Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service • Hacker News Board

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#111

Post by easp » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 5:06 PM UTC

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.

Which was still infinitely better than racking your own servers and then, later, driving to the colo at 4:30 am because of yet another contingency you failed to anticipate in your HA planning. One of the earlier contingencies was that the colo's "remote hands" service was actually staffed by bonobos.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#112

Post by easp » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 5:09 PM UTC

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…

In my limited experience, the actual costs have been small enough that I regret even spending time on a detailed spreadsheet based cost model to predict costs.

At some point, that will change. At that point I'll have a very clear basis for calculating ROI on migrating to different infrastructure.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#113

Post by anto1ne » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 5:10 PM UTC

sofuture wrote: post #88

ajju wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With most of dedicated server providers now, you can get any server with a 1 month contract, no strings attached, for a fraction of the price of an equivalent ec2 instance, and good IO as a bonus. And good providers usually delivers within 24h.

I love aws services and use them myself, but for ec2, but I doubt most users have such volatile needs. The main advantage I see, for aws users (non ec2) is to have everything in the same place.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#114

Post by plusbryan » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 5:10 PM UTC

zacharypinter wrote: post #86

plusbryan wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right, I misspoke when I said "innovate" - what I meant was, Amazon's goal is to create reliable base-level services for the developers of the world. Whereas a Sendgrid might provide unsubscribe management and fancy graphing, I don't see Amazon adding on additional services like this.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#115

Post by bryanh » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 5:15 PM UTC

hazelnut wrote: post #11

bye bye postmarkapp, critsend, sendgrid, authsmtp, cloudsmtp ...

I don't know about that... In preparing to launch a high volume email startup, I have a few problems:

* How reputable are Amazon's IP's? Will my emails get flagged as spam due to reuse and general abuse?

* Another cranky API to use. Why not STMP?

* Sendgrid (and several others) have wonderful built in statistics and other quick n' easy apps.

* Also, those services' core business is deliverability, not volume. I feel AWS's offering may be the other way around...

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#116

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 5:25 PM UTC

bryanh wrote: post #108

kordless wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

[deleted]

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#117

Post by sdh » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 5:39 PM UTC

hopefully, this improves the deliverability of email that originates within amazon's environment. the service can be easy, but if the messages aren't getting through, then there is no point and sendgrid and others will continue to survive.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#118

Post by aonic » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 5:40 PM UTC

aonic wrote: post #37

vladd wrote: post #2

It seems they implemented a gradual increase of daily quota to protect themselves against spammer abuse. Here's the link to the document describing the system: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/...

And also, after you sign up for SES, you can't actually use it to send out emails to your customers until they grant you 'production' access. This process seems to be done manually as they say it can take up to 24 hours after an initial request, and from the sounds of it, someone contacts you personally to confirm your email usage.

Just an update, I requested SES production access 4 hours ago and just received notification that I was approved.

Maybe they ramped up support to handle the launch day? Or maybe it's because I've been an AWS user for years, or maybe because I've been using $1000/m worth of AWS services for a month, and the SES account was for the same website hosted on my AWS.

Update: switched all my web servers to use SES via Postfix. So far so good! Setting it up over postfix took ~10 minutes including installing the perl libs needed

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#119

Post by pkulak » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 5:46 PM UTC

bryanh wrote: post #108

kordless wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Wait... troubled? I use Postmark...

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#120

Post by pkulak » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 5:48 PM UTC

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…

Why? We use Sendgrid where I work and they're great. Probably quite a bit more expensive though. We pay over $100 a month just to send email.