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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Do not run your own mail server. Deliverability is a full-time job for somebody. You can share that "somebody" by using a mail service agent (MSA -- Sendgrid, Postmark, Amazon SES, etc) for roughly 1/100th of the cost of employing them directly. Mail server software is also notoriously finicky and every minute you spend administering it is time that doesn't move your business forward.

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I can not confirm this at all.

Yes, initial setup can be a hassle, but after that, my experience is that deliverability mostly depends on the content you send, not the MTA or its configuration (you should have SPF, DKIM etc. in place, of course).

However, if you also need (semi-)automated bounce handling (as in, automatically unsubscribe hard bounces), then yes, you probably shouldn't roll that yourself. But I don't really consider that to be MTA-related stuff.

This has been my experience as well. At a certain scale, it's worth internalizing this effort of course, but that is (in my opinion) an enterprise-level problem (and has an accompanying enterprise-level headache).

I've had great experiences with MailGun, Sendgrid and Mandrill. Amazon SES not so much; very cheap but deliverability seems to be an issue (anecdotally).

Unless you have experienced email person on the technical team, you will waste way too much time on configuring, etc.

I used to have email servers running AWS and eventually gave up. Hosted email services are far less hassle.

I agree. I use Mandrill.

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