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Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

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

#51

Post by pembrook »

manishsharan wrote: post #41
pembrook wrote: post #30

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 considerati…

You are assuming that SES allows for spammers. In my experience, SES has pretty good controls , limits and policies to dissuade from spamming.

Literally all ESPs and SMTP services have super strict anti-spam policies. The problem is it only takes 1 bad send to end up on a blacklist.

The cheapest service will always get the most attempts from spammers. You can try to detect them before they send, but the only way you know for sure that they're a spammer, is after they've already sent spam using your platform.

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

#52

Post by erksa »

hstaab wrote: post #44

For those recommending against SES for critical deliveries, what are you using? In the recent past I’ve used Postmark, but they were acquired by a marketing company.

For any critical email delivery make sure you can address this thing with the mailsender of choise:

1)SPF,

2)DKIM,

3)DMARC [2] (DMARC is often forgotten or can be super noisy when set up. Postmarc offers a aggregation service for free that sends you a weekly summary),

4)Dedicated IP

5)Reverse IP look up [1] (locate a dns PTR record for that IP address) should match the sender.

Not everyone supports 5).

4 and 5 is what you end up paying for, but totally worth it. Sendgrid, SES, Mailgun etc.

[1] https://www.mailgun.com/blog/deliverability/reverse-dns-whit...

[2] https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com/

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

#53

Post by ctas »

hstaab wrote: post #44

For those recommending against SES for critical deliveries, what are you using? In the recent past I’ve used Postmark, but they were acquired by a marketing company.

Shameless plug: I've recently started my own transactional email service (https://www.markix.com), primarily targeting small senders, after having been a very happy Postmark customer for a long time. Our service is still in closed beta but delivering live emails.

I run a couple other businesses and moved all of my transactional email sending over to Markix.

Would love to have a chat with anyone that might be starting a new project and is open to try out a new mail service (mail in bio).

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

#54

Post by kunwon1 »

johanneswu wrote: post #25
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-subscr…

Interesting. I've worked with vendors (Including VMWare/Carbon Black) that told me they couldn't override the global list. Maybe the product is evolving to address these (past?) flaws

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

#55

Post by dpifke »

nostrebored wrote: post #20
alyandon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I finally started sending anything from AWS SES straight to trash because the spam on their platform is persistent and they are non-responsive to spam reports. I was getting 30+ fraudulent/spam emails a day in just one inbox alone.

That's untrue. I can tell you that spam reports and bounces are monitored, and customers do have to go through validation of their workflows if they breach thresholds. I had to help multiple customers who had access to SES shut off for valid use cases because they didn't handle events coming back from customers appropriately.

I have never gotten a response to an SES spam report.

A quick search turns up 50 or so in my sent mail folder within the past year or two.

3 of the most recent 5 reports are all the same message content (likely the same sender, although possibly using different—maybe hacked—accounts).

By way of comparison, I've sent a similar volume of complaints to Twilio Sendgrid, received a response to every single complaint, and a random sampling of recent reports doesn't show any repeat message content.

Google doesn't even provide a way to report spam from Gmail users, which is ironic given the OP is complaining about Google's aggressive spam blocking. Spam from Gmail is comparable in volume to what I receive from SES and Sendgrid, and almost all of those messages are obvious phishing and 419 scams. (One would think one of the largest tech companies in the world would be able to implement basic filters to catch these, if they cared enough to do so.) Cf. spam from SES, which is mostly either cryptocurrency pump-and-dump, or semi-legit companies sending to spamtrap addresses that appear on publicly-indexed web pages, in WHOIS, etc. but which have been never used for real correspondence (and have obviously never opted in to any lists).

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

#56

Post by kunwon1 »

messutied wrote: post #29
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.

To echo the other reply, I don't rely on email for critical comms.

If I had to rely on email for critical comms, I would use a product that lets me see the SMTP logs, and alert on failures. I would have some backup provider that I could then quickly shift to

But I'm still an on-prem email administrator, so my entire paradigm is pretty much obsolete. I may not be the best source of info in this space

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

#57

Post by gog »

0ct4via wrote: post #39
gog wrote: post #27

[flagged]

What an insightful and intelligent comment, that contributes incredible wealth to the current discourse, and doesn't minimize the seriousness of cancer at all - not. "Omit internet tropes" is pretty clear in the guidelines, and failing to make any kind of intelligent or reasoned argument adds nothing to the conversation here. Do better.

I agree that my comment was not constructive, frustration got the better of me, I will work on that. You might want to look into your abrasive/patronizing tone used to deliver that message.

Also, I don't agree that comparing Gmail to cancer is minimizing the seriousness of cancer, maybe you are just not seeing the damage to email as a decentralized platform Gmail is doing.

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

#58

Post by joshstrange »

I'm currently using PostmarkApp (from before the acquisition) but I've looked longingly at SES for years. My traffic is very bursty and so ~8 months out of the year I pay the monthly cost and send 1-2 emails if that and then the other 3 months I send close to my plan max. I'd love to switch to a pay-per-use provider but stories like this scare me. I've already dealt with deliverability issues (iCloud randomly deciding that unless you can receive emails, have the MX records in place, they will block you. This was for transactional/login/notification emails), since email is the login method for my sites it's rather important that it works. To PostmarkApp's credit they helped me to track down why the emails were bouncing to iCloud, I doubt I would have gotten the same support from AWS (I'm too small of a fish).

I'd love to hear what other people are using to send transactional emails (no marketing). Ideally I'd find a provider that could "scale down to $0".

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

#59

Post by nugget »

pembrook wrote: post #30

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 considerati…

If SES is the worst, who is the best? By implication, simply the most expensive providers?

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

#60

Post by whoknew1122 »

dpifke wrote: post #55
nostrebored wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's untrue. I can tell you that spam reports and bounces are monitored, and customers do have to go through validation of their workflows if they breach thresholds. I had to help multiple customers who had access to SES shut off for valid use cases because they didn't handle events coming back from customers appropriately.

I have never gotten a response to an SES spam report. A quick search turns up 50 or so in my sent mail folder within the past year or two. 3 of the most recent 5 reports are all the same message content (likely the same sender, although possibly using different—maybe hacked—accounts). By way of comparison, I've sent a similar volume of complaints to Twilio Sendgrid, received a response to every single complaint, and…

No response != nothing being done with the report
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