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Comment by Joel_Mckay | Hacker News Reader

Almost every SaaS (Spam as a Service) API ends up arguing its minority of legitimate users are a justified excuse for the majority of nuisance traffic.

Most cloud IP blocks already have very poor reputations, and or already on Spamhaus blacklists.

People have a right to choose to be upset. =3

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My experience has been the opposite of what you're saying: AWS SES (one of AWS's flagship products, and probably the biggest email sender in the world) is a pretty responsible anti-spam citizen. Spamhaus even wrote this article[1] praising SES's anti-spam efforts. From the article: "Amazon SES has a long-standing relationship with Spamhaus, working closely to prevent suspicious IPs and domains from impacting their network." Though I'm sure that new incidents come up daily, Spamhaus themselves seem to disagree with the notion that SES's IP blocks have "poor reputations."

[1] https://www.spamhaus.org/resource-hub/service-providers/how-...

Whatever IP people temporarily host on a cloud incurs the prior users reputation.

Again, using legitimate traffic to shim network spam is a common counterargument against black listing.

Of the approximate 274000 banned hosts I stare at... many nuisances are from Amazon, Azure, digital ocean, and Hetzner. I am sure Maildrill or Mailchimp does have legitimate use cases, but generally the majority of the traffic suggests otherwise. I am certainly biased in this opinion. =3

Are those hosts using hosted VPS instances, or are they sending through SES? There's a pretty significant difference... FWIW, I get why a lot of VPSes simply block email hosting altogether. It makes it a bit harder for me to find a host for my own small server, but I do understand the pain. Some services are better or worse, and I can imagine at the scale of many cloud hosts, trying to keep the IPs for general hosting out of blocklists would impact the bottom line more than reputational damage for a handful of legit email hosting accounts.

TBF, the demo app referenced in TFA and depending on how many emails you actually send for however many domains may well be a better option for me than my small MTA server.

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