Question: if all these companies monitor outgoing SMTP traffic, how are people sending billions of spam messages a day? What's the loophole?
Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid
91–100 of 189 posts
Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid
#92Isn’t part of the reason for using Mailgun, Sendgrid etc that you get to send via IP addresses with good reputation?
I tried using Sendgrid and was surprised to find out that unless you buy an expensive plan, then: * You get IPs from a shared pool, and the reputation is nowhere near guaranteed. In fact, many of my mails were blackholed or rejected. * The "bad" IPs that were used by someone for spamming are not immediately removed from the pool, so you will encounter them. The net result for me was that Sendgrid is not a solution fo…
I second to that. For a few years now my opinion was that Sendgrid is a good guys of sending email... until I realized most of the spam I'm getting is from Sendgrid IPs, including for example continuance of work offers from Uber (I am disabled and I cannot even drive a car)
I'm unsure what problems Sendgrid is battling but their customer support staff is certainly understaffed or they simply gave up on fighting spam. So yes if you want to send spam and can start with highest paid account they offer, probably Sendgrid is your best bet.
Also their spam@ and abuse@ is a waste of time. It came to point that they simply started ignoring my inquiries at all! Here is example of one of my emails that is not getting any response, if Sendgrid is actually reading this: support+id1021573@sendgrid.zendesk.com
As sending spam is a Federal Crime, I have already reached out to FBI, FTC and next plan to write my State Attorney General.
Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid
#93If I were to host this myself, I'd still need a static IP that had a good reputation. GCP and Azure both mention that we should not be hosting mail servers on their platforms (rather, they all suggest we setup mail servers + relays to a reputed IP).
How would I go about getting a static IP or a reputed IP?
Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid
#94Now if only there was a decent self hosted alternative to MailChimp.
You might want to check out https://sendy.co/ , or https://emailoctopus.com if you want a hosted equivalent. Both will save you a lot of money over MailChimp. Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of EmailOctopus.
Not sure if you or I will catch any hate as I point out that your disclaimer as founder of emailoctopus was included elsewhere in the thread but not here.
Just pedancics/semantics from me; many in this situation include the info (some:only) in the profile instead/as well and that has been mostly accepted in the past. I also appreciated your mention of another alternative too, it's definitely not over-the-top astroturfing in any way!
PS. Add yourself to AlternativeTo.net
Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid
#95Now if only there was a decent self hosted alternative to MailChimp.
http://alternativeto.net/software/mailchimp/?platform=self-h...
This actually showed up right away (suprising even though I use alternativeto.net often, nice SEO on their part) - and it had useful info!
Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid
#96This sort of thing is fantastic to see, regardless of whether you want to run your own mail servers for this task.
That they provide a hosted service using the same stack is great to see: host it yourself, or pay them to host it for you. This is what great open source businesses can look like.
No "open core" where the good stuff isn't available for the community, and community efforts to implement the same thing get rejected.
No viral licensing like the GPL or jesus shit on a stick, the AGPL.
Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
We really need a better solution to fighting spam. https://github.com/jimktrains/email_ng is an overly complicated idea I had once, but the basic gist is that the receiver could give the sender a signed receiver email address that is for the sender's email address. This way, transactional email (and sure, I guess marketing from your company) would be able to get through and the email given out wouldn't be able to be…
This sounds like a cryptographic way to achieve the aliasing scheme many people already use, e.g "chatmasta+hackernews@gmail.com". Your proposal requires at least the status quo (aliased email address at signup), but the problem is it also requires cooperation of the receiver's email provider (e.g. gmail) and the sender's email provider. You are unlikely to ever see any new standard adopted by all major email provide…
There are services like 33mail.com, which I've used for years, which do exactly that. You give a service an email like servicename@chatmasta.33mail.com (or a custom domain, if you're on a paid plan), and then you can block/unblock/track emails per username.
Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might want to check out https://sendy.co/ , or https://emailoctopus.com if you want a hosted equivalent. Both will save you a lot of money over MailChimp. Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of EmailOctopus.
Not sure if you or I will catch any hate as I point out that your disclaimer as founder of emailoctopus was included elsewhere in the thread but not here. Just pedancics/semantics from me; many in this situation include the info (some:only) in the profile instead/as well and that has been mostly accepted in the past. I also appreciated your mention of another alternative too, it's definitely not over-the-top astrotur…
You're quite right - I've updated the comment and my profile to include that information. Thanks for mentioning.
We're already on AlternativeTo but unfortunately below the fold on most of our competitors.
Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid
#99Isn’t part of the reason for using Mailgun, Sendgrid etc that you get to send via IP addresses with good reputation?
There have been a few discussions regarding deliverability:
Why does Gmail hate my domain? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855030
How to Avoid Spam Filters | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10465639
If there are others I'd appreciate a link!
Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried using Sendgrid and was surprised to find out that unless you buy an expensive plan, then: * You get IPs from a shared pool, and the reputation is nowhere near guaranteed. In fact, many of my mails were blackholed or rejected. * The "bad" IPs that were used by someone for spamming are not immediately removed from the pool, so you will encounter them. The net result for me was that Sendgrid is not a solution fo…
How can you check if an IP is good or spammy? It would be nice to get an elastic IP in the cloud, test it for spamminess, and give back the bad ones. Catch and release fishing for IPs.
http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855145
https://senderscore.org/ per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9156312
http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329371
http://multirbl.valli.org/ per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11330382