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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

#161

Post by desdiv »

nodesocket wrote: post #158
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.

Dumb question, can you reassign an already assigned public IP address to a different EC2 instance?

Let's say GP's micro instance goes down, or extra load brings the need for a larger instance, can they spin up a different EC2 instance and reassign the existing public IP address to it?

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

#162

Post by nodesocket »

desdiv wrote: post #161
nodesocket wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dumb question, can you reassign an already assigned public IP address to a different EC2 instance? Let's say GP's micro instance goes down, or extra load brings the need for a larger instance, can they spin up a different EC2 instance and reassign the existing public IP address to it?

Absolutely, this is done on AWS with EIPs (elastic ip's). You can migrate an EIP between instances via the AWS API and the change takes effect nearly instantly.

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

#163

Post by sanderjd »

ams6110 wrote: post #159
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.

I don't know anything about this space, but I strongly suspect the generic answer applies: because you need to be able to debug the system when things go wrong. Things always go wrong, and no recipe can replace expertise when they do.

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

#164

Post by ams6110 »

massaman_yams wrote: post #135
eloff wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In practice, while there are some services which will purport to tell you an IP's reputation, their output isn't well correlated with actual delivery outcomes at scale (depending, to some extent, on what domains you're sending to). This is because the big consumer mailbox providers often don't rely on public datasources for assessing reputation, and because reputation is tracked at the domain level, in addition to -…

> there have been some indications from Gmail that they no longer use IP reputation at all

I can believe it. I posted already about my experience with the free tier of Mailgun's service. I went through all their instructions about setting up the service and verifying my domain etc. but still had a lot of email rejected, especially by yahoo.com but also hotmail.com due to poor reputation IPs

Gmail.com typically delivered everything.

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

#165

Post by giglamesh »

joering2 wrote: post #68
speleding wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until recently I sent newsletters from our own infrastructure and I agree that it's doable, but: - You have to ramp up sending from new IP addresses VERY slowly if you want to avoid getting grey / black listed by Yahoo and AOL, this makes it quite a tedious process - Make sure you also have rDNS set up, Gmail uses it as an important quality signal - Accurately handling bounces is a bit of a nightmare because each mai…

Sure. Until they email you your account is "temporarily suspended due to some spam complains" and before you find out some angry customer felt that tmher refund process took too long and filter her email to see yours and click "mark as spam" each email and you scramble to setup your own mailservers before you let employees go because your company is unable to send a single email to make a single sale this month... Un…

Mine was suspended for spam and I was falsely accused by Mailgun of have compromised servers. Initially I freaked out and then discovered that my servers were fine, but my account at Mailgun was hacked and used to send thousands of spam emails. This happened a couple of times. I asked to see the IP addresses of the senders and Mailgun said they didn't track that/could not tell me. And then they had the audacity to bill me for sending spam that was sent as result of their system being compromised.

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

#166

Post by _jal »

user5994461 wrote: post #145
_jal wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, with the exception of AT&T. The Deathstar rejects all mail from my server, despite (a) no spam ever having been emitted from my domain in almost 20 years, (b) the IP having been stable for coming on eight years, and (c) I don't send bulk mail. Best I can tell, their blacklist-removal process is auto-deny with no humans in the loop. I gave up and decided screw them, I don't need to talk to anyone with an…

You need to configure SPF and DKIM, irrelevant of what reputation and service you have.

They are. I've been running mail professionally since the early 90s; not to brag, but I know what I'm doing.

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

#167

Post by ams6110 »

Arnt wrote: post #58
gondo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but if opt for dedicated IP address, dose it matter if you have it from Mailgun or if you have your own?

That depends on who you are. Mailgun will do some chores for you, for a fee. If those chores are things you can do in your sleep, fine! Mailgun does nothing magic.

Since I've complained about the free tier reputation issue elsewhere, I will say that Mailgun gives you a great set of management tools and a very nice API. Those are things you're going to have to build/assemble yourself (or do without) if you just go the "postfix on an EC2 instance" route.

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

#168

Post by [deleted] »

movedx wrote: post #157
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 $1,00…

[deleted]

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

#169

Post by tinix »

sanderjd wrote: post #163
ams6110 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know anything about this space, but I strongly suspect the generic answer applies: because you need to be able to debug the system when things go wrong. Things always go wrong, and no recipe can replace expertise when they do.

As OP said, there are also things to consider, such as IP reputation, etc... I've done higher volume mailing from a tiny server just like OP, but we also had a couple huge slices of a /24 and pile of /16 net blocks GRE tunneled and used different blocks of addresses for different types of mail. It's not as simple as just setting this up and forgetting it, there's a good bit of arcane knowledge required to do it right. If you're sending millions of messages per day, you cannot afford to burn a bunch of IP addresses because you triggered grey/blacklists for major ISPs or email providers. Shit, these days, you can't afford to burn IP addresses, period. They are officially exhausted. If you HAVE to hit a user's inbox, you can assuredly afford to spend a few grand setting it up right, and then reap the rewards for months/years afterwards for very little recurring cost. Just my two cents, as someone who built a single server to send millions of messages per day.

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

#170

Post by theprop »

Is this more than an SMTP server? Those are services designed to send emails as an API service for many different parties. Is that what "Postal" is? Or is it a another SMTP server like Postflix or something? It's not at all clear from your description...
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