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Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#14
post #4

If it works like they say, this is a godsend. Email is a royal pain and the pricing of SES is well below market rate. Postmark ( http://postmarkapp.com/ ) is similar and is $1.50 per thousand, compared to $.10 per thousand from Amazon.

Mailchimp appears to be offering unique emails from $5 per thousand! They appear to have significant discounts for emailing lists, but even at $12903 for 24.8 million emails, that's still $.52 per thousand.

http://www.mailchimp.com/pricing

Data transfer rates still apply for Amazon, but still... am I missing something?

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#15
This is excellent. I recently moved a production website to EC2 at the last minute due to contractual disagreements with a hosting vendor. My next step was to sign up on SendGrid and configure postfix to use that for emails, SES will be better integrated into the AWS ecosystem.

As a lot of you may know, emailing out from EC2 is mostly impossible as all ISPs bounce them back

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#16
I'm not so sure Sendgrid, Postmark, and other email senders should be shaking in their boots.

There's plenty of other businesses that leverage AWS technology and resell it for a higher price. I bet they add AWS as an option as a value added reseller.

If you have an existing email host integrated throughout your site, it might make more sense to just stick with them.

It will force them to lower their prices though.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#18
post #6

I suppose this will hurt the competition, sites like sendgrid and mailchimp.

I don't think it will kill off the likes of SendGrid. It might actually help expose Email-as-a-Service to potential customers who weren't aware that those companies existed. In the end it could expand the market for everyone and end up benefiting the competition as well.

Pick an Amazon Web Service and for most (all?) there are several standalone companies competing on quality, customer service, and ease of use.

The problem for the competition is that Amazon's suite of services is getting more and more comprehensive and using ALL of their offerings really does lower development overhead (versus picking and choosing the best standalone Email/Queue/Storage/CPU offering).

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#19
I wonder how they will respond if an account gets over the allowed threshold of spam complaints. I could see them responding either by:

a) Cutting off the customer's use of Simple Email Service; or

b) (Much much worse) cutting off the customer's AWS account, including EC2 and so on.

I'm guessing a), but it would be nice to have assurances against b). Otherwise a false positive on the "they're using SES to spam" detection system could be catastrophic.

The SES docs just point to the standard customer agreement - http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ - which doesn't appear to make any specific mention of SES terms and conditions.

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