Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 92 posts

Re: Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

#21

Post by LinuxBender »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #6

If you are not in the business of selling email delivery, you should be buying email delivery from a company who is in that business. It's extremely hard to get emails delivered and it's even harder for a small company. For your use case you could probably use Postmark and get good delivery with that.

As others mentioned they are using a paid AWS email service. In fairness however the price is very low thus making the bar to entry very low. They will have no shortage of customers that abuse the system, do not handle UCE reports and in some cases are outright spamming. The spammers may get blocked with time but there will be a continuous wake of damage in their path on the shared pools of IP addresses.

Re: Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

#22

Post by LeonM »

leetrout wrote: post #13
LeonM wrote: post #9

This is typically not a big deal, as explained in the message, it is a temporary countermeasure. It'll resolve itself as long as you really aren't spamming. Though Gmail responds citing your IP, Gmail and all other large email services don't use IP filtering. Just about all email service providers use domain reputation, since IPs are ephemeral. If you are sending transactional emails that your customers have agreed t…

Not entirely true. There is a reason Mailchimp owns a rather large block of IP addresses. https://ipinfo.io/AS14782

> Not entirely true

OK you are right, Gmail may use IP-based rating, but it only does that if there isn't sufficient proof (in form of DKIM signatures) that the email is sent on behalf of the domain. If the email is DKIM aligned, then domain rating is used. I just didn't want to go that far into detail in my post.

> There is a reason Mailchimp owns a rather large block of IP addresses.

The reason is mostly for supporting smaller/legacy/self-hosted email services that do rely on IP reputation. Since Mailchimp won't allow customers to bulk email unless they have DKIM set up correctly, they don't have to worry as much about IP spreading with the major email service providers.

Re: Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

#23

Post by vbezhenar »

anamexis wrote: post #10
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #6

If you are not in the business of selling email delivery, you should be buying email delivery from a company who is in that business. It's extremely hard to get emails delivered and it's even harder for a small company. For your use case you could probably use Postmark and get good delivery with that.

Using SES is buying email delivery from a company who is in that business.

If Amazon can't make it work, might just use good old postfix I guess.

My anecdotal evidence is that simple postfix setup with IP from a reputable hoster which is not blacklisted works perfectly. And it's actually pretty simple to configure postfix for sending mail (now configuring postfix + dovecot + auth + spam filtering is another story).

Re: Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

#24

Post by pixl97 »

LeonM wrote: post #11
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #6

If you are not in the business of selling email delivery, you should be buying email delivery from a company who is in that business. It's extremely hard to get emails delivered and it's even harder for a small company. For your use case you could probably use Postmark and get good delivery with that.

> you should be buying email delivery from a company who is in that business. OP is doing just that, Amazon SES = Simple Email Service

Then OP should change services to a service that offers this as their primary mission objective.

If SES isn't delivering some stuff, Amazon will link to a page and say "here is why, good luck" and that's the end of the support ticket.

Re: Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

#25

Post by johanneswu »

kunwon1 wrote: post #14

Amazon SES is not a good choice for sending critical email notifications. Their 'global suppression list' [1] has caused no end of headaches for me and my clients. If you and I are both using SES to send to the same person, and my message results in a hard bounce, then your messages to that person will start to silently fail. [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/sending-email-glob...

You can now use a account-level suppression list to override the global suppression list though.

> If an address is on the global suppression list, but not on your account level suppression list (which means you want to send to it), and you do send to it, Amazon SES will still attempt delivery, but if it bounces, the bounce will affect your own reputation

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/lists-and-subscrip...

Re: Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

#28

Post by inopinatus »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #6

If you are not in the business of selling email delivery, you should be buying email delivery from a company who is in that business. It's extremely hard to get emails delivered and it's even harder for a small company. For your use case you could probably use Postmark and get good delivery with that.

Unfortunately Postmark was recently acquired by a so-called “campaign management” company and they have already started sending unsolicited commercial mail to unauthorised recipients, and when I pushed back and complained they became downright hostile and confrontational and told us to unsubscribe - from a marketing list that we hadn’t opted into, and that was operated via their new parent company. It was like a conversation from the dark ages of UCE where the spammer says “just opt out mate”. So Postmark are dead to me now.

Re: Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

#29

Post by messutied »

kunwon1 wrote: post #14

Amazon SES is not a good choice for sending critical email notifications. Their 'global suppression list' [1] has caused no end of headaches for me and my clients. If you and I are both using SES to send to the same person, and my message results in a hard bounce, then your messages to that person will start to silently fail. [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/sending-email-glob...

Would you happen to know of better alternatives for sending critical email notifications? We're just now working on moving away from Mailgun into SES. This thread is making me reconsider.

Re: Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

#30

Post by pembrook »

Email sending is a largely efficient market, and SES is the cheapest sender.

Thus, the SES IP pools have the worst IP reputations among all the SMTP-based senders. I would never use them (or an ESP that sends with them) in a million years.

The reason why cheap = bad in email is because Spammers have the lowest conversion rates of all senders (their emails are always untargeted), so price is their number 1 consideration.

You can cheap out elsewhere in your stack. But never cheap out on email — especially if you’re not sending high volume enough for a dedicated IP.

Post reply on HN