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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

#81

Post by gog »

0ct4via wrote: post #75
gog wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for this, you made me laugh. I don't feel like giving in to my inner child so I will not engage any further in this shenanigans, I would just like to answer your question.

I am not "crying", but I would be pissed of as well if Hotmail or anybody else was doing the same. This is not about being a predominant platform, but about hurting legitimate email senders to "combat spam" in a way where using their platform, or one of the big players, is the "safest" way to get your emails delivered in a timely manner and land in the recipients Inbox.

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

#82

Post by jeffbee »

alyandon wrote: post #71
jeffbee wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I only have the perspective from the edges of the organization, and from years ago, but I can’t recall investigating anything other than support tickets that came from account representatives. So you probably need a paid account. That said, these are as little as $1.99/month.

I am certain that if you have a case that reproduces even one in a million times the relevant teams will be highly attentive.

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

#83

Post by alyandon »

jeffbee wrote: post #82
alyandon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I only have the perspective from the edges of the organization, and from years ago, but I can’t recall investigating anything other than support tickets that came from account representatives. So you probably need a paid account. That said, these are as little as $1.99/month. I am certain that if you have a case that reproduces even one in a million times the relevant teams will be highly attentive.

This was really only a problem 3 or 4 years ago. At some point in time, it just stopped happening and I hadn't really thought about it since then. I am a Google One subscriber so there are probably some support options open to me that I could avail myself to if the issue ever resurfaced that weren't available to me when I wasn't a subscriber.

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

#84

Post by shmoogy »

nomilk wrote: post #12
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…

Very useful thread. I recently considered SES for a quick app and didn't discover the purpose of dedicated IPs. They're listed under add ons, but seem somewhat essential if the emails are important. Checking out the pricing page, a dedicated IP costs $24.95 per month, which would be more than the actual cost of emails for many small-medium apps (e.g. 100K emails per month would be about $10). Ooc, do other email prov…

Dedicated can be an issue unless you have sufficient volume, unless I've been mislead in the past.

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

#85

Post by baobabKoodaa »

inopinatus wrote: post #28
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 conv…

Holy crap! I had no idea. Do you mean they sent unsolicited commercial mail to registered users of Postmark, or do you mean they sent to email addresses they collected as part of their operations (emails that users of Postmark sent emails to)?

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

#86

Post by baobabKoodaa »

anamexis wrote: post #48
killerpixler wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree here. The sendgrid, mailchimp, postmark of the world are in the business of sending emails. They have their dedicated IPs and handle deliverability, anti spam, and whatnot with email providers like Gmail. SES is an email sending infrastructure tool. That's not the same. IMO equating SES with an email company is like saying home depot is a contractor because they sell hammers and lumber. It gives you the tool…

SES, like Mailchimp, Sendgrid, and Postmark, has dedicated IPs as a paid add-on.

SES is not in the business of ensuring deliverability for your email. Dedicated ips is another hammer that they sell.

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

#87

Post by baobabKoodaa »

vbezhenar wrote: post #23
anamexis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> My anecdotal evidence is that simple postfix setup with IP from a reputable hoster which is not blacklisted works perfectly.

And my anecdotal evidence is that it does not work perfectly: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-ser...

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

#88

Post by baobabKoodaa »

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

> OP is doing just that, Amazon SES = Simple Email Service

If you look at AWS pages for SES, nowhere on their pages do they market email deliverability. That's not the service they sell.

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

#89

Post by baobabKoodaa »

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.

> 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.

How would you even know? Last I checked, I was unable to find any support path to Gmail where one could report email-blackholing-instances and get them investigated.

This is what I wrote several years ago at the point when I gave up trying to run my own email server:

> Over the course of 2 years that I was actively using my own server to send email from the same domain and same IP, there were periods of time when my emails were landing in Gmail’s inbox. And then there were periods of time when my emails were placed in spam, sometimes outright bounced, and sometimes received and dropped without even landing in the spam folder. You could never know what Gmail would do with your email.

https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-ser...

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

#90

Post by baobabKoodaa »

jeroenhd wrote: post #72
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please explain how you measured your email deliverability.
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