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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean “you own your newsletter”?

Your newsletter is owned by a massive corporate platform such as Mailchipm, which will ban you for wrongthink/wrongspeak just like other massive corporate platforms like Facebook.

Just the first news story I found: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1017221 - keep in mind that “antivaxxer” doesn’t mean what it used to mean but could simply mean you’re pointing out that vaccines aren’t 100% safe or 100% effective which is absolutely true but was considered fake news by mainstream propaganda a year or so ago. Besides the point but I expect I’ll get some replies so just noting preemptively.

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You're conflating the medium (newsletter) with its distribution mechanism (mass mailing). If you have the content and the destination addresses, it's trivial to switch to another provider.

Other providers can still ban you.

Switching providers sometimes requires all existing subscribers to “opt in” again.

Regardless you’re still owned by a platform. Gmail ain’t gonna let you deliver 1000s of emails yourself.

Others can ban you, but if the first band was bogus, the others probably won't ban you.

Others could require everyone opt in again, but most of the email providers don't require this.

People move their list to another provider all the time; very starkly different from a bunch of followers on a social platform.

> You're still owned by a platform.

There is a clear difference between lock in to a single provider and their commercial interests and strategy and the possibility that your content might fall foul of a number of providers.

For many email is a much less risky option than alternatives. Do you have a better option?

Then you just move to another ESP / newsletter service with your mailing list? Or even run it yourself with something like listmonk.

I don't use Mailchimp and never will. I use sendy.co with amazon and on another system I built my own mailer using Mailgun. The main thing is to ensure you have an opted-in mailing list. If you spam randoms, all of these platforms will ban you.

Sure, you might get kicked off a newsletter provider platform. It's a risk.

But you have far far more options to take your subscriber list and go to a different provider (substack, tinyletter) or even build your own solution using something like mailgun or AWS SES. (Yes, that latter option would be quite a bit of work, but if you had, say, 20k email subscribers, it might be worth it.)

If you get kicked off twitter or facebook or even a place like HN or Lobste.rs, you have exactly zero ability to export the contact info of people who knew you and want to continue to hear from you.

It took me about four hours to build an SES based mailing system. With dynamodb, lambda and the API gateway it is almost trivial. Put docker in the mix and it’s more like going to the moon.

I don't think SES is particularly hard to use. That being said, there are a huge number of caveats:

* Email HTML is gnarly. Hope you like tables. The vast majority of web developers aren't equipped to write email HTML for something as simple as a button and have it render correctly in all email clients.

* Things get much more complicated when you need to email a large number of people (say 10s of thousands - very real for a lot of newsletters) and want to both personalize your content (e.g. add unsubscribe links) and not take 30 minutes to email all your subscribers.

* The metrics you get with SES are extremely barebones. Makes Sendgrid look incredible, and that's saying something. Deliverability and inboxing will be even more of a black box than usual.

SES to handle transactional email is completely reasonable. Doing bulk email sends using SES is asking for trouble and you'll consistently lag way behind the big marketing ESPs (MailChimp, Constant Contact, Active Campaign) on delivery rates.

Making sure you avoid spam traps, fraudulent signups, purchased lists, spammy campaigns and all that are most of the work. Even if your customers are internal only, what happens when one of your salespeople uploads a sketchy email list they got from who knows where.

I've worked at an ESP before and you'd be very surprised how many smart people are just working on the spam detection.

That's great first hand experience, thanks for sharing. Personally I'd probably look at an open source package, but my biggest worries about building my own emailer would be:

* making sure I followed the best practices (DMARC, DKIM, etc).

* building IP reputation. Not sure how SES does with deliverability, but I know that can be an issue.

* email clients rendering of my newsletter. This could by using text only, I suppose. That might work depending on your audience.

Again, though, at least you have the option of building your own solution when you have a newsletter.

It’s not a technical problem.

The difference between you and Amazon is that Amazon can deal with Gmail by picking up the phone. You aren’t even going to get as far as ‘talk to the hand’.

You can do all the things like DKIM right and still go straight to spam. If you’re a real DIY fanatic you’ll run your mail server at home or some other IP address which is doomed from the viewpoint of deliverability and be too stubborn to change it.

The SES/Dynamo/Lambda system is perfectly balanced for email lists that generate a huge amount of traffic for short bursts but still need to handles bounces and subscribe/unsubscribe requests whenever they come in, even if you don’t feel like getting around to rebooting the server stuffed under your bed. If you try to do it on a conventional server you need to pay for a lot more server if you don’t want it to get overloaded at peak load.

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