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Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

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81–90 of 177 posts

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#81

Sendgrid & other such senders will be shaking in their shoes now. Personally, as soon as I have more time, I'll switch to the amazon service. Also, any new app I make will use Amazons service by default. Sending email out is quite important for growth, and such services really help businesses. What impresses me about amazon is that they are not looking at what the competition is charging or trying to charge high base…

I think there's only one appropriate response when Amazon comes stumbling into your market: http://blog.easydns.org/2011/01/18/easyroute53-nameserver-in...

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#82
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?

All sorts of things can lead people to erroneously assume that an email is spam (and mark it as such).

For example, if your app sends out an automated email that isn't clear about what site/service it relates to, a proportion of recipients are likely to mark it as spam without reading it and figuring out who its from. Few people have time to read email that looks to them like spam.

Or, if your company or service emails its list of subscribers for the first time in months, quite likely half the list will have forgotten who you are and the fact that they opted in to your list in the first place. And a disproportionate number of them will mark your email as spam.

Or if people sign up for MyBrandedWebsite.com, but then receive an email from Software Company X (the company behind MyBrandedWebsite.com), people won't recognize the link, and a proportion will mark the email as spam. It's a rookie mistake on the part of Software Company X, but it happens all the time.

Ultimately, minimizing spam reports requires a lot more than double opt in and an unsubscribe link.

Amazon will be keen to minimize spam reports for emails sent through their system, because they'll need to ensure that their deliverability rates stay high. So they'll need good automated systems to detect spammers. But email/spam detection is an inherently fuzzy business, and false positives are inevitable. If a false positive could bring down an entire service hosted on AWS, even if just for a few hours, then using SES starts to look pretty risky.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#83
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?

People sign up. People get tired of your email. Clicking spam is easier than clicking unsubscribe (which people are also taught not to click on). Both AOL and Yahoo have been pretty aggressive about banning mail servers that send too much "spam", which in several cases was a legitimate mailing list people had to ask to subscribe to.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#84

Seems Amazon wants to fight it out with Google, by matching the new services with Google App Engine's free quota. $0.10 per thousand in SES -> $0.0001 per email recipient // Same as in GAE. You can send 2,000 messages for free each day when you call Amazon SES from an Amazon EC2 instance directly or through AWS Elastic Beanstalk. // Same as in GAE. This, along with the recent AWS Elastic Beanstalk release and Amazon'…

I actually doubt that they really care about competing with Google App Engine. I mean, AWS has NetFlix, New York Times, Dropbox among their customers and GAE has.... who?

What I do think is that services like GAE have set a standard for the ease of use and price. People are now looking for free tiers, instant deployment, and traffic-based pricing. Customers are expecting Amazon to provide the same and so they do.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#85

Sendgrid & other such senders will be shaking in their shoes now. Personally, as soon as I have more time, I'll switch to the amazon service. Also, any new app I make will use Amazons service by default. Sending email out is quite important for growth, and such services really help businesses. What impresses me about amazon is that they are not looking at what the competition is charging or trying to charge high base…

I think this must have always been a concern for companies like Sendgrid. As someone who operates a service to allow incoming email (CloudMailin) there's nothing more worrying than the big boys coming along an sweeping you up. However, so long as you continue to add value people will choose your product over the competition. Moves like this can ultimately lead to a far better product in the long run.

Having tried the service it's currently clunky and command line based too! I wouldn't actually call these comparable products. SES seems more like it replaces transactional emails that users might have previously event sent without a lot of a anti-spam measures. The value that companies like Sendgrid/Mailchimp/Postmark add outweighs the price for me and, at least, in the short term I won't be moving anywhere.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#86

Sendgrid & other such senders will be shaking in their shoes now. Personally, as soon as I have more time, I'll switch to the amazon service. Also, any new app I make will use Amazons service by default. Sending email out is quite important for growth, and such services really help businesses. What impresses me about amazon is that they are not looking at what the competition is charging or trying to charge high base…

The thing is, Sendgrid et al will continue to innovate in terms of feature set, and AWS never will. And that's a good thing: They focus on the absolute core of a product need - and let providers like heroku or dropbox grow like a vine on top of them, providing things people want.

> Sendgrid et al will continue to innovate in terms of feature set, and AWS never will

Seems to me that Amazon has been quite busy innovating and expanding their feature set.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#88
post #73

I love what Amazon is doing with AWS, and I like this new service a lot. Plus I'm a happy customer. But damn this is all getting very complicated. First they turn off email, so you have to find a provider, then they turn it back on, but you have to pay them. Looking at my AWS console, I've got 8 or 9 tabs on there -- each representing a little piece of what I might want in an app. Each has it's own help section with…

Seriously, the lack of a flat fee model is the main thing that has kept me away from AWS.

That's the point, though: usage driven fees. It's absolutely not the most economical offering, but the freedom and ability to either quadruple your infrastructure or shut it down entirely, no strings attached, in an instant is what you're paying for.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#89
post #17

It amazes me how quickly AWS iterates and adds new features. Also, this is just what I needed for a site I am building (I was trying to figure out which third-party mail provider to use.)

One of my coworkers remarked that it's amazing how Amazon just takes their existing infrastructure and repackages it to be sold as a service. When you look at it as something that they already had built for themselves, while still being awesome, it helps keep perspective.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#90
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

These are not really comparable products. MailChimp is an email broadcast and subscription management service. It's for sending things like email newsletters and marketing campaigns. SES/Postmark/Sendgrid are more for one-to-one type communications, e.g. delivering your application's forgot password email.

Ah, thanks for that clarification.

However, I would have thought that the "one-to-one type communications" would be more expensive (per email), than sending to lists. Amazon seems to allow both, at a much lower cost.

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