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Ask HN: What service are you using to send marketing emails?

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Re: Ask HN: What service are you using to send marketing emails?

#11
post #5

I used Mailgun before and at work we have Postmark. Both good. I also made the following table for myself some time ago: https://nts.strzibny.name/transactional-email-providers/

Great post, I was checking out Postmark but they seem to be acquired by MailChimp-like company that I've never heard of – "Active Campaign": https://postmarkapp.com/blog/postmark-and-dmarc-digests-acqu...

While their blog post is saying they're not changing anything, it is concerning.

I'll check out Mailgun.

Re: Ask HN: What service are you using to send marketing emails?

#13
post #9

I use loops.so a YC funded startup. It is a monthly charge though. But super simple to use for product updates. The "loops" part I have not used yet which is emails triggered by actions. Kind of strange that you only send a couple of marketing emails a year. What's up with that?

It's not really marketing strictly speaking. Our customers (~2000 contacts) want us to send them email when we release an update or a new product. They willingly volunteered to sign up. So, this is a little different than MyPillowCompany sending out spammy marketing drip campaigns day in day out. I could technically send "transaction" emails in a python script via AWS SES but it would be nice to have something that can also report bounces, deliverability stats, etc. I am expecting almost no bounces unless customer has abandoned their email. Our mailing list was validated by sending a confirm link to their email during sign up. That said, I am far from understanding how email marketing works and any advice is much appreciated.

Re: Ask HN: What service are you using to send marketing emails?

#14

Is there any reason you cant use SES for marketing emails? Or comparable services like Postmark?

I was reading this thread and there are several warnings against using AWS SES: https://old.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/4269bx/ses_for_email_m...

and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15493127

So far, we've sent probably 5k transaction emails using AWS SES and haven't had any compliants. One possibility would be to get a AWS SES dedicated IP for $25/month and suck up the cost of $300/year to be on the safe side. Thoughts?

Re: Ask HN: What service are you using to send marketing emails?

#16

http://sendy.co Yours is the exact use case that it covers super well. Pay a one-time ~$60 fee and runs on top of SES.

You can now also use most other SMTP services like Postmark, SMTP2go, Elastic Email, Sendgrid or Mailjet as of v6.0.1.1

Re: Ask HN: What service are you using to send marketing emails?

#18

Is there any reason you cant use SES for marketing emails? Or comparable services like Postmark?

I was reading this thread and there are several warnings against using AWS SES: https://old.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/4269bx/ses_for_email_m... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15493127 So far, we've sent probably 5k transaction emails using AWS SES and haven't had any compliants. One possibility would be to get a AWS SES dedicated IP for $25/month and suck up the cost of $300/year to be on the safe side. Tho…

I have been using Postmark to send marketing emails and recommend it if you are unsure about SES

Re: Ask HN: What service are you using to send marketing emails?

#19

When I looked into low-budget mailing list management, I ended up spinning up a ListMonk instance. (It's free/open source.) But you still end up needing to connect it to a mailing backend like AWS SES or similar. If you want to avoid SES, I'm not sure what better alternatives there are, but I'd like to know too! (I have extremely low mailing volume and would like to prioritize deliverability) https://listmonk.app/

When I was selfhosting bulk email, I found it helped to have a large number of good reputation ip addresses, Controls to stop mailing at the first hint of problems, Scrutiny over the email list to avoid sending to honeytrap addresses, overzealous throttling. It can be done it’s just a pain when a mail server gets blacklisted and you have to shift your setup to a new mail server (preferably on a completely different address space to avoid subnet bans).

It’s much easier with todays orchestration systems, but I’m out of that game because unless you are a well known provider some obscure university or small business will block your mailer even if you follow all the rules. Not worth it

Re: Ask HN: What service are you using to send marketing emails?

#20
post #3

You can a marketing email plugin for Wordpress called FluentCRM and still send with Amazon SES with FluentSMTP https://fluentsmtp.com/ . Annual subscription, but not as expensive as MailChimp. https://fluentcrm.com/ Also check out MailGun: https://www.mailgun.com/ . It might be more in line with what you were looking for.

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