you’re doing.

This seems like a really neat service! Kudos!

Thanks a lot

Mailbluster.com is similar.

I don't find any similarity than both sends email, please try sendsimple.app its free No cc required

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