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Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

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Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#101

Post by Silhouette »

sneak wrote: post #97
Silhouette wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, this says more about how broken GMail now is than anything else. Real Soon Now(TM), the tech community needs to start a serious campaign to shame and isolate email providers that do not reliably deliver legitimate emails, regardless of how high profile they are. It probably needs meaningful government/regulator backing to get anywhere. The odd false positive on spam/malware filtering is understandable, it's no…

“the tech community” doesn’t matter: users chose gmail. Shaming them won’t do anything, because the users are the ones whose choices matter.

But the users might make different choices if they knew how often mail they probably want to receive isn't reaching them. The problem at the moment is that the failures are largely silent from the user's point of view. To be fair to GMail, although it's obnoxiously aggressive with classifying things as spam, as far as I know it doesn't silently drop incoming mail without notifying either the sender or recipient, which is the worst thing that some major ISPs do.

I have had customers contact my business to ask for help with something, and we send them a quick reply answering their question, and then the next day we get a frustrated follow-up asking why we are ignoring them, and this continues for another round or two until they give up on buying something from us or cancel a subscription.

I have had friends send me a reply a month after a big party saying they're sorry they didn't make it but they only just found the invitation and the follow-up I sent them in their junk folder.

Those sorts of cases are annoying and seem to happen all the time these days, but imagine if a missing email was something really important from your doctor or your kid's school.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#102

Post by koheripbal »

degenerate wrote: post #67
atonse wrote: post #19

Is there an open source server that gives you all the goodies that MailGun abd SendGrid do? Like delivery abd bounce webhooks?

I don't think there is. NodeMailer kind of gets close by letting you request Delivery Status Notifications, but doesn't have webhooks or handle them for you: https://nodemailer.com/smtp/dsn/ The closest thing I think exists would be Sendy, but it's a closed source paid app.

It's not closed source - the source is visible when you install it.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#103

Post by sneak »

Silhouette wrote: post #101
sneak wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“the tech community” doesn’t matter: users chose gmail. Shaming them won’t do anything, because the users are the ones whose choices matter.

But the users might make different choices if they knew how often mail they probably want to receive isn't reaching them. The problem at the moment is that the failures are largely silent from the user's point of view. To be fair to GMail, although it's obnoxiously aggressive with classifying things as spam, as far as I know it doesn't silently drop incoming mail without notifying either the sender or recipient, whic…

Your doctor already pays the whitelisted email deliverability cartel, or their email hosting service does.

You're free to try to educate users now, if you like, but most people receive emails only from a small group of hosting companies.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#104

Post by Silhouette »

sneak wrote: post #103
Silhouette wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the users might make different choices if they knew how often mail they probably want to receive isn't reaching them. The problem at the moment is that the failures are largely silent from the user's point of view. To be fair to GMail, although it's obnoxiously aggressive with classifying things as spam, as far as I know it doesn't silently drop incoming mail without notifying either the sender or recipient, whic…

Your doctor already pays the whitelisted email deliverability cartel, or their email hosting service does. You're free to try to educate users now, if you like, but most people receive emails only from a small group of hosting companies.

And you don't think it's a problem that many people might not receive some legitimate emails at all? Or you just don't think that anything can be done to improve the situation now?

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#105

Post by bifrost »

mceachen wrote: post #30
bifrost wrote: post #9

This doesn't sound like a good deal for the average business with zero experiencing managing their mail. One spam block and you're done, you'll spend at least a week dealing with that.

This calculus makes sense, unless what you're moving away from has no functional delivery assurances and regularly has server errors and downtime. And customer service that denies their own problems.

Indeed true, if you are on one of those big providers and they're failing you there's not much to lose aside from your own time/money by DIY'ing it. The ESP business is basically all about volume and if you need special handling you're going to get left behind.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#106

Post by sneak »

Silhouette wrote: post #104
sneak wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your doctor already pays the whitelisted email deliverability cartel, or their email hosting service does. You're free to try to educate users now, if you like, but most people receive emails only from a small group of hosting companies.

And you don't think it's a problem that many people might not receive some legitimate emails at all ? Or you just don't think that anything can be done to improve the situation now?

I think that if users thought that their email is broken or not working, they wouldn't use the service that they do.

The actual people being negatively affected have chosen an acceptable level of spam false positives.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#107

Post by tashoecraft »

Zababa wrote: post #55
tstrimple wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many ways to measure the cost of something like this, but a blind look at average salaries is probably the worst. It doesn't factor in overhead or opportunity cost. In most companies, having a developer spend a week on maintenance of a system which isn't a core business value doesn't make sense. They would be much better utilized on value added work. I guarantee you most engineers could delivery way more th…

As I said here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259123 this isn't a company, it's a newsletter so more of something like a side project. I don't think you could deliver more than 500€ of savings in a week because the email costs were the main costs. I agree with you than within a company this would be different, but this isn't a company.

My comment was targeted to the person I replied to, which I interpreted as "managers only think in terms of time saved where as developers if merely left alone would roll it their own and save time and money", which is ridiculous. An engineer should think like their manager, and the manager should think like the engineer. A cost/benefit should be realized, and I think for the high majority of companies, you should not be rolling your own to save 500/year.

A newsletter is so different because merely this blogpost could have generated enough money/attention to warrant doing it, but there's an endless amount of reasoning that can be done to warrant both choices.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#108

Post by Silhouette »

sneak wrote: post #106
Silhouette wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you don't think it's a problem that many people might not receive some legitimate emails at all ? Or you just don't think that anything can be done to improve the situation now?

I think that if users thought that their email is broken or not working, they wouldn't use the service that they do. The actual people being negatively affected have chosen an acceptable level of spam false positives.

But again, the point is that the users often don't know how badly their email is broken.

Unless the user is actively expecting to receive an important mail around a certain time and therefore likely to notice its absence, the failures are either quiet (messages dropped in junk automatically that may or may not be noticed by the recipient later) or totally silent (as with ISPs that drop mail they deem inappropriate entirely, without notifying either party).

Even if someone is expecting a mail, as the experience with business customers I mentioned demonstrates annoyingly often, the failure to receive that email may be assumed to be the fault of the expected sender, not the recipient's own mail service.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#109

Post by dariusj18 »

Silhouette wrote: post #51
sneak wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deliverability is a thing. When most of your list recipients are on gmail, this is a good way to end up in spam for all of them. People who believe this is a viable method to reach the inboxes of thousands of gmail users have never tried.

Sadly, this says more about how broken GMail now is than anything else. Real Soon Now(TM), the tech community needs to start a serious campaign to shame and isolate email providers that do not reliably deliver legitimate emails, regardless of how high profile they are. It probably needs meaningful government/regulator backing to get anywhere. The odd false positive on spam/malware filtering is understandable, it's no…

It's more about how broken email is, gmail does what it does because they have to deal with the broken ecosystem of spammers and spoofers.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#110

Post by dariusj18 »

mtlynch wrote: post #39

If you don't want to pay MailChimp prices but don't want to make the full leap to self-hosting, EmailOctopus Connect is a nice middle ground.[0] It's similar to Mailtrain in that it uses your Amazon SES account to send the mail, but it's a managed SaaS so you don't have to worry about keeping your server patched or accidentally wiping out your subscriber list. I've been migrating all my lists out of MailChimp and int…

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