Announcing Amazon SES Management Console | Hacker News Reader

Announcing Amazon SES Management Console

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20 pointsTiZon6 comments

Be interesting to see a SES vs Mailchimp vs Sendgrid vs Postmark etc comparison table. Any bloggers feel like writing that post?

As a new customer of SendGrid, I'd be VERY interested in this. More specifically, I'd like to learn about possible integrations with Mailchimp and SendGrid. Sendgrid is super cheap and allows me the ultimate flexibility in email customisation, but I'd like to be able to use the boss-friendly UI and advanced segmenting features of Mailchimp (w/o having to write it -badly - myself).

Many of our email campaigns turned out to not need extensive customisations, which is why we started off doing it in-house. I'd much rather let the business folks be responsible for turning off/no campaigns than having to wait for me. Plus that darn chimp is cute!

This is pretty interesting, I was really hoping they did this along time ago, seems it was the only thing missing to their Messaging Products after they introduced SNS and SQS. I've been using Postmark for about two years now, and I love it. I'm even beta testing one of their upcoming features for inbound email handling. One of the reasons I prefer Postmark to other services like SendGrid is their awesome simple and inexpensive pricing. Even though they don't have fancy features like unsubscribe links and all that, those features aren't that hard to implement yourself. I'm seeing that SES is more comparable to Postmark than to MailChimp(which really ain't for transactional emails) and SendGrid(with all the fancy features). SES is cheaper than Postmark with just $0.10/1000 emails instead of $1.50/1000 emails.

As a member of the Postmark team, I first want to say thanks for your loyalty.

Now onto the technical stuff.

One of the main reasons that it is impossible to compare Postmark with Mailchimp (and even difficult to compare it to Sendgrid or SES) is our laser focus on transactional email delivery.

We've been in the email business long before building Postmark, and we know the differences between how ISPs treat transactional (event or customer triggered) emails and bulk (marketing) emails.

We also know that because ISPs treat these emails differently, they need to be SENT differently. This is why we strictly prohibit bulk sending on Postmark, to make sure that the transactional email sent through our system has the highest rates of (and the fastest) delivery possible.

We know that we've had customers leave because we limit sending to transactional emails - but its to the benefit of the customers we have because we maintain extremely high delivery rates.

Email delivery is, as we've leanred, very susceptible to "Tragedy of the Commons" in the fact that it's very easy for a small number of people to spoil the value for the many. We're protective of our infrastructure this way because our customers can trust the result.

Comparing Postmark to SES on the pricing front is something we chose to avoid as well. You can drink well whiskey or top shelf bourbon. Both can get you drunk, but you'll only really enjoy sipping one of them :)

I've found that SES is pretty vague for managing complaints against the sender. The metrics that this provide are useful, because someone with limited technical skill can monitor complaints and adjust course. If the email system you're writing provides an admin UI to change the particulars (from email, subject, various headers), then complaint management and tweaking can all be done without a coder.

Mmm. Unfortunately the console doesn't really offer much at this point. A few nice charts and you current sending limits. I'm assuming the guys will continue to add to this in the upcoming weeks.

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