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Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#61

Post by eli »

jonknee wrote: post #38
eli wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dare you to look at the API for some of the "traditional" email service providers. I've had the displeasure of working with a few from some of the big names and they are real DailyWTF material.

I have worked with Constant Contact and it was a Constant Headache. My favorite was when they took the API down for maintenance and maintained HTTP 200 OK status codes for requests but instead of XML returned it was an HTML page saying they were down. I took a screenshot of the page because it was so surprising: http://www.jongales.com/blog/2009/10/17/constant-contacts-in...

EmailLabs/Lyris decided to invent their own XML-over-HTTP API format rather than use REST or even SOAP or anything else you might already have a library for. They combined this with a very poor understanding of how XML is supposed to work (lots of tags) and return results that aren't guaranteed to validate. Dates are represented in one of six different formats depending on which particular function you're calling. If there's a problem, you might get an error, you might get back nothing. I could go on.

Silverpop is similar.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#62

Post by infocaptor »

I guess this is a great opportunity for individuals to provide services like aweber, mailchimp etc. Think about it, now you don't need to worry about the hardware. Provide a killer interface, make it super super easy and have a low monthly fee and let the user pay the amazon bill. ofcourse there are multiple revenue models but now is the opportunity.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#63

Post by jsatok »

maverhick wrote: post #33

I like this. They are priced at 25% of sendgrid, which we use as we send a million emails a month or so. But sendgrid provides a dedicated IP address. Having a dedicated IP over a period of time helps with delivery as the IP 'reputation' increases based on your delivery rates. A lot of EC2 Ips are blacklisted by ISPs because people just create instances and spam away using exim/sendmail. If amazon and keep its IPs cl…

I'm in a similar situation. Sending hundreds of thousands a month with SendGrid, and while it'll be more than Amazon, I think the dedicated IP makes it worthwhile.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#64

Post by d_r »

On the topic of sending e-mail, I discovered the following note on my utility company's bill payment page. I'm guessing they have never heard of SendGrid or the like.

http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dennis/GGBF...

(They did not reply to my friendly e-mail about it. Or perhaps their box was over quota...)

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#65

Post by fooandbarify »

bromley wrote: post #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" detec…

How would legitimate use be falsely flagged as spam in large numbers? Other than a malicious conspiracy of some sort, I don't understand why a disproportionate number of e-mail recipients would target legitimate mail as spam. Am I missing something?

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#66

Post by pilif »

devicenull wrote: post #56
pilif wrote: post #48

I wonder who's going to be the first to announce a SMTP proxy for this? More seriously: While I can kind of understand that Amazon has their API and probably wants this to work similarly, but there is already a wide-spread protocol for sending out email (SMTP) and I just can't understand why they can't provide an endpoint for that. Many applications which I really see making use of this already have built-in SMTP sup…

If they use SMTP, they run the risk of a compromised server sending spam through them. With the API, it makes it a bit more difficult for a compromised machine to start spamming, unless it already has API keys for this service.

Nothing prevents them from requiring SMTP-Auth for authentication to make sure that the sending is coupled to a specific account.

If we are talking compromised machines, then the key would be compromised as well at which point a spammer can use that key to send spam regardless of protocol.

I'm not saying to use smtp auth with your amazon username and password, but with some token derived from the API key, but just SMTP.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#67

Post by nolite »

nolite wrote: post #5

I wonder how well their mailing reputation is for high deliverability with this new service.. I've heard that mailing from EC2 was almost pointless due to its low reputation score

After reading through the guides, this is the most simple and clear exposition of email deliverability and reputation I've ever come across.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/...

(The mailchimp guide is also nice, and very extensive http://www.mailchimp.com/articles/email-delivery/ )

Seems like they'll like use a completely different IP range than EC2, and there shouldn't be any problems.. lets hope

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#68

Post by izak30 »

bromley wrote: post #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" detec…

We have had our entire account at threat of termination because of spam complaints. Here is the scenario: We aim to be for designers what heroku is for developers, so we resell amazon's service. A designer's client (Small business, medical industry) was mailing SPAM emails from yet another party's shady service, but linking to the AWS-hosted website.

Amazon sent a semi-threatening email directly to me, along with the email in question so I could deal with the culprit. It happened twice. The second time us, and the small business client needed to part ways so that I could keep ensuring AWS that we were being good stewards of their IP addresses.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#69

Post by izak30 »

fooandbarify wrote: post #65
bromley wrote: post #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" detec…

How would legitimate use be falsely flagged as spam in large numbers? Other than a malicious conspiracy of some sort, I don't understand why a disproportionate number of e-mail recipients would target legitimate mail as spam. Am I missing something?

Well, illegitimate use has to be handled appropriately as well, or we're in a "This is why we can't have nice things" scenario.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#70

Post by pfarrell »

nolite wrote: post #5

I wonder how well their mailing reputation is for high deliverability with this new service.. I've heard that mailing from EC2 was almost pointless due to its low reputation score

I work as an engineer for an email service provider. I can tell you that deliverability is one of the core things you bring to the table when you are doing sending for a lot of people. It's the sloppy, people oriented aspect that developers ignore (imagine you've got a huge send going out and gmail just flagged you as a spammer, you better have a contact there to fix it fast). Sure, you can write an app to send a million emails in a few minutes, but your work (and bandwidth costs) are pointless if it never makes it to the customer's inbox.

There are a lot of dirty details in sending at volume. But like the old saying goes, "where there's muck, there's brass."

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