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Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

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Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#101

Post by dceddia »

novalis78 wrote: post #39
dan1234 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re sending newsletters, you might want to look at Sendy[1] (no affiliation), which sends via SES. 1 https://sendy.co

Seconded. Can only highly recommend send. The license is inexpensive, you get the whole code base and can modify when needed as well. Setup is easy as integration into SES very mature at this point.

The codebase is a bit of a horror, though, of the old "PHP+SQL+HTML mixed in a blender" variety. I went in to make a few mods at one point and it was pretty scary.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#102

Post by simonhamp »

stephenr wrote: post #96

This 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…

Completely agree with this, my only concern is that an open-source solution increases the likelihood of spam-ridden senders popping up more frequently and becoming harder to shut-down as they can spin up instances more easily and get going from a new location more quickly.

There is actually some benefit to be had by the process of setting up a mailing service being a little trickier.

From a business perspective, it's also a great decision, as it shows customers who outgrow (or are in fear of outgrowing) your SaaS have a first-party path to scale.

And you could still make money off those customers if you can offer a strong support/hosting solution.

It's a massive win. As an aTech customer with some of their other products in the past, I'm really pleased to see this and I wish them all the best!

Also, proud to support fellow Brit tech companies ;)

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#103

Post by stephenr »

simonhamp wrote: post #102
stephenr wrote: post #96

This 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…

Completely agree with this, my only concern is that an open-source solution increases the likelihood of spam-ridden senders popping up more frequently and becoming harder to shut-down as they can spin up instances more easily and get going from a new location more quickly. There is actually some benefit to be had by the process of setting up a mailing service being a little trickier. From a business perspective, it's…

> becoming harder to shut-down as they can spin up instances more easily and get going from a new location more quickly

I don't think this is going to work in their favour - spammers already have the tools they need - the real killer is blacklisted IP's/ranges.

If you're legit, you can jump through some hoops if you inherit a blacklisted IP.

If you're a spammer, all you can do is try to get an IP that isn't blacklisted.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#104

Post by smichel17 »

stephenr wrote: post #96

This 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…

That's some pretty strong hate for the GPL without reasoning to back it up. As a fan of the GPL/AGPL, care to elaborate?

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#106

Post by tysonstewart »

jccalhoun wrote: post #105

Is it common now to call email "mail?" I don't know anything about this area (never even heard of mailgun or sendgrid) and wondered if this was some kind of service for sending actual mail.

No. These are services to send emails without overhead of maintaining your own service.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#107

Post by cnagele »

dan1234 wrote: post #3

Isn’t part of the reason for using Mailgun, Sendgrid etc that you get to send via IP addresses with good reputation?

This is a big reason for sure. As you can see in this post, those IP addresses can be hit or miss depending on the provider. At Postmark, we don't really believe in dedicated IPs for all customers. We think that our customer base should not include any bad actors, and instead manually approve every customer to ensure our entire CIDR ranges are clean. The benefit is not just clean IPs, but clean IPs that have an incredible transactional-only reputation with the ISPs. This is how we are able to delivery so fast to the inbox. We only really believe in dedicated IPs for higher volume senders, especially since reputation is moving toward the domain more and more. I wrote about this six years ago, and it is even more true today (https://postmarkapp.com/blog/the-false-promises-of-dedicated...).

At the same time, if you are willing to install and manage Postal on your own servers, it's not that hard to maintain your own IP with a great reputation. You just need a good hosting provider (probably not AWS), you need to set up your infrastructure like DKIM, SPF, DMARC, rDNS, and Return Paths, and most importantly you need to maintain good engagement (low bounces, high opens). At a glance, Postal looks like a nice option if you want to do it on your own for cheap. You just might lack the stability, support, maintenance, and performance that goes behind an ESP.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#108

Post by jimktrains2 »

itissid wrote: post #85
chatmasta wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually curious, so if I understand you correctly what you are saying is that a receiver had some software generated an address like johndoe+A16789HFF...@gmail.com and then sent it to the sender for use, that would require email providers cooperation. I am not clear on the "cooperation" parts work. I THINK its basically that email providers block emails based on other criteria like DNSBL. And the "cooperation" bit i…

That's more-or-less what I was thinking. The receiver would require understanding of the signature to white-list the message; the sender just sends to an email address as they would normally. No or invalid sig would fall back to our current anti-spam methods.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#109

Post by jimktrains2 »

drdaeman wrote: post #89
AJ007 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think overall ISPs do a very good job at fighting spam. Compared to a decade and a half ago, I would call it a minimal problem. My greatest fear is that Google and Facebook will co-opt email and charge money for companies to get access. Google has already made some progress with this by selling ads in Gmail that look like email while pushing commercial messages in to other inboxes. This is bad because it penalizes…

Correction: large^W giant mail systems, that can observe a significant portion of world's mail, and have a lot of R&D resources, do a very good job at fighting spam (in their own systems). A DIY home mailserver will still let, like, 5-15% of spam emails slip through.

Even with Gmail I still find enough false-positives on spam to make me troll through it daily to make sure important emails don't get sent there.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#110

Post by jimktrains2 »

criddell wrote: post #83
jimktrains2 wrote: post #47

Earlier 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…

> We really need a better solution to fighting spam. I rarely receive email spam these days. The spam I get is on my voice line. I'm getting several robocalls per day. If you have the skills to work on this stuff, I'd love to see a solution to phone call spam because email spam feels solved.

I get more spam and more robocalls every single day. I can't rely on even Gmail's spam filter, because it has a non-negligible amount of false-positives.
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