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Comment by callesgg | Hacker News Reader

Send your emails yourself.

It's not like it is hard. At least not harder than integrating to a third party email sender.

Sending email is hard and for most people not a thing that provide them with a proper ROI, because among other things...

- You need to make sure that your email servers IPs are not on black lists.

- That you use DKIM properly

- your multipart mime encoding is correct

- bouncing e-mails are handled...

- take care of scaling & operating the servers

- and so on....

You can spent ( and waste ) a lot of time on this... especially if you are new to email sending..

> - You need to make sure that your email servers IPs are not on black lists.

This alone is a huge, huge chore. Especially if you run a hosted service that allows some user-specified content in outbound email bodies. It's a lot cheaper for us to pay Mandrill to handle all of that for us, provide us excellent metrics and diagnostics, and let us know if one of our users is sending junk mail before it gets out of hand.

Even if you do everything right you can still find yourself on a blacklist. Then you get to pound sand.

Blacklists suck. Not as much as spam sucks, though.

Frankly, with the amount of bullshit blacklists out there that real mail providers actually trust, I've come to detest blacklists more than spam.

Has anyone set up a blacklist full of random IPs as a joke to see how many people follow it?

Well, we have been put on blacklists that the operator wanted money to "expedite" removal from. I'm assuming that blacklist was pretty much random IPs... And it did impact deliverability.

Is sending emails yourself as easy as changing two lines of code in your app? That's what it took to integrate Mandrill for me. If you think that's as hard as sending email yourself, you are wrong.

Yeah, it's not hard: until you want to reach mailboxes at some obscure providers like Yahoo or Outlook.

Yes, SendGrid sends emails, but there is value add on top of that. (e.g. negotiating with hotmail to ensure your emails get through, webhooks, APIs, statistics, templates, etc.).

Yes, sending an email is easy enough. It's all the other stuff we have services like this for.

Deliverability plays an immense part why people rely upon an ESP.

Yeah, I have to imagine anyone who claims sending email yourself isn't hard probably hasn't sent enough email to know how hard it can be. There's a new problem with every order-of-magnitude increase in volume.

If you use EC2 or the like your IP address or the entire address block could have easily ended up on a spam list so your email will be blocked. I wish SendGrid was only necessary for people who sends lots of mail but the reality is that no cloy provider can guarantee that email from their IP addresses will be delivered.

If you invoke sending email through Amazon SES, it's free for the first 2K per day, due EC2 blocks being on spam lists.

http://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/

"You can send 2,000 messages for free each day when you call Amazon SES from an Amazon EC2 instance directly or through AWS Elastic Beanstalk."

We just switched off of SES because of the lack of bounce/rejection diagnostics, and their internal blacklisting policies are really aggressive. If someone's email server goes down for a few hours, they're blacklisted for quite some time, even after it comes back up.

After using SES for close to two years, I'd suggest looking elsewhere if you really care about deliverability or stats/metrics. We switched to Mandrill a few months ago and have been very impressed. It's still a tiny, microscopic percentage of our budget, but we get so much more (open/click reporting, sub-accounts, rendered email body history, much better blacklist/whitelist management).

Thanks for the recommendation! Will have to check them out.

Does open/click reporting still work for GMail with the changes to the way they load images?

Check out the bottom of this post for where they stand on that: http://blog.mandrill.com/rejection-imports-subaccount-enhanc...

They get accurate data for clicks, but geolocation/browser stats for opens aren't 100%. They still track the rates, but it looks like they're coming from one of Google's proxies, so this is the best they can do for now.

Another +1 for Mandrill. We've been quite happy with them as well.

> [...] the lack of bounce/rejection diagnostics [...]

My employer has been making more and more use of SES, and we've just started looking at automated processing of feedback notifications [1]. Did you find them lacking?

[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/notific...

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