from Hacker News

Sending mail with AWS SES and Route53

by chrisanthropic on 12/4/16, 9:44 PM with 33 comments

  • by inopinatus on 12/4/16, 10:28 PM

    If you just enable DMARC like that you'll receive a XML report every day from every major provider. To reduce the noise and do something useful with this data consider using an aggregator tool e.g. https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com (free and from a trustworthy source)

  • by justinator on 12/5/16, 2:58 AM

    Dada Mail [0] (which I wrote, and have worked on for 15+ years) supports sending via SES, and it works great. The instructions to implement it [1] are quite similar. I set up SES for a ton of clients, and the majority of them seem very happy using it.

    One thing this article doesn't touch upon is that SES does have a limit on how many messages you may send in a timeframe per second, as well as per day. If you go over these limits, your message will not send out correctly. Make sure your software supports enough of the API for SES to fetch these limits are correctly send your messages, below these limits.

    [0] http://dadamailproject.com/

    [1] http://dadamailproject.com/d/features-amazon_ses_support.pod...

  • by vacri on 12/5/16, 12:44 AM

    An issue that recently hit us: if you're going to be testing mail, then use the SES test addresses. Don't use your own or fake addresses. If SES get x% bounces on any outbound address, it will cut off your SES access across the board, and it doesn't come back on quickly.

    We had a test address that was purposefully undeliverable. A test script sent out thousands of mails when it shouldn't have, and those undeliverable mails got treated as bounces. So, we got our SES cut off for two days, despite our clearly test/undeliverable mail being the cause. Regular AWS support can't do anything, only a special email unlock team can (they protect the 'deliverability' of AWS mail), and they're not exactly responsive.

    http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/mailbox...

  • by chao- on 12/4/16, 10:39 PM

    There are a solid handful of these "newsletter/marketing over SES" services these days. Sendy, Moon Mail, EmailOctopus and a few others (last did a large search a few months ago). Sendy even has a value-add service piggybacking off them (EasySendy Pro), though it looks like they've significantly added features since the last time I looked.

    But where most people tend to see "Amazon == No Need To Think", I also see a looming "all your eggs in someone else's basket" and the first thing I look for is whether I can plug in an SMTP provider that isn't Amazon SES. In the FAQ, in a sub-note on a Features page, or anywhere. Almost without fail, none of their sites address this, even though it seems like it wouldn't be much harder than being SES specific.

    Perhaps spam reports and bounce tracking might be sacrificed (i.e. requires outsized effort to implement) if it was via generic SMTP and not SES specific?

    Does anyone know the answer to the "any SMTP" question for any of these services?

  • by jonathanbull on 12/5/16, 10:27 AM

    This is really useful - DKIM/SPF/DMARC setup is way trickier than it should be.

    I'm a co-founder of EmailOctopus so happy to answer any questions on the integration side of things.

  • by kennysmoothx on 12/5/16, 4:29 AM

    I have moved over all of my clients who use transactional email over to SES from Sendgrid and honestly they couldn't be happier.

    SES Pricing is amazing and deliverability seems to be good all across. (Not to mention you get around 60k free emails monthly if requests are coming from a AWS server)

  • by wineisfine on 12/5/16, 6:21 AM

    I tried (bought) sendy.co and it seems quite buggy. I'm still looking for something self-hosted, where any SMTP provider can be plugged into, and that does not look like its 1993. As I have some non-techies that need to work with it.

  • by SnowingXIV on 12/5/16, 4:40 AM

    What do people do these days for easily handling contact forms with a shared host? They come from my server name which then I change, so sometimes could be marked as spam. Simple php post. To/From

  • by chrisanthropic on 12/4/16, 10:14 PM

    And just in case anyone is feeling frisky all of the sensitive info in the screenshots was removed and replaced.

  • by questionr on 12/5/16, 3:45 AM

    whats the Google Cloud (first-party) managed mail service for personal domains?