Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 177 posts

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#91

Post by ez77 »

detst wrote: post #52
ez77 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could anyone explain the usage of 'white label' here? The Wikipedia entry (+) doesn't help this foreign speaker. (+) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-label_product

"White label" in this context would basically be a middleman. Customer pays the white label for the AWS services and the white label pays AWS. The white label would obviously have to offer something of value and in this discussion, that value would be predictable pricing and maybe simplification of the services.

Thank you and jrnkntl (edit: and alttab) for explaining it.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#93

Post by wahnfrieden »

ajju wrote: post #73
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #28

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.

Many companies will resell space to you on AWS with a flat fee model. Many hosts now are simply AWS front-ends.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#94

Post by astrodust »

tybris wrote: post #79
mike-cardwell wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl/CPAN wins hands down. And I am both a Perl and a Java programmer.

Well, except in code quality.

There's some awfully shady Java code out there, but since it looks impressive with all those abstract bases and factories you can't see the real problems.

A 12,0000 line Java program with the same features and the same bugs as a 500 line Perl script is going to look clean in comparison even though it's just as crappy.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#95

Post by kordless »

ladon86 wrote: post #3

You get a daily quota of 2000 messages if you're an EC2 customer. That's pretty competitive, and nicely within the limit of what I'm sending at this stage of my startup. Sold, well played once again Amazon.

I can send up to 2K messages a day with a premiere Google Apps account.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#96

Post by gaiusparx »

infocaptor wrote: post #62

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.

It is also now simpler to create competitive alternative to mailchimp as you can just focus on the user experience and features rather than delivery. Great opportunity for startups.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#97

Post by subbu »

plusbryan wrote: post #72
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #28

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…

You think that's complicated? Boy, back in my day, we didn't have no fancy "management console" or "tabs". Why, you had to play with your AWS services by hand ! And you liked it.

Wanted: A webapp/dashboard that tracks money you have spent acorss Amazon services.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#98

Post by marcc »

jonknee wrote: 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.

One of the things Amazon is doing differently is offering complete control of the email headers. I've recently been evaluating some services and many don't offer this. I don't want to send marketing emails, unfortunately I have a service provider who uses e-mail as an integration strategy (instead of rest or anything similar). AWS does fill a niche for me, although I imagine that my particular niche is tiny. Although part 2, ill be hooked and using it for other email services soon.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#99

Post by smokinn »

latortuga wrote: post #89
d_r wrote: 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.

That's not how AWS works at all.

Werner Vogels (Amazon's CTO) explains it well here:

http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-clo...

And the history is well presented here:

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-computing/am...

The tldr; is basically that AWS was a skunkworks project within Amazon with its own completely separate infrastructure. Its success is mostly independent from Amazon.com's success. (Amazon.com funded it but mostly left it alone until it hit it big.) As Vogels points out, within 2 months of launch AWS would already have surpassed Amazon's excess capacity. I imagine now with some of the huge customers such as Netflix and NYT on AWS the AWS traffic may dwarf Amazon.com's.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#100

Post by dalore »

pilif wrote: post #66
devicenull wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 SM…

Except they already have auth setup for all their other webservices. Why not make email yet another service and the auth infrastructure is already there.
Post reply on HN