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Comment by santa_boy | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps a bit OT, but will really appreciate inputs on this.

There have been an influx of such tools, and understandably so, related to email lists. Based on various comments, I feel that the biggest item driving success around email is around email deliverability.

What are the the skills and secret sauce of companies that claim to do very reliable email deliverability, and I'm failing to understand why isn't it as simple as doing the right configurations and setting it up using Amazon SES.

Any email gurus to please throw actionable light on this?

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> What are the the skills and secret sauce of companies that claim to do very reliable email deliverability, and I'm failing to understand why isn't it as simple as doing the right configurations and setting it up using Amazon SES.

Email deliverability is reputation based (beyond IP) and takes into account technical, reputational and behavioural factors.

Technical basically means getting stuff like SPF, DKIM and DMARC right.

Reputational means you’re sending from a reputable IP and that the domain you’re sending from is reputable. If you’re too small to warrant your own IP, you need to be on a shared one with other good senders.

Behavioural just means that your recipients are engaging with your emails in a manner that the inbox provider deems to be positive.

Some of this stuff is a bit challenging to setup, or it’s a bit tough to build the reputation, there’s no real secret sauce to it though.

I wrote about a few of the secret sauce tricks here: https://jacobfilipp.com/blocklistings/

It's very challenging to maintain good mailer reputation when you let "the public" use your IP addresses (easier to deal with a dozen enterprise mailers than a million mom-and-pop shops). Some vendors use psychological nudges ("reminder: our contract forbids web-scraped and purchased lists"). Some use technical means to block problematic email addresses. Some buy/scrape lists on the down-low and use them to check if customers are uploading scraped lists...

How did you justify paying $6,000/year for a dedicated IP address? SES will provide you with the same thing for $25/month (https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/#Amazon_SES_Pricing). I noticed your statistics didn't include SES. To me, mystery surrounding reliable email deliverability is primarily a tactic some vendors use to entice non-technical people into relying on their proprietary email marketing solution.

The reason we are paying $6k/year for something that normally costa $20 is that we've been with this Marketing Automation provider fir many years, and a lot of our internal training/documentation/integrations are tailored to them. The $6k price tag is not a big enough fraction of our contract to justify switching. And, importantly, all of the other enterpriae-scale marketing automation vendors play this exact same game (the main competitor is owned by Oracle...). We're getting screwed, but I chose to lose this battle in order to reach my greater objectives :-)

The reasons why the stats don't include SES is because the target audience for this article is fairly narrow: it is people at orgs that pay for "Marketing Automation" software. That software has capabilities beyond just email sending, and is used for marketing (hence different deliverability challengea than those at SES, which has a broad customer base and can be used for transactional/alerting emails)

Yes, "deliverability" is often used as something vendors use to spook people. It only matters at scale (like >10,000 people per mailing). And many vendors dont actually know what theyre doing.

I'll be glad to answer more questions on this thread or through email (its in my profile)

Email deliverability is no secret. Just send an email to one of many email deliverability testers to find out the spammyness of your email: https://www.mail-tester.com

The sender IP address is a large component in determining email spammyness. This is why SES allows you to pay extra for a dedicated IP address (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/dedicated-ip.html). However, it's not something you will likely need unless you send in large volumes.

It's definitely no secret but those testers do not provide the full story. No do IP blocklist checkers - not all blocklists are created equal, nor do most have any impact at all.

For most senders, whilst IP reputation does play a role, as long as you're on a decent platform the majority of your deliverability concerns will be surrounding your own domain's reputation. Your domain reputation is directly influenced by your sending behaviour. You need to be sending to people who want to receive your email and will engage with it.

iamacyborg's response above is spot on.

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