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Comment by rolleiflex | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a more modern alternative to Sendy (https://sendy.co/) which is a little cheaper. (no affiliation except being a user)

Sendy does look like it has more features though - and it has been around for far longer, corner cases debugged and all. I’d love to hear how this is any different from Sendy.

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I can read the installation instructions of Sendy and say "yup, I can do that. Upload a file, point my web browser towards it".

I read the installation instructions of MailCoach and wonder whether this Composer thing is what I would use if I had a server that's not a DigitalOcean server, and whether this is something I can install without becoming a PHP wizard.

Composer is the apt, yum, dnf, npm, pip, etc of PHP

And it's a hurdle when the audience is small non-tech businesses wanting a newsletter.

For a dev company, maybe even integrating it into one of their applications, great!

Sendy targets very much the former ones. I just assume MailCoach does, too, but I don't really know.

It's a hurdle for anyone who isn't a PHP developer. Why would anyone else have reason to know that?

Sendy has abysmal performance for large lists though.

I'll never understand why they haven't fixed that. A while ago I ended up writing a little patch that parallelized list sends with Redis backing things and some worker processes. Took me maybe a day of work. If I remember right we were easily getting a few hundred sends a second, could have easily gone faster. Default Sendy was a few a second on the same machine/resources. SES can support tremendous send rates if you get limit lifts from AWS.

that's because SES HATES being used. IT's very much a "If you absolutely _must_ send and email from here.. fine. we'll let you, but you _really_ ought to use some other service."

Can you elaborate a little on that? SES looks reasonable from the outside; what problems does it have that other email services don't?

Not GP but I can give you my experience. SES seems to be a "good enough" solution if you use their API. There are a lot of missing features, such as logging anything other than metadata, which makes it not so useful if you are operating in a regulated industry.

The real problems come when you try to use the SMTP gateway. It's quite slow and unreliable and doesn't really work for parallel workloads. The only way to somewhat mitigate it is to deploy a postfix into EC2 and then queue your emails there.

> The real problems come when you try to use the SMTP gateway. It's quite slow and unreliable and doesn't really work for parallel workloads.

Ah, that's helpful to know. I would normally have wanted to use the SMTP gateway as a more portable API, to avoid tying things to Amazon-specific APIs. But it sounds like doing so would add substantial fragility.

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