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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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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