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

101–110 of 177 posts

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#101

Post by jsdalton »

Jabbles wrote: post #90
jsdalton wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, well keep in mind a few things:

* Until today, MailChimp was by far the cheapest option, esp. if you compare them against similar services, e.g. Campaign Monitor.

* Mailchimp is a lot more than a dumb email server...it's a list management service, it offers stats, a pretty robust API, etc. You'd have to spend a lot of time to build up those capabilities around SES.

* I'm not sure SES is meant to handle the volume MailChimp handles. (I don't mean technically, I more mean what is allowed by Amazon.)

Just a few thoughts from a pretty well satisfied MailChimp customer. (I'm also a SendGrid customer, and you can bet I'll be taking a close look at SES as a replacement for that service.)

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#103

Post by biot »

eli wrote: post #61
jonknee wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you had any experience with Exact Target, at the API level or other? And don't get me started about a certain email broadcaster vendor out of Seattle that starts with "what" and ends in "counts"... their idea of XML is to parse an entire file line-by-line and treat each line independently of the whole. So it kind of looks like XML... to a kid who just learned Java I suppose.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#105

Post by megaman821 »

eli wrote: post #75
megaman821 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to use SilverPop but then we just bought a PowerMTA license and wrote our own front end. If you are a small company with a large list, SilverPop is too expensive. Amazon is cheap but it doesn't look like it has any mailmerge (email personalization) capabilities.

If you don't mind my asking, how much of a pain is it dealing with spam complaints and deliverability issues on your own versus through Silverpop?

The pain is all up front. You configure PowerMTA to slow down its sending due to the responses of the various email providers so they never block you. As the trust for your ip goes up you can send at a faster and faster rate. Also you then store all the email bounces and run a cron job to clean your list. Usually I stop sending to emails that return hard bounces and ones that have soft bounced three times.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#106

Post by Linford0 »

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.

Already on to it! http://www.emlr.co.uk

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#107

Post by scraplab »

kordless wrote: post #95
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.

Which you've paid for separately. This is inclusive if you've got an EC2 server.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#108

Post by bryanh »

kordless wrote: post #95
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.

That may be true, but from what I remember, the transition past 2000 was very difficult with Google Apps. In the end you'll have to go with a email provider like SES (or the now troubled PostmarkApp).

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#109

Post by frisco »

subbu wrote: post #97
plusbryan wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

http://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/account/index....

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#110

Post by jgilliam »

markessien wrote: post #7

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…

Sendgrid is half as expensive once you get beyond sending a handful of emails. $.005 vs $.01

I am a sendgrid customer, and unless Amazon is cheaper and can solve the deliverability issues, there is no way I'm switching.

Post reply on HN