Hacker News Reader

Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

Email sending is a largely efficient market, and SES is the cheapest sender.

Thus, the SES IP pools have the worst IP reputations among all the SMTP-based senders. I would never use them (or an ESP that sends with them) in a million years.

The reason why cheap = bad in email is because Spammers have the lowest conversion rates of all senders (their emails are always untargeted), so price is their number 1 consideration.

You can cheap out elsewhere in your stack. But never cheap out on email — especially if you’re not sending high volume enough for a dedicated IP.

View on HN

Thanks

I never had to use SES or really Email for that matter in my own architecture.

Since we get so immersed in best practices and recommendations of good architecture pushed by these very cloud providers (AWS, Azure, etc) -- this kind of candid information is usually not available unless we burn our fingers and learn through own experience.

I wish there was more efficient way of such practical knowledge to be shared among practitioners. Current discussion forums etc work to an extent but just hope there was much more effective way to spread awsreness.

> best practices and recommendations of good architecture pushed by these very cloud providers

...are deliberately designed to mix several actual best pracices and a lot of marketing so that it's difficult to discern what is what.

This is bad advice.

SES is the best among the provider.

They treat spam very seriously, compare to other. You would need to maintain a baseline, failure to do so will get the account into soft-susspend or permanent suspended quickly.

AWS, being an engineering focus product, provider tooling and automated around bouncing, spam reporting handling. Having sophisicated tooling help user deal with that.

They strongly againtst and not suggest end-user to buy dedicated IP. Where as other providers always want user to pay more for "dedicated ip" to "get better delivery".

AWS has procedure, best practice to encounrage slowly warmup when sending mass volume. They had their own rate limit (14 messages per second by default), move the account out of sandbox, a good domain/sender verification.

They are the best among providers when it comes to email.

Sometimes they appear to be worst than others, but that is a specific case. The way email works will always have false positive. If user decided the email is spam(even it isn't) and keep reporting it may appear in a certain spam list.

Every SMTP service (Mailgun, Sendgrid, Postmark, etc.) does the same things AWS does to try to prevent spam and has the same features you mention (shared IPs to start, warmup on mass sending, developer tooling, etc.)

Email delivery is a commodity business at this point, hence why there's so many PE rollups in the space.

The fact of the matter is it only takes 1 bad send to end up on a blacklist, and SES is the cheapest so it will always be the most attractive target for spammers/fraudsters.

Am I correct that maybe you run a Saas built off SES and might have incentive to defend?

I run a competitor of SES so I won't defend them.

But the problem is that Mailgun/Sendgrid/Postmark and the like is less senstive to spam and ban. The ban on SES is way heavier and the spam rule is stricer.

Maigun/Sendgrid even suggest to use dedicated IP pool to improve delivery, where as AWS SES doesn't https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/dedicated-ip.html https://docs.sendgrid.com/ui/account-and-settings/dedicated-... You can see the tone there.

You are assuming that SES allows for spammers. In my experience, SES has pretty good controls , limits and policies to dissuade from spamming.

Literally all ESPs and SMTP services have super strict anti-spam policies. The problem is it only takes 1 bad send to end up on a blacklist.

The cheapest service will always get the most attempts from spammers. You can try to detect them before they send, but the only way you know for sure that they're a spammer, is after they've already sent spam using your platform.

I'm a bit surprised that the spammers even bother with it, since it costs money and the conversion rates are near zero. I had the impression that most spammers would rather take over hacked accounts -- not quite zero cost, but pretty low.

If SES is the worst, who is the best? By implication, simply the most expensive providers?

Not necessarily (although, hard to imagine there's even 1 spammer willing to spend $100,000/yr on some enterprisey crap like Salesforce Pardot or Marketo).

But I'd just go with whatever sender isn't the cheapest and has the founders still intimately involved in the product. Stopping spammers is ultimately still a human game. Postmark used to be my go-to, but they sold, and I'd bet my entire salary that within a few years that service will end up like all the others that have been bought-and-sold.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com