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Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

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Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#171
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From personal experience, if you're not jumping straight from no emails to a million an hour, your mail setup is good (SPF/DKIM/etc), you're not reusing a IP address that was sending spam last week (so be wary sending from cloud servers), and you aren't actually sending spam, then you can send from your own infrastructure just fine.

This is true, with the exception of AT&T. The Deathstar rejects all mail from my server, despite (a) no spam ever having been emitted from my domain in almost 20 years, (b) the IP having been stable for coming on eight years, and (c) I don't send bulk mail. Best I can tell, their blacklist-removal process is auto-deny with no humans in the loop. I gave up and decided screw them, I don't need to talk to anyone with an…

I think AT&T was also the reason I started using a bulk mail delivery service for my low volume personal mail when 1&1 migrated their datacenter after I had been using them for a decade or something (thereby changing my IP address).

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#172
post #151

Great discussion here, not necessarily about the OP's link, but still learned a lot. Would love to contribute my 2 cents... Our app[1] sends/receives several million emails per month. Not an exaggeration, it's actually seven figures. Meaning it's more than 100k a day. Meaning it's 5-6 emails every friggin second. On average. It, of course, peaks during US daytime, up to 30 per second. We tried a looooh-ot of solution…

you would need to get yourself familiar with SMTP, postfix, SPF/DKIM, mx-validation, blacklists etc. And by "familiar" I mean "learn it tothe core" Why? Wouldn't the "proper" or "best" way of configuring all these things be pretty much the same for everyone? Why could this just not be a receipe: do all these things, in this order, etc.

Well, there ARE recipes indeed, but sometimes people (legitimate people, not spammers) have their email settings misconfigured and you have to fix things...

Example: good practice is to reject (or at least defer) an email if the sending server is not listed in the domain's SPF record. But lots of people are sending email "on behalf" of gmail without even knowing it (when their mail-server forwards a gmail-message to another address, and this address never receives it).

There are tons of little gotchas like this that you need to look into :((

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#173
post #157
post #151

Great discussion here, not necessarily about the OP's link, but still learned a lot. Would love to contribute my 2 cents... Our app[1] sends/receives several million emails per month. Not an exaggeration, it's actually seven figures. Meaning it's more than 100k a day. Meaning it's 5-6 emails every friggin second. On average. It, of course, peaks during US daytime, up to 30 per second. We tried a looooh-ot of solution…

Hey, So firstly, I don't work for AWS or Amazon, or any Cloud provider. Just wanted to make sure that was clear. After reading your very interesting comment I thought I'd do some maths on the costs SES should be charging you. Essentially at $0.10 per 1,000 messages, and sending "several million" or "seven figures" worth of messages per month, so a possible total of 9,999,999, you should be paying almost exactly $1,00…

SES is indeed much cheaper that the others (mailgun, sendgrid, postmark etc.)

But you have some things missing from your calculation:

1) Attachments (yes, SES charges separately)

2) Dedicated IP addresses (SES charges you separately for this)

3) S3 (where emails are stored

4) AWS Lambda (because you need a script/function, that processes incoming messages as they come in).

But yes, you're right, with SES its cheaper than others, couple of thousand tops

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail does an incredible job. The last few times I went to spam and saw emails that shouldn't be in there, a careful inspection revealed they were actually very well crafted phishing messages. Ever since, I don't bother checking the spam folder. Too dangerous. Gmail is smarter than me.

No, legit emails end up there every day for me.

Same, usually newsletter stuff that I don't super care about but still somewhat annoying.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#175
post #151

Great discussion here, not necessarily about the OP's link, but still learned a lot. Would love to contribute my 2 cents... Our app[1] sends/receives several million emails per month. Not an exaggeration, it's actually seven figures. Meaning it's more than 100k a day. Meaning it's 5-6 emails every friggin second. On average. It, of course, peaks during US daytime, up to 30 per second. We tried a looooh-ot of solution…

How about redundancy when your $4 a month VM goes down? If you're sending/receiving that much e-mail, I assume uptime is critically important.

[deleted]

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#176

This sort of thing is fantastic to see, regardless of whether you want to run your own mail servers for this task. That they provide a hosted service using the same stack is great to see: host it yourself, or pay them to host it for you. This is what great open source businesses can look like. No "open core" where the good stuff isn't available for the community, and community efforts to implement the same thing get…

The business model is very similar to Sentry. Loving it though , don't know how the internal finances team approve such changes, but wow!

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, but as someone who's worked on the sending of emails side of this i can assure you that the techniques for fighting spam are TOO effective. There are many legit emails that go into black holes before any standard idea of spam filtering comes into play. I wrote an embeddable smtp server so that you could have an app that sent email without ever asking your users to put in their SMTP server info... it was USELESS…

I hear this all the time, but the culprit is always someone sending spam, who does not consider it spam. Usually stuff like missing unsubscribes, spammy language, sending bulk to bought email lists, etc.

As someone running a personal email server for >10 years I can promise you this is a legitimate problem and the false-positive issue is not even close to solved. It's just that most people use a big provider to send personal email, so nobody is incentivized to care about solving it.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#178

Has anyone tried elasticemail.com? I've seen their CEO post here before. If you have, what's your experience with them vs Mailgun or Sendgrid? Thanks

After the demise of Mandrill I started to divide transactional email between Elastic Email and SparkPost. I send around a thousand messages a month through them and haven't had any problems with either. I still miss Mandrill though. I send high volume mail through Mailgun and have had a great experience with them and their API. I tried integrating with Sendgrid but they have some constraints around MX records that were showstoppers for me.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#179
post #157
post #151

Great discussion here, not necessarily about the OP's link, but still learned a lot. Would love to contribute my 2 cents... Our app[1] sends/receives several million emails per month. Not an exaggeration, it's actually seven figures. Meaning it's more than 100k a day. Meaning it's 5-6 emails every friggin second. On average. It, of course, peaks during US daytime, up to 30 per second. We tried a looooh-ot of solution…

Hey, So firstly, I don't work for AWS or Amazon, or any Cloud provider. Just wanted to make sure that was clear. After reading your very interesting comment I thought I'd do some maths on the costs SES should be charging you. Essentially at $0.10 per 1,000 messages, and sending "several million" or "seven figures" worth of messages per month, so a possible total of 9,999,999, you should be paying almost exactly $1,00…

SES is on a couple of email black lists though, on the grounds that they're too laissez faire. On your own IP at least you own your own reputation.

Re: Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

#180
post #99
post #3

Isn’t part of the reason for using Mailgun, Sendgrid etc that you get to send via IP addresses with good reputation?

There have been a few discussions regarding deliverability: Why does Gmail hate my domain? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855030 How to Avoid Spam Filters | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10465639 If there are others I'd appreciate a link!

Hotmail deliverability: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14210939
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