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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

#71

Post by alyandon »

jeffbee wrote: post #66
alyandon wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's cool and all and I'll take your statement in good faith.

However, how do I as a user report that an email that was accepted by Google's own SMTP servers was not subsequently delivered to my Gmail inbox? I can't call or email support and it is a meme at this point that Google support is only accessible via social media or contacting a Google insider.

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

#72

Post by jeroenhd »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #7
jeroenhd wrote: post #4

Things like this are to be expected with shared IP addresses for mail services. This sounds like something Amazon should figure out more than anything. There's probably something going on with a customer or theirs (misconfiguration, spammer, vulnerability exploited) that's triggering spam detection rules. At least Google reports the issue back to you instead of silently dropping all of your email like many other mail…

Google also silently drops mail in some cases.

I've never experienced that. When mail gets dropped, my experience is that you either receive a notice from the SMTP service or get a DMARC report that tells you about the percentage of dropped mail.

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

#73

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

albert_e wrote: post #42
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…

Thanks I never had to use SES or really Email for that matter in my own architecture. Since we get so immersed in best practices and recommendations of good architecture pushed by these very cloud providers (AWS, Azure, etc) -- this kind of candid information is usually not available unless we burn our fingers and learn through own experience. I wish there was more efficient way of such practical knowledge to be shar…

> best practices and recommendations of good architecture pushed by these very cloud providers

...are deliberately designed to mix several actual best pracices and a lot of marketing so that it's difficult to discern what is what.

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

#74

Post by slau »

saradhi wrote: post #62

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/…

Just make sure you have sufficient traffic to warrant a dedicated IP. An unknown IP suddenly sending a burst of emails is going to get soft-blocked very quickly. You need to build up your reputation, and you need to slowly increase how much you send.

The managed IP is an option, although I’ve never used it.

When I was the VPoE at Dixa, we switched over to SES, and we had 3 dedicated IPs, and for our volume back then (a few thousand emails a day), this worked very well. I don’t know if they ever hit scaling issues after I left.

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

#75

Post by 0ct4via »

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.

Bold assumption of you, assuming a "patronizing tone" and what I am or aren't seeing -- by that logic, it would seem you "are just not seeing the damage cancer does" given your ridiculous comparison.

Would you cry the same if Hotmail were the predominant platform?

Regardless of that, it still wasn't constructive, and your "you might want to x" and "you're not seeing y" comments are much more patronizing than anything else - maybe consider not projecting so hard next time.

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

#76

Post by kureikain »

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…

This is bad advice.

SES is the best among the provider.

They treat spam very seriously, compare to other. You would need to maintain a baseline, failure to do so will get the account into soft-susspend or permanent suspended quickly.

AWS, being an engineering focus product, provider tooling and automated around bouncing, spam reporting handling. Having sophisicated tooling help user deal with that.

They strongly againtst and not suggest end-user to buy dedicated IP. Where as other providers always want user to pay more for "dedicated ip" to "get better delivery".

AWS has procedure, best practice to encounrage slowly warmup when sending mass volume. They had their own rate limit (14 messages per second by default), move the account out of sandbox, a good domain/sender verification.

They are the best among providers when it comes to email.

Sometimes they appear to be worst than others, but that is a specific case. The way email works will always have false positive. If user decided the email is spam(even it isn't) and keep reporting it may appear in a certain spam list.

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

#77

Post by pembrook »

kureikain wrote: post #76
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…

This is bad advice. SES is the best among the provider. They treat spam very seriously, compare to other. You would need to maintain a baseline, failure to do so will get the account into soft-susspend or permanent suspended quickly. AWS, being an engineering focus product, provider tooling and automated around bouncing, spam reporting handling. Having sophisicated tooling help user deal with that. They strongly agai…

Every SMTP service (Mailgun, Sendgrid, Postmark, etc.) does the same things AWS does to try to prevent spam and has the same features you mention (shared IPs to start, warmup on mass sending, developer tooling, etc.)

Email delivery is a commodity business at this point, hence why there's so many PE rollups in the space.

The fact of the matter is it only takes 1 bad send to end up on a blacklist, and SES is the cheapest so it will always be the most attractive target for spammers/fraudsters.

Am I correct that maybe you run a Saas built off SES and might have incentive to defend?

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

#78

Post by pembrook »

nugget wrote: post #59
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?

Not necessarily (although, hard to imagine there's even 1 spammer willing to spend $100,000/yr on some enterprisey crap like Salesforce Pardot or Marketo).

But I'd just go with whatever sender isn't the cheapest and has the founders still intimately involved in the product. Stopping spammers is ultimately still a human game. Postmark used to be my go-to, but they sold, and I'd bet my entire salary that within a few years that service will end up like all the others that have been bought-and-sold.

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

#79

Post by moltar »

alyandon wrote: post #8
jeroenhd wrote: post #4

Things like this are to be expected with shared IP addresses for mail services. This sounds like something Amazon should figure out more than anything. There's probably something going on with a customer or theirs (misconfiguration, spammer, vulnerability exploited) that's triggering spam detection rules. At least Google reports the issue back to you instead of silently dropping all of your email like many other mail…

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.

Not sure if this is an edge case or not. But getting approved for SES isn’t that simple. And then shut downs happen very quickly even for legitimate cases. AWS is very aggressive with SES.

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

#80

Post by alyandon »

moltar wrote: post #79
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.

Not sure if this is an edge case or not. But getting approved for SES isn’t that simple. And then shut downs happen very quickly even for legitimate cases. AWS is very aggressive with SES.

Maybe they care now. They certainly did not appear to care when my mailbox was getting spammed into uselessness by their customers.
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