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Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

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Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#171
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love it if you could provide a link to your cheaper for more service providers. I've not found anything comparable for less $. Also, if you're comparing lock-in prices, compare them against the EC2 reserved instance prices.

How about http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr... and http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr... been with them for 3+ years and never had a problem

They look great. Too bad they're in Germany :(

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#172
post #147
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love it if you could provide a link to your cheaper for more service providers. I've not found anything comparable for less $. Also, if you're comparing lock-in prices, compare them against the EC2 reserved instance prices.

http://www.gandi.net/hosting

Interesting pricing breakdown (reminds me of Heroku), however they seem to be more expensive than Linode and definitely more than EC2.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They already added fancy graphing to EC2, EBS and RDS just recently. What used to be CloudWatch services became free and integrated into the dashboard of those other services. Elastic Beanstalk is also a layer above their base-level services. Seems like Amazon is willing to move up the chain and will continue to in the future.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#174
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…

Check this out: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/... You can configure SES to work with Postfix or Sendmail. It's at least close to what you're asking about.

Their solution involves hooking a perl script into mail delivery for sendmail and postfix.

Now, I have nothing against that method in general, but if you need to send so many emails that it's useful to use the Amazon service, then forking, starting up perl and then running that script for every email you are sending might not be a viable option performance-wise.

On the other hand: If you are using amazon's service for sending mail, then with some likelyhood you are also running EC2 where wasting a couple of CPU cycles is beneficial for Amazon :-)

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#175

Here's my blog post: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/introducing-the-amazon-si... If you like to solve puzzles, be sure to read the PS!

Jeff, are there any plans to support mailbox provisioning?

At the moment I'm using Rackspace's REST API to create a mailbox for our new customers. I like their API, but I don't like the fact that we have to communicate with their IMAP and SMTP servers to receive and send email. It forces us to write a lot of bug-prone email handling code.

Could Amazon help in this kind of a scenario?

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#176
post #172
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.gandi.net/hosting

Interesting pricing breakdown (reminds me of Heroku), however they seem to be more expensive than Linode and definitely more than EC2.

They're cheaper than both for bandwidth which is what I care about most.

Re: Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

#177
post #103
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Without providing a biased opinion I thought the following link might help with your understanding of the ExactTarget API capabilities and structure - http://wiki.memberlandingpages.com/API_References

Hope this helps!

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