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Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid
- yowza 10y agoNot usable without a proper license.
- bluehatbrit 10y agoIt seems a license will be added in a few hours - https://github.com/atech/postal/issues/6 https://github.com/atech/postal/issues/6
- cryptoledgers 10y agoMIT license has been added
- jsiepkes 10y agoSeems to be fixed. Project is licensed under the MIT license.
- dan1234 10y agoIsn’t part of the reason for using Mailgun, Sendgrid etc that you get to send via IP addresses with good reputation?
- grenoire 10y agoExactly. These services do not get blocked by spam filters due to their credibility scores. That is the most important feature, not the UX.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hultner 10y agoI think reputation is counted towards your DKIM these days, which also makes the reputation somewhat portable by moving your private key to with you to a new server/ip.
- jrodom 10y agoIP reputation continues to be the most important factor that impacts deliverability. Providers are slowly moving to domain-based reputation systems that leverage DKIM. Gmail seems to weight domain reputation in their calculations higher than most currently.
- michaelbrooks 10y agoFor me, it's more the support you get from using third party APIs. It's nice to break away from companies to a certain extent, but if you need help/support you only have yourself to fix the issue. If you go with a third party and something happens, you can go to them for a solution.
- Doches 10y agoAnd if the third party service goes down, you're SOL -- there's nothing you can do to fix the issue, and it's your users who are suffering. What's your answer when a customer says "my emails aren't getting through, please fix it" and you...can't?
- dozzie 10y agoThis is a major risk of outsourcing part of your operations. You probably shouldn't do this to the core of your business, as you lose control over problems. But sending marketing e-mails usually is not the core of business, unless one is selling the service of sending e-mails.
- user15672 10y agoIf emails are a part of your core business, you should have a business continuity plan for this situation. That may be to fall back to another service, or even a temporary in-house server. Of course, if it's that important, then you'd be foolish to not have invested in a better solution, or to not have a proper SLA with a third party.
- baudehlo 10y agoThat's why you always set up a local mail server that delivers onwards to these services. I documented how to do that with Haraka here: https://baudehlo.com/2016/07/26/setting-up-haraka-to-send-to-mailchimpsendgridses-etc/ https://baudehlo.com/2016/07/26/setting-up-haraka-to-send-to...
- richardkeller 10y agoUnfortunately, unless you're paying for a dedicated IP address with Mailgun, their sender reputation is mostly quite bad. We are constantly having to request our account to be moved to a new IP due to them landing up in some blacklist.
- bowersbros 10y agoWhat is your emails bounce rates etc? Or is it caused by others using those same IPs too?
- scsh 10y agoIf they aren't paying for a dedicated IP, those emails would be going out across the shared IP pool, and a particular IP's reputation would be affected be everyone who's email went out via that IP.
- mdekkers 10y agoInteresting. I have never seen those issues, and have been using MG for quite a few years, for many clients.
- user15672 10y agoSame here. I've moved away from paying for a dedicated IP because it seemed a bit redundant.
- lemming 10y agoI used to use Mailgun for sending out licences for my product. I got a lot of people saying they had never arrived, especially Microsoft addresses and Chinese ones. This continued despite repeated complaints and IP switches. I switched to sending through Fastmail and have never had a problem since.
- gondo 10y agobut if opt for dedicated IP address, dose it matter if you have it from Mailgun or if you have your own?
- the_mitsuhiko 10y agoSendgrid gives you dedicated IPs so you are responsible for your own reputation. When you start out using it you might start on a low reputation depending on what the person on that IP did before.
- parenthephobia 10y agoFrom personal experience, if you're not jumping straight from no emails to a million an hour, your mail setup is good (SPF/DKIM/etc), you're not reusing a IP address that was sending spam last week (so be wary sending from cloud servers), and you aren't actually sending spam, then you can send from your own infrastructure just fine.
- speleding 10y agoUntil recently I sent newsletters from our own infrastructure and I agree that it's doable, but: - You have to ramp up sending from new IP addresses VERY slowly if you want to avoid getting grey / black listed by Yahoo and AOL, this makes it quite a tedious process - Make sure you also have rDNS set up, Gmail uses it as an important quality signal - Accurately handling bounces is a bit of a nightmare because each mail server has a slightly different format and you want to make sure you don't process out-of-office messages - Bounces and "message delayed" messages can arrive days later So we ended up switching to mailgun and although they do sometimes give you a bad IP the time saved is worth it, especially their option to have a web hook back to your backend to process the bounces.
- joering2 10y agoSure. Until they email you your account is "temporarily suspended due to some spam complains" and before you find out some angry customer felt that tmher refund process took too long and filter her email to see yours and click "mark as spam" each email and you scramble to setup your own mailservers before you let employees go because your company is unable to send a single email to make a single sale this month... Until then, all is fine I agree.
- giglamesh 10y agoMine was suspended for spam and I was falsely accused by Mailgun of have compromised servers. Initially I freaked out and then discovered that my servers were fine, but my account at Mailgun was hacked and used to send thousands of spam emails. This happened a couple of times. I asked to see the IP addresses of the senders and Mailgun said they didn't track that/could not tell me. And then they had the audacity to bill me for sending spam that was sent as result of their system being compromised.
- jwr 10y agoI tried using Sendgrid and was surprised to find out that unless you buy an expensive plan, then: * You get IPs from a shared pool, and the reputation is nowhere near guaranteed. In fact, many of my mails were blackholed or rejected. * The "bad" IPs that were used by someone for spamming are not immediately removed from the pool, so you will encounter them. The net result for me was that Sendgrid is not a solution for my transactional E-mail, because of the high risk of my E-mails getting blackholed/rejected. I use it for newsletters/marketing only.
- jimktrains2 10y agoWe really need a better solution to fighting spam. https://github.com/jimktrains/email_ng https://github.com/jimktrains/email_ng is an overly complicated idea I had once, but the basic gist is that the receiver could give the sender a signed receiver email address that is for the sender's email address. This way, transactional email (and sure, I guess marketing from your company) would be able to get through and the email given out wouldn't be able to be used if sold or stolen, as the receiving mail server would reject it because of a bad signature (bad sender, and coupled with DKIM and SPF, a malicious user wouldn't be able/allowed to spoof the sender's email).
- chatmasta 10y agoThis sounds like a cryptographic way to achieve the aliasing scheme many people already use, e.g "chatmasta+hackernews@gmail.com". Your proposal requires at least the status quo (aliased email address at signup), but the problem is it also requires cooperation of the receiver's email provider (e.g. gmail) and the sender's email provider. You are unlikely to ever see any new standard adopted by all major email providers, unless it came through a standards committee. But your idea is interesting. Perhaps you could lower the cost of adoption by replacing the dependency on TLS/SSL with some sort of pgp signing scheme. This way all the "protocol" happens within the message body, so email providers do not need to adopt a new standard. As long as at least one website and one user implement the protocol, it can work without any cooperation from third parties. As an aside, it would also be nice if password managers included functionality around generating temporary/isolated email addresses.
- tyingq 10y agoAnd their collective knowledge of how many concurrent connections to open with each provider, how many emails to send in a single SMTP session, how fast to send, etc. There's a fair amount that experience lends to staying out of the spam box.
- j_s 10y agoThere have been a few discussions regarding deliverability: Why does Gmail hate my domain? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855030 How to Avoid Spam Filters | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10465639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10465639 If there are others I'd appreciate a link!
- j_s 10y agoHotmail deliverability: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14210939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14210939
- cnagele 10y agoThis is a big reason for sure. As you can see in this post, those IP addresses can be hit or miss depending on the provider. At Postmark, we don't really believe in dedicated IPs for all customers. We think that our customer base should not include any bad actors, and instead manually approve every customer to ensure our entire CIDR ranges are clean. The benefit is not just clean IPs, but clean IPs that have an incredible transactional-only reputation with the ISPs. This is how we are able to delivery so fast to the inbox. We only really believe in dedicated IPs for higher volume senders, especially since reputation is moving toward the domain more and more. I wrote about this six years ago, and it is even more true today (https://postmarkapp.com/blog/the-false-promises-of-dedicated-ips https://postmarkapp.com/blog/the-false-promises-of-dedicated...). At the same time, if you are willing to install and manage Postal on your own servers, it's not that hard to maintain your own IP with a great reputation. You just need a good hosting provider (probably not AWS), you need to set up your infrastructure like DKIM, SPF, DMARC, rDNS, and Return Paths, and most importantly you need to maintain good engagement (low bounces, high opens). At a glance, Postal looks like a nice option if you want to do it on your own for cheap. You just might lack the stability, support, maintenance, and performance that goes behind an ESP.
- howard941 10y ago> manually approve every customer to ensure our entire CIDR ranges are clean This is probably a key element of good performance. To keep my mail admin duties part time I simply whois the IP of evil senders and drop the resulting entire CIDR block into the our local blacklist.
- cbhl 10y agoWhy wouldn't spammers just start adopting Postal on their servers, too?
- jonknee 10y agoJudging from the amount of it the sending email portion is not what spammers struggle with. It's the "maintain your own IP with a great reputation" part. How would Postal help?
- wl 10y agoMailgun and Sendgrid send plenty of spam. It boggles the mind that they have a "good reputation" when nearly everything they send me is unsolicited.
- hw 10y agoThere's lots of effort in building AI for chatbots, but why aren't there more efforts in building AI for better spam classification? As much as I would like email to die a horrible death just like snail mail died and have everyone (individuals and businesses) start using some form of IM, it's still quite an integral part of the interwebs for people that it deserves a bit more focus on smarter spam filtering instead of relying heavily on IP reputation pools which screws over many legit users.
- massaman_yams 10y agoGmail stopped using IP reputation entirely a year or two ago, and effectively every major consumer mailbox provider relies on domain reputation heavily these days. Almost all major filters look at a combination of indicators, so it's becoming less and less common that a good mail coming from a bad IP is subject to filtering. The answer to why better spam filtering AI hasn't been developed in a non-proprietary setting is fairly straightforward: the success of any filtering method is heavily dependent on consuming data at scale - including recipient behavior (e.g., mark as spam, vs. spend time reading a message), and this underlying data is just as important, if not more so, than the machine learning approach used to compute filtering assessments. In short - you more or less have to be a large mailbox provider in order to have a chance at doing this well.
- hultner 10y agoI suppose this is more like a open source alternative to PowerMTA? How would you compare them?
- throwanem 10y agoMore an open-source alternative to Sparkpost, if you're looking to compare it with a Message Systems offering. (But not really all that comparable, since Sparkpost is nothing without Momentum, and this does not appear to rely on or include any specific MTA.)
- madspindel 10y agoThis project fails to answer the question 'Why?'.
- Doches 10y agoIt's a self-hosted alternative to transactional email PaaS providers. Literally the second sentence in the README: > Think Sendgrid, Mailgun or Postmark but open source and ready for you to run on your own servers. Your comment fails to answer the question: "Did this HN user even RTFT(itle)?"
- blowski 10y agoThat's just begging the question. What's the advantage of running on your own servers vs using SendGrid?
- Doches 10y agoFair. To a certain mindset, "self-hosted" is its own advantage -- but to pick a couple of advantages out of thin air: + Free: I can run Postal on my own hardware, with no usage limits or costs other than the VPS or AWS costs (which I'm paying anyway) + Independent: I'm not relying on a third-party to provide core features. If SendGrid goes down there's nothing I can do about it + Private: Maybe I don't want to hand over a list of my user's email addresses to SendGrid. Self-hosting services means I maintain control over them. It's a tradeoff, and you may value control less than, say, convenience. YMMV.
- r_clark 10y agoI feel like you're still begging the question. The proposition is not really "SendGrid vs Self-hosted SendGrid", but "Self-hosted SendGrid vs any IMAP/SMTP server": > Free: I can run Postal on my own hardware, with no usage limits or costs other than the VPS or AWS costs. So is postfix. > Independent: I'm not relying on a third-party to provide core features. What features? This is the crux of the question. What do you actually need that justifies having to maintain a web application? > Private: Maybe I don't want to hand over a list of my user's email addresses to SendGrid. Again... so is Postfix.
- senic 10y agoInteresting, I was just looking for something like this the other day, thanks HN! The software looks quite polished. Hopefully there'll be a dockerzied version to play with it.
- ksajadi 10y agoWe sent a lot of emails which makes services like Postmark or Mandrill very expensive. Since switching to Amazon SES, the cost has been much lower but the lack of individual email tracking has been a pain (in case a recipient claims they haven't received it or we need to track opens, etc). This UI with an Amazon SES backend would be ideal.
- icebraining 10y agoSince it uses SMTP anyway, shouldn't be too hard to allow it to use SES as a smart host.
- dan1234 10y agoIf you’re sending newsletters, you might want to look at Sendy[1] (no affiliation), which sends via SES. 1 https://sendy.co https://sendy.co
- novalis78 10y agoSeconded. Can only highly recommend send. The license is inexpensive, you get the whole code base and can modify when needed as well. Setup is easy as integration into SES very mature at this point.
- dceddia 10y agoThe codebase is a bit of a horror, though, of the old "PHP+SQL+HTML mixed in a blender" variety. I went in to make a few mods at one point and it was pretty scary.
- kyriakos 10y agothis is exactly what i was looking for. thanks
- j_s 10y agoThere was a lot of activity in this space when Mandrill "died" last year. This comparison was a very good overview of hosted options: https://www.metachris.com/2016/03/free-transactional-email-services-the-best-alternatives-to-mandrill/#summary https://www.metachris.com/2016/03/free-transactional-email-s... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11328631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11328631 And the discussion there linked this detailed sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Nb1YqYJq9eWm6ojLDRXd4RRMn0po4M6h7lvETm27bTU/edit#gid=340282016 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Nb1YqYJq9eWm6ojLDRXd... | https://sendyhost.com/mandrill-alternatives-245/ https://sendyhost.com/mandrill-alternatives-245/
- nbevans 10y agoThe reason why we use Mailgun is to avoid deploying and maintaining e-mail infrastructure which is very hard and high cost. We would rather keep paying Mailgun about $20/mo as this is cheaper by several magnitudes than the self-hosting option.
- itburnslikeice 10y ago> 20/mo as this is cheaper by several magnitudes than the self-hosting option. exactly this, even the cheapest cloud instances cost around 100$/m, while some might be 20$/m it's just not worth the effort to host your own because it also needs management/maintenance if you do which translates in to hours of work. Yes you can automate these things but it simply not worth it when the only thing you want to do is sent mass emails, without even caring about anything besides configuration to connect to XYZ service.
- uuoc 10y ago> when the only thing you want to do is sent mass emails If that is the only thing you want to do then you should be disconnected from the internet entirely, never to be allowed to return. We do not want your SPAM, spammer.
- mikekchar 10y agoHmm... We use Sendgrid to do things like sending confirmation emails. We send a lot of them because we have a lot of customers (long may it continue ;-) ). That's what I was thinking when I read "mass emails". YMMV.
- t3ra 10y agoSounds interesting. I have been looking for a proper mail Server for sending marketing only for a while now. I'll wait for the doc to update but until then : Does it do things like IP rotation? Is it using postfix at the backend or its a complete mail Server What kind of list management features does it have? (i am looking to compare with interspire)
- no1youknowz 10y agoHas anyone tried elasticemail.com? I've seen their CEO post here before. If you have, what's your experience with them vs Mailgun or Sendgrid? Thanks
- lancer 10y agoAfter the demise of Mandrill I started to divide transactional email between Elastic Email and SparkPost. I send around a thousand messages a month through them and haven't had any problems with either. I still miss Mandrill though. I send high volume mail through Mailgun and have had a great experience with them and their API. I tried integrating with Sendgrid but they have some constraints around MX records that were showstoppers for me.
- no1youknowz 9y agoThanks. SparkPost mention they have the best deliverability in the market. How would you rate the deliverability out of 100% for Elastic Email and SparkPost? Thanks
- jpkeisala 10y agoIs Postal and services like Mailgun solution for a functionality where email can be viewed/replied from personal email inbox and a web app? Then somehow magically these services routes mail to relevant inboxes and the web app like Zendesk etc?
- spuz 10y agoDoes Postal allow you to set up an email group? I.e. an email address that will forward to a defined list of other email addresses any email that is sent to it? This is a feature of Mailgun but unfortunately it does not quite behave in the way we need with regards to setting the 'Reply-to' address. I'm looking forward to seeing the documentation and setting up Postal on my server.
- vanilla 10y agoThis seems to be the software behind appmail.io[1], a service just like mailgun and sendgrid. [1]: https://appmail.io/ https://appmail.io/
- rayboy1995 10y agoFrom the repo: > Postal was developed by aTech Media to serve its own mail processing requirements and we have since decided that it should be released as an open source project for the community. It was originally launched by us as AppMail but renamed to Postal as part of making it open source as we felt the name was more suitable.
- jbverschoor 10y agoI'm a big fan of mailgun. It is far better than mandril, sendgrid and probably ses - without a lot of the set up
- cryptarch 10y agoDo you have a system to prevent trusted users from being given low-reputation ip addresses without them having to pay for a dedicated ip? Something like, "if you don't pay for a dedicated ip, but have been a non-spamming client for a month, we move you to a higher-rep ip address pool"?
- charlieegan3 10y agoTheir premium plus plan seems to offer this: https://appmail.io/pricing https://appmail.io/pricing
- cryptarch 10y agoThat's a dedicated ip address, I meant a system to isolate spammers and new users in a relatively low-rep ip address pool.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- IgorPartola 10y agoNow if only there was a decent self hosted alternative to MailChimp.
- jonathanbull 10y agoYou might want to check out https://sendy.co/ https://sendy.co/, or https://emailoctopus.com https://emailoctopus.com if you want a hosted equivalent. Both will save you a lot of money over MailChimp. Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of EmailOctopus.
- j_s 10y agoNot sure if you or I will catch any hate as I point out that your disclaimer as founder of emailoctopus was included elsewhere in the thread but not here. Just pedancics/semantics from me; many in this situation include the info (some:only) in the profile instead/as well and that has been mostly accepted in the past. I also appreciated your mention of another alternative too, it's definitely not over-the-top astroturfing in any way! PS. Add yourself to AlternativeTo.net
- jonathanbull 10y agoYou're quite right - I've updated the comment and my profile to include that information. Thanks for mentioning. We're already on AlternativeTo but unfortunately below the fold on most of our competitors.
- j_s 10y agohttp://alternativeto.net/software/mailchimp/?platform=self-hosted http://alternativeto.net/software/mailchimp/?platform=self-h... This actually showed up right away (suprising even though I use alternativeto.net often, nice SEO on their part) - and it had useful info!
- brightball 10y agoI'm most interested to see what their solution for handling INCOMING email looks like. Having used the inbound APIs with the others they are all pretty polished and reliable but have inconsistent APIs. I've always been a little bit concerned about how to handle high volumes of inbound email functionality if the prices on those services ever went up.
- ushi 10y agoWe are running this[0] with some postfix boxes in front of it. Works quite well for us. [0] https://github.com/ushis/mailhook https://github.com/ushis/mailhook
- brightball 10y agoI'll have to check it out.
- pvsukale3 10y agoWill this platform be actually usable for independent developers considering today's spam blocking scenario. How one should proceed with this in order to not get blacklisted while actually using it for the first time.
- Mahn 10y agoIt's an interface, it doesn't take care of email reputation for you. This is for people who want to DIY to have a pretty dashboard on top, but you're on your own for email deliverability.
- ramoq 10y agoQuestion: if all these companies monitor outgoing SMTP traffic, how are people sending billions of spam messages a day? What's the loophole?
- ohstopitu 10y agoIf I were to host this myself, I'd still need a static IP that had a good reputation. GCP and Azure both mention that we should not be hosting mail servers on their platforms (rather, they all suggest we setup mail servers + relays to a reputed IP). How would I go about getting a static IP or a reputed IP?
- stephenr 10y agoCompanies have been renting/leasing servers for a long time before Amazon and Google got into that business.
- stephenr 10y agoThis sort of thing is fantastic to see, regardless of whether you want to run your own mail servers for this task. That they provide a hosted service using the same stack is great to see: host it yourself, or pay them to host it for you. This is what great open source businesses can look like. No "open core" where the good stuff isn't available for the community, and community efforts to implement the same thing get rejected. No viral licensing like the GPL or jesus shit on a stick, the AGPL.
- simonhamp 10y agoCompletely agree with this, my only concern is that an open-source solution increases the likelihood of spam-ridden senders popping up more frequently and becoming harder to shut-down as they can spin up instances more easily and get going from a new location more quickly. There is actually some benefit to be had by the process of setting up a mailing service being a little trickier. From a business perspective, it's also a great decision, as it shows customers who outgrow (or are in fear of outgrowing) your SaaS have a first-party path to scale. And you could still make money off those customers if you can offer a strong support/hosting solution. It's a massive win. As an aTech customer with some of their other products in the past, I'm really pleased to see this and I wish them all the best! Also, proud to support fellow Brit tech companies ;)
- stephenr 10y ago> becoming harder to shut-down as they can spin up instances more easily and get going from a new location more quickly I don't think this is going to work in their favour - spammers already have the tools they need - the real killer is blacklisted IP's/ranges. If you're legit, you can jump through some hoops if you inherit a blacklisted IP. If you're a spammer, all you can do is try to get an IP that isn't blacklisted.
- smichel17 10y agoThat's some pretty strong hate for the GPL without reasoning to back it up. As a fan of the GPL/AGPL, care to elaborate?
- 10y ago
- jccalhoun 10y agoIs it common now to call email "mail?" I don't know anything about this area (never even heard of mailgun or sendgrid) and wondered if this was some kind of service for sending actual mail.
- tysonstewart 10y agoNo. These are services to send emails without overhead of maintaining your own service.
- xeromal 10y agoYeah, it's kind of annoying. I thought it was something similar to Easypost
- dogecoinbase 10y agoWhat about sendmail, or /usr/bin/mail?
- WA 10y agoAwesome, I've been waiting for this, because I don't believe in the "delivery" promise of big brand mail providers. Most newsletters* go to spam, no matter if they're via Mailchimp, Aweber or transactional mail providers. Maybe the big names work better with Gmail, since Gmail has quite an aggressive spam filtering. But neither I, nor most of my customers (Germans) use Gmail, so I don't care. Edit: *most newsletters I receive
- nik1aa5 10y agoSo can I use this in front of Postfix?
- oblib 10y agoI took a look at the github project and I hope they do great. As a side project I've been working on setting up my own mail server using "Mail-in-a-Box" (https://mailinabox.email https://mailinabox.email) for about a month now. It's been a learning process but I do like the idea of having control over this. I've got it set up to send emails from a remote app server using a perl script and an email account configured on my Mac Mail app all working. Mail-in-a-Box is really pretty sweet. It walks you through the install and has a very nice Control Panel that handles DNS and user account setup and it comes with the Roundcube email web client and ownCloud. There are hurdles. I got a clean IP from DigitalOcean with no problem, but the domain name I'm using is new and has no reputation so when I tested it last week sending emails from the app server to my personal Gmail account the Gmail server responded saying: "Our system has detected that this message is 421-4.7.0 suspicious due to the very low reputation of the sending IP address. 421-4.7.0 To protect our users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has 421-4.7.0 been temporarily rate limited." I only sent about a dozen emails, all to my own Gmail account, so that seems to be a bit harsh. Then it occurred to me why Gmail exists and it made a lot more sense. So, there are hurdles.
- jitbit 10y agoGreat discussion here, not necessarily about the OP's link, but still learned a lot. Would love to contribute my 2 cents... Our app[1] sends/receives several million emails per month. Not an exaggeration, it's actually seven figures. Meaning it's more than 100k a day. Meaning it's 5-6 emails every friggin second. On average. It, of course, peaks during US daytime, up to 30 per second. We tried a looooh-ot of solutions (all priced at THOUSANDS a month at this volume) including Mailgun, Sendgrid, SES etc, but finally settled to a tiny Ubuntu micro-instance on EC2, running Postfix. It has 1 gb of memory, costs us $4 a month and the CPU load rarely goes higher than 4%. Of course you would need to get yourself familiar with SMTP, postfix, SPF/DKIM, mx-validation, blacklists etc. And by "familiar" I mean "learn it tothe core" :)) Another thing - you need to build-up reputation for your IP, cause email providers like outlook/gmail/yahoo will simply reject your emails if you start sending a LOT out of the blue. You have to build it up gradually, takes months to get there. Makes it a huge PITA when you need to change your IP :(( PS. If you need incoming email to call some external REST-api - postfix can launch a local php-script that does that. Not sexy but - $4 a month, right. [1] https://www.jitbit.com/hosted-helpdesk/ https://www.jitbit.com/hosted-helpdesk/
- azca 10y agoThis is what I would do as well. Coming from a hosted mail solution (one of the earliest in the Industry as part a of the initial Dotcom bubble) that cost 10000x5+thensome as much to run, albeit with higher send rates and clusters, It totally makes sense to use ec2 for these needs today.
- movedx 10y agoHey, So firstly, I don't work for AWS or Amazon, or any Cloud provider. Just wanted to make sure that was clear. After reading your very interesting comment I thought I'd do some maths on the costs SES should be charging you. Essentially at $0.10 per 1,000 messages, and sending "several million" or "seven figures" worth of messages per month, so a possible total of 9,999,999, you should be paying almost exactly $1,000 for that. That's not really "THOUSANDS", but it is substantially more than $4 haha :) If you're sending 5,000,000, then the figured drops to $500/month. Anyway your $4/month server is a very cool concept. Would you be willing to share the configuration? Perhaps you've written an Ansible Playbook to provision it for you? EDIT: So essentially my point is this: it's not that expensive, compared to compute resources to actually run your application, to have someone else manage all of that for you.
- theprop 10y agoIs this more than an SMTP server? Those are services designed to send emails as an API service for many different parties. Is that what "Postal" is? Or is it a another SMTP server like Postflix or something? It's not at all clear from your description...