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Comment by ksajadi | Hacker News Reader

We sent a lot of emails which makes services like Postmark or Mandrill very expensive. Since switching to Amazon SES, the cost has been much lower but the lack of individual email tracking has been a pain (in case a recipient claims they haven't received it or we need to track opens, etc).

This UI with an Amazon SES backend would be ideal.

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If you’re sending newsletters, you might want to look at Sendy[1] (no affiliation), which sends via SES.

1 https://sendy.co

Seconded. Can only highly recommend send. The license is inexpensive, you get the whole code base and can modify when needed as well. Setup is easy as integration into SES very mature at this point.

The codebase is a bit of a horror, though, of the old "PHP+SQL+HTML mixed in a blender" variety. I went in to make a few mods at one point and it was pretty scary.

this is exactly what i was looking for. thanks

There was a lot of activity in this space when Mandrill "died" last year.

This comparison was a very good overview of hosted options: https://www.metachris.com/2016/03/free-transactional-email-s... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11328631

And the discussion there linked this detailed sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Nb1YqYJq9eWm6ojLDRXd... | https://sendyhost.com/mandrill-alternatives-245/

Per "Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy" | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9151487

The Sendy codebase is horrifying. [...]Just lots and lots of rough PHP _vs_ This isn't software to be used for analysis. Sendy is f-in awesome!

Amazon SES rocks from a pricing standpoint but deliverability isn't its strong suit _vs_ I find no difference between SES and MailChimp regarding delivery

I would stick with Sendy, but I could never get the unsubscribe links to work _vs_ there is a version 2 of Sendy, which appears to fix all these problems

lighter version of Mailchimp and super cheap [...] Configuration is a bit painful

I have been using it for almost 1.5 years and really like it.

if you are taking all the trouble to install Sendy you should look at Mandrill (2 years go) _vs_ Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account (1 year ago) | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11170713

Also self-hosted: https://github.com/bevacqua/campaign | http://directmailmac.com ($100)

Hosted Sendy: https://www.sentopia.net/

Other/creative alternatives: http://tinyletter.com/ (5000 free) | https://domain.yandex.com/domains_add/ (500 outbound/day) | https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html

Sentopia.net founder here. I agree that the codebase could be better, a lot better.. but we have made heavy modifications and it's not a problem anymore, I should add that we have tried to work together with Sendy.co developers but seems our emails are being ignored. Sendy is a platform, and a good one at that. but our value is on our SMTP server pools and their reputation as others have mentioned. We are always looking at new platforms like postal, that we can jump on board with if it means a better user experience for our clients.

> the lack of individual email tracking has been a pain

SES did introduce tracking back in 2014 or so. You can get notifications for deliveries, bounces, and complaints.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ses-delivery-notifications/

I co-founded https://emailoctopus.com which might be what you're looking for - we're an AWS partner offering marketing features (list management, open tracking, etc.) on top of SES.

You could also try something like Sendwithus hooked up to your SES account. They provide a consistent template, delivery and customer support interface for email that integrates with a lot of different providers.

It's a nice layer who's pricing works if you're sending a lot of emails to the same people over and over again. The entire setup (pricing and interface) is build around individuals sent to and not total email volume.

If you want to track opens and some more metrics independent of your mailing solution you should try mailspice.com

(Disclaimer: Developer of mailspice)

Since it uses SMTP anyway, shouldn't be too hard to allow it to use SES as a smart host.

If you want to send newsletters, try Mailwizz.

Be careful with some of the alternatives and be sure to read their source code with an empty stomach.

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