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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

#61

Post by joshstrange »

erksa wrote: post #52
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 wha…

And 1 surprising thing (to me) is some places (iCloud was what bit me) alway want you to be able to receive email (have MX records). Even though I have no need to support incoming emails iCloud was blocking my sending until I got that setup. The incoming emails just go to a black hole but that's enough.

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

#62

Post by saradhi »

Thanks you all for comments. I have made a decision to subscribed to dedicated IPs (credits: @slau).

The differentiating factor between our current AWS SES plan and the competitors (mentioned in the comments) is having a dedicated IP. With our current volume, none of the competitors are anyway near AWS SES costs. So, moving to a dedicated IPs thats cost 25$ extra not only solves our issue, but also no change in code/infrastructure.

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

#63

Post by cuu508 »

ctas wrote: post #31

Do you have a custom return-path configured? Using a custom return path might help, because it ties your reputation primarily to your domain. ESPs check multiple factors. Both IP and domain reputation play a role. They will check your return path / envelope sender domain reputation and your IP. Your domain will start with it's own reputation, but can be boosted with a good IP reputation. But if your domain had bad se…

FYI: Your privacy policy is missing https://app.markix.com/privacy-policy

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

#64

Post by alyandon »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #60
dpifke wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sending the report to /dev/null would technically be doing something with the report though.

My problem is "no response to report" combined with "I continue to receive the same or substantially similar volume and types of emails from the same sender(s) from the same email provider weeks after submitting the reports" == "non-responsive email service operator".

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

#65

Post by alyandon »

jeffbee wrote: post #50
betaby wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impossible to know. But in my cases from any IP with low volume. I.e. I have a bunch of personal servers for 10+ years, there are rarely outgoing emails from them and google happily just black-hole emails from such low volume IPs.

I'd be surprised if this was accurate. A low-volume IP might get a temporary failure code 4xx, but that's not silent. If they accept your message they intend to deliver it, or bounce it. Perhaps your return path is defective.

Google used to do this for low volume emails I was literally sending to myself by authenticating with my google smtp account credentials. I could find no rhyme or reason to it. It would claim to accept emails and they would never show up in my inbox or in spam. Sometimes they would get delivered to spam. Sometimes to my inbox like expected.

It most often involved security log snippets which would include ip addresses and hostnames that were likely already on "is a known bad actor" list.

Bug on their end? Intentional thing to disrupt spammers? I don't know.

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

#66

Post by jeffbee »

alyandon wrote: post #65
jeffbee wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be surprised if this was accurate. A low-volume IP might get a temporary failure code 4xx, but that's not silent. If they accept your message they intend to deliver it, or bounce it. Perhaps your return path is defective.

Google used to do this for low volume emails I was literally sending to myself by authenticating with my google smtp account credentials. I could find no rhyme or reason to it. It would claim to accept emails and they would never show up in my inbox or in spam. Sometimes they would get delivered to spam. Sometimes to my inbox like expected. It most often involved security log snippets which would include ip addresses…

Well, I won't contradict your personal experience, but I will say that I worked on gmail delivery for six years and if during that time it had ever come to light that any message had been accepted and not ultimately disposed of in some way, that would have been P0 and dozens of people would have dropped everything in order to root-cause and remediate that.

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

#67

Post by jfengel »

pembrook wrote: post #51
manishsharan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm a bit surprised that the spammers even bother with it, since it costs money and the conversion rates are near zero. I had the impression that most spammers would rather take over hacked accounts -- not quite zero cost, but pretty low.

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

#69

Post by ttul »

Hey everyone, CEO of MailChannels here. I've been following this thread with interest, as we've also observed similar challenges in the email delivery space. Well, to be honest, the ground game is constantly changing in this space as everyone has scaled.

Email delivery is inherently complex due to the various factors that contribute to deliverability, including IP reputation, domain reputation, content filtering, and recipient engagement. Shared IP pools can indeed be challenging because of the "bad neighbor" effect, where one sender's bad behavior can affect the reputation of all senders using that IP.

However, shared pools can also prove advantageous because it's harder for a receiver to block your IP if tons of email comes from it from a wide variety of senders. Receivers are trying to reduce collateral damage while protecting their users from spam and phishing - this is literally the reward model feeding their machine learning models. If your email travels alongside millions of other emails that are mostly received well, that IP will not be blocked; whereas, if you send email from your own IP, it doesn't take much for a receiver to pull the trigger and block you since there is very little consequence other than blocking your traffic.

Not that anyone here asked, but if you want a "best practice", try multiple different services and approaches and find the one that works best for you. There is no perfect email sending service for all senders and as mentioned above, the ground game is changing all the time.

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

#70

Post by [deleted] »

gog wrote: post #57
0ct4via wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]
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