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Comment by baobabKoodaa | Hacker News Reader

If you are not in the business of selling email delivery, you should be buying email delivery from a company who is in that business. It's extremely hard to get emails delivered and it's even harder for a small company. For your use case you could probably use Postmark and get good delivery with that.

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Unfortunately Postmark was recently acquired by a so-called “campaign management” company and they have already started sending unsolicited commercial mail to unauthorised recipients, and when I pushed back and complained they became downright hostile and confrontational and told us to unsubscribe - from a marketing list that we hadn’t opted into, and that was operated via their new parent company. It was like a conversation from the dark ages of UCE where the spammer says “just opt out mate”. So Postmark are dead to me now.

Holy crap! I had no idea. Do you mean they sent unsolicited commercial mail to registered users of Postmark, or do you mean they sent to email addresses they collected as part of their operations (emails that users of Postmark sent emails to)?

The former, but not even the primary details of a registered account; they subscribed the emergency contact email addresses, which for us included one of my board members, who then contacted me saying “why am I getting this noise?”

It was neither an emergency nor a transactional message, making it exactly the kind of behaviour they don’t permit from their own customers. Doubling down with the instruction to unsubscribe oneself could only be interpreted as a “fuck you”, and coming from an email company claiming such a moral high ground as Postmark formerly occupied, a sensational own goal.

Using SES is buying email delivery from a company who is in that business.

Disagree here. The sendgrid, mailchimp, postmark of the world are in the business of sending emails. They have their dedicated IPs and handle deliverability, anti spam, and whatnot with email providers like Gmail.

SES is an email sending infrastructure tool. That's not the same.

IMO equating SES with an email company is like saying home depot is a contractor because they sell hammers and lumber. It gives you the tools to be able to build stuff but it's not the same as a construction company.

SES, like Mailchimp, Sendgrid, and Postmark, has dedicated IPs as a paid add-on.

SES is not in the business of ensuring deliverability for your email. Dedicated ips is another hammer that they sell.

If Amazon can't make it work, might just use good old postfix I guess.

My anecdotal evidence is that simple postfix setup with IP from a reputable hoster which is not blacklisted works perfectly. And it's actually pretty simple to configure postfix for sending mail (now configuring postfix + dovecot + auth + spam filtering is another story).

> If Amazon can't make it work, might just use good old postfix I guess.

AWS blocks TCP25 outbound by default [1].

[1] https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/ec2-port-25-throttle

> My anecdotal evidence is that simple postfix setup with IP from a reputable hoster which is not blacklisted works perfectly.

And my anecdotal evidence is that it does not work perfectly: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-ser...

As others mentioned they are using a paid AWS email service. In fairness however the price is very low thus making the bar to entry very low. They will have no shortage of customers that abuse the system, do not handle UCE reports and in some cases are outright spamming. The spammers may get blocked with time but there will be a continuous wake of damage in their path on the shared pools of IP addresses.

> you should be buying email delivery from a company who is in that business.

OP is doing just that, Amazon SES = Simple Email Service

Then OP should change services to a service that offers this as their primary mission objective.

If SES isn't delivering some stuff, Amazon will link to a page and say "here is why, good luck" and that's the end of the support ticket.

> OP is doing just that, Amazon SES = Simple Email Service

If you look at AWS pages for SES, nowhere on their pages do they market email deliverability. That's not the service they sell.

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