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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
by chao- 10y ago
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?
- chrisanthropic 10y agoI've spent the last few months researching this and the only one I've found that offers that is https://mailtrain.org/ https://mailtrain.org/ It's self-hosted and from their FAQ: "Amazon SES, SparkPost, SendGrid, Mailgun – you name it. You can use any provider that supports SMTP protocol to send out your newsletters. Bounce and complaints handling via webhooks is supported for SES, SparkPost, SendGrid and Mailgun."
- chao- 10y agoI remember finding Mailtrain in my search, but the last time I looked, I don't remember seeing some of the details that I'm now reading on their Github. Apparently they can read bounces from more than just the services you named (which itself is a good improvement over Amazon-only), but can read from ZoneMTA and Postfix logs as well which is awesome and solves my "someone else's basket" concerns. Thanks for prompting me to take a look at them again!
- chrisanthropic 10y agoNo problem. Honestly, the only reason I didn't go with that is because I work with AWS and wanted to see how they're setting up a 'serverless' newsletter via SES.
- dahdum 10y agoSendy offers this, uses php mailer that you can plug other transports into. As you guessed you lose the spam / bounce tracking.
- chrisanthropic 10y agoI looked into Sendy for quite a while but I like EmailOctopus' tech stack (and dev speed) better. My personal opinion only of course.
- dahdum 10y agoEmailOctopus is only SaaS right? Sendy is one time purchase so much cheaper if that's important.