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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

#151

Post by jitbit »

Great discussion here, not necessarily about the OP's link, but still learned a lot. Would love to contribute my 2 cents...

Our app[1] sends/receives several million emails per month. Not an exaggeration, it's actually seven figures.

Meaning it's more than 100k a day. Meaning it's 5-6 emails every friggin second. On average. It, of course, peaks during US daytime, up to 30 per second.

We tried a looooh-ot of solutions (all priced at THOUSANDS a month at this volume) including Mailgun, Sendgrid, SES etc, but finally settled to a tiny Ubuntu micro-instance on EC2, running Postfix. It has 1 gb of memory, costs us $4 a month and the CPU load rarely goes higher than 4%.

Of course you would need to get yourself familiar with SMTP, postfix, SPF/DKIM, mx-validation, blacklists etc. And by "familiar" I mean "learn it tothe core" :))

Another thing - you need to build-up reputation for your IP, cause email providers like outlook/gmail/yahoo will simply reject your emails if you start sending a LOT out of the blue. You have to build it up gradually, takes months to get there. Makes it a huge PITA when you need to change your IP :((

PS. If you need incoming email to call some external REST-api - postfix can launch a local php-script that does that. Not sexy but - $4 a month, right.

[1] https://www.jitbit.com/hosted-helpdesk/

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

#152

Post by joering2 »

massaman_yams wrote: post #138
joering2 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Spam sucks, but don't waste your time reporting it to federal agencies. In practice, 'unsolicited' isn't a high enough bar for them to care - it has to be overtly fraudulent, malicious, etc. in order to have a shot at getting attention.

I disagree. This would be a very bad concept to ignore not high enough crime to be reported.

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

#153

Post by StavrosK »

jrodom wrote: post #124
bhatman wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, we've been seeing problems like this with Mailgun for about a year (with the support ticket record to show for it) and I'd love to get in touch. FYI your email address is not currently visible in your profile (should be in the 'about' section).

Fixed. Lets figure it out.

Is this per-project, or per-customer? I run https://spa.mnesty.com/ with you, which has a 1.5% bounce rate (I'm guessing that's high? I don't really know), and I wouldn't want it to be interfering with my personal email (0% bounce) that I also run with you.

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

#154

Post by _asciiker_ »

j_s wrote: post #119
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

Per "Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy" | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9151487 The Sendy codebase is horrifying. [...]Just lots and lots of rough PHP _vs_ This isn't software to be used for analysis. Sendy is f-in awesome! Amazon SES rocks from a pricing standpoint but deliverability isn't its strong suit _vs_ I find no difference between SES and MailChimp regarding delivery I would st…

Sentopia.net founder here. I agree that the codebase could be better, a lot better.. but we have made heavy modifications and it's not a problem anymore, I should add that we have tried to work together with Sendy.co developers but seems our emails are being ignored. Sendy is a platform, and a good one at that. but our value is on our SMTP server pools and their reputation as others have mentioned. We are always looking at new platforms like postal, that we can jump on board with if it means a better user experience for our clients.

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

#155

Post by jimktrains2 »

user5994461 wrote: post #143
jimktrains2 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gmail does an incredible job. The last few times I went to spam and saw emails that shouldn't be in there, a careful inspection revealed they were actually very well crafted phishing messages. Ever since, I don't bother checking the spam folder. Too dangerous. Gmail is smarter than me.

No, legit emails end up there every day for me.

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

#156

Post by azca »

jitbit wrote: post #151

Great discussion here, not necessarily about the OP's link, but still learned a lot. Would love to contribute my 2 cents... Our app[1] sends/receives several million emails per month. Not an exaggeration, it's actually seven figures. Meaning it's more than 100k a day. Meaning it's 5-6 emails every friggin second. On average. It, of course, peaks during US daytime, up to 30 per second. We tried a looooh-ot of solution…

This is what I would do as well. Coming from a hosted mail solution (one of the earliest in the Industry as part a of the initial Dotcom bubble) that cost 10000x5+thensome as much to run, albeit with higher send rates and clusters, It totally makes sense to use ec2 for these needs today.

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

#157

Post by movedx »

jitbit wrote: post #151

Great discussion here, not necessarily about the OP's link, but still learned a lot. Would love to contribute my 2 cents... Our app[1] sends/receives several million emails per month. Not an exaggeration, it's actually seven figures. Meaning it's more than 100k a day. Meaning it's 5-6 emails every friggin second. On average. It, of course, peaks during US daytime, up to 30 per second. We tried a looooh-ot of solution…

Hey,

So firstly, I don't work for AWS or Amazon, or any Cloud provider. Just wanted to make sure that was clear.

After reading your very interesting comment I thought I'd do some maths on the costs SES should be charging you. Essentially at $0.10 per 1,000 messages, and sending "several million" or "seven figures" worth of messages per month, so a possible total of 9,999,999, you should be paying almost exactly $1,000 for that. That's not really "THOUSANDS", but it is substantially more than $4 haha :)

If you're sending 5,000,000, then the figured drops to $500/month.

Anyway your $4/month server is a very cool concept. Would you be willing to share the configuration? Perhaps you've written an Ansible Playbook to provision it for you?

EDIT: So essentially my point is this: it's not that expensive, compared to compute resources to actually run your application, to have someone else manage all of that for you.

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

#158

Post by nodesocket »

jitbit wrote: post #151

Great discussion here, not necessarily about the OP's link, but still learned a lot. Would love to contribute my 2 cents... Our app[1] sends/receives several million emails per month. Not an exaggeration, it's actually seven figures. Meaning it's more than 100k a day. Meaning it's 5-6 emails every friggin second. On average. It, of course, peaks during US daytime, up to 30 per second. We tried a looooh-ot of solution…

How about redundancy when your $4 a month VM goes down? If you're sending/receiving that much e-mail, I assume uptime is critically important.

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

#159

Post by ams6110 »

jitbit wrote: post #151

Great discussion here, not necessarily about the OP's link, but still learned a lot. Would love to contribute my 2 cents... Our app[1] sends/receives several million emails per month. Not an exaggeration, it's actually seven figures. Meaning it's more than 100k a day. Meaning it's 5-6 emails every friggin second. On average. It, of course, peaks during US daytime, up to 30 per second. We tried a looooh-ot of solution…

you would need to get yourself familiar with SMTP, postfix, SPF/DKIM, mx-validation, blacklists etc. And by "familiar" I mean "learn it tothe core"

Why? Wouldn't the "proper" or "best" way of configuring all these things be pretty much the same for everyone? Why could this just not be a receipe: do all these things, in this order, etc.

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

#160

Post by ams6110 »

jwr wrote: post #40
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?

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…

Same experience with Mailgun. The "free" tier servers do not have good reputations. As you can imagine, being free, they are used by spammers. I found it impossible to send to yahoo.com recipients. Gmail, interestingly, did accept and deliver almost all messages.
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