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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

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

The former, but not even the primary details of a registered account; they subscribed the emergency contact email addresses, which for us included one of my board members, who then contacted me saying “why am I getting this noise?”

It was neither an emergency nor a transactional message, making it exactly the kind of behaviour they don’t permit from their own customers. Doubling down with the instruction to unsubscribe oneself could only be interpreted as a “fuck you”, and coming from an email company claiming such a moral high ground as Postmark formerly occupied, a sensational own goal.

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

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cheape…

I run a competitor of SES so I won't defend them.

But the problem is that Mailgun/Sendgrid/Postmark and the like is less senstive to spam and ban. The ban on SES is way heavier and the spam rule is stricer.

Maigun/Sendgrid even suggest to use dedicated IP pool to improve delivery, where as AWS SES doesn't https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/dedicated-ip.html https://docs.sendgrid.com/ui/account-and-settings/dedicated-... You can see the tone there.

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