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Show HN: SESS – Simple Email Sending Service

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Re: Show HN: SESS – Simple Email Sending Service

#31

Post by massaman_yams »

conquistadog wrote: post #27
sessy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A valid business email is one where you should be able to receive and send mails. If you have a 'catch all' email id, the system does not accept that. Having said that i must say our algorithm is deliberately a bit aggressive (so as to prevent spam). Your email could very well be a false positive. Could you write to support@sess.email from the business email in question. I'll be happy to look into it and whitelist it…

What technical means do you use to detect a catch-all address? I know of no reliable method for that purpose, since receiving server cooperation would be required and could not be trusted.

This won't detect a catch-all address, but will almost always detect a catch-all domain: send email to [long random string]@domain. Does it bounce or is it accepted?

Re: Show HN: SESS – Simple Email Sending Service

#32

Post by sessy »

massaman_yams wrote: post #30
sessy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me rephrase your query. If you send 2 emails and 1 bounces, then your SBUR would be 50% and so will you be banned? NO. We predicted this would happen. The SBUR doesn't kick in for the first few thousand mails. Over time your list gets cleaner (because we keep track of bounces, unsubscribes and dont send them emails from next time on.) (I'm one of the engineers who developed SESS.)

Dirty spammer hack: include 50% of recipients as addresses you control, and that won't ever bounce, complain, or unsubscribe. That pushes SBUR down, likely below threshold. These are often addresses created manually by 'click farmers' so they don't have obvious patterns which could enable an email service provider to identify them. (I'm still working on figuring out ways to detect this...) Or, send spam to a new addr…

Hey, thanks for the points. Will be sure to factor these in.

Re: Show HN: SESS – Simple Email Sending Service

#33

Post by greglindahl »

sessy wrote: post #16
chrisper wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the website not mobile friendly? It acts really wonky on my side. Firefox Beta on Android.

I must agree that we have not given particular thought to making this work on mobile. We made the assumption that people composing newsletters would mostly be working on desktops than on mobiles.

That's probably true for actual customers using the service, but when people discover your site, they're more likely to be on mobile. You can have a different landing page for mobile that focuses on the "about" without having the huge composer page.

Re: Show HN: SESS – Simple Email Sending Service

#34

Post by CodeWriter23 »

sloka wrote: post #3

Looking this up on mobile. I hope you're considering making it more mobile friendly. But then I'm not sure how many would prefer composing newsletters on mobile. Good luck though.

Composing on email might be a thing. But for me, I can’t even view pricing or terms on my iPhone 8 Plus.

Re: Show HN: SESS – Simple Email Sending Service

#35

Post by finaliteration »

a13n wrote: post #29

Amazon's email service is called SES, simple email service. Since these names are quite similar and could cause confusion, you are probably infringing on their trademark.

At first glance I thought this post was going to be an SES feature or something. So...

Re: Show HN: SESS – Simple Email Sending Service

#36

Post by mockingbirdy »

sessy wrote: post #17
mockingbirdy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will need to add machine learning based classification of mails before sending them. Spammers will just create the next account until they get detected again. Their servers will be faster on a blacklist than they can spell Spamhaus. I recommend ULMFiT [1]. [1]: http://nlp.fast.ai/classification/2018/05/15/introducting-ul...

Like i mentioned in an earlier comment, we have a nifty little program that checks both the validity of the business email as well as the domain. Then a sampling of the list is done to weed out troublemakers. We do a little bit more. Unfortunately i can't get into specifics here :)

Ok, nice to hear that. It seems that you've put some thoughts in it. Mail is very easy to mess up, so I wish you all good luck!

Re: Show HN: SESS – Simple Email Sending Service

#37

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

massaman_yams wrote: post #31
conquistadog wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What technical means do you use to detect a catch-all address? I know of no reliable method for that purpose, since receiving server cooperation would be required and could not be trusted.

This won't detect a catch-all address, but will almost always detect a catch-all domain: send email to [long random string]@domain. Does it bounce or is it accepted?

Why would you block by that? I've worked places that intentionally did use the catch-all, mostly against misspellings.

Re: Show HN: SESS – Simple Email Sending Service

#38

Post by rkagerer »

sessy wrote: post #10

Hi, i'm one of the engineers that made SESS.EMAIL as a side project. AMA.

Nice designer. Is there a simple way to make the emails look like they came from a server in my domain? (e.g. can they relayed through my own SMTP server provided I make the necessary configuration tweaks)

Re: Show HN: SESS – Simple Email Sending Service

#39

Post by insomniacity »

sessy wrote: post #11
insomniacity wrote: post #8

My only concern with trying this as someone just starting out with email marketing is that I don't know my SBUR rate... in fact I would assume that the first ever email to a new population (even if legitimate) is bound to have a far higher rate given errors in data collection (say collected on paper, leading to bad email addresses and bounces) and keen unsubscribers. Then I'm successfully banned and have to go to ano…

Let me rephrase your query. If you send 2 emails and 1 bounces, then your SBUR would be 50% and so will you be banned? NO. We predicted this would happen. The SBUR doesn't kick in for the first few thousand mails. Over time your list gets cleaner (because we keep track of bounces, unsubscribes and dont send them emails from next time on.) (I'm one of the engineers who developed SESS.)

I mean, that's also an interesting question to ask, and a reasonable answer.

But it's not quite my original point - which is that if I don't know my SBUR rate, that would put me off ever starting to use this service. Though of course your competitors may have similar rates I'm just not aware of.

Re: Show HN: SESS – Simple Email Sending Service

#40

Post by conquistadog »

massaman_yams wrote: post #31
conquistadog wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What technical means do you use to detect a catch-all address? I know of no reliable method for that purpose, since receiving server cooperation would be required and could not be trusted.

This won't detect a catch-all address, but will almost always detect a catch-all domain: send email to [long random string]@domain. Does it bounce or is it accepted?

How does the existence of a catch-all, of any kind, make it not a "valid business domain?"
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