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But we had to learn everything about email. Every damn bit. SMTP, relays, MX-records, SPF verification, DKIM signatures, spam filtering, reverse-DNS, blacklist

But we had to learn everything about email. Every damn bit. SMTP, relays, MX-records, SPF verification, DKIM signatures, spam filtering, reverse-DNS, blacklisting, "Internet Message Format", throttling, MIME-encoding, email-antiviruses, bounces, headers, log-parsing, rate-limiting, greylisting, RFC standards (and that no one follows them)... And of course - about IP address reputation (more on that later). Are there any open source tools to tackle some of these? Given the maturity of email marketing I would expect some pretty robust free tooling available.

atonse 7y ago
I'd love to see if they did the math of the engineer time spent to learn all this vs paying another service. (Although outsourcing this doesn't necessarily mean you don't have to learn a lot of these things). There must be an inflection point where it becomes more economical to host your own, but I doubt 22k an hour is that point? Maybe it is.
- allana 7y ago
  Sendgrid is pretty spendy, going by their public pricing and assuming the aveage usage is half the peak usage, the Sendgrid bill could be around ~$2500 usage.
nodesocket 7y ago
So, instead of spending “several thousand a month at this scale” which isn’t a lot of money for a business, you wasted how many engineering hours or worse founder hours that could have utilized building features or signing-up new customers. Developer; I have to pay money, nahhhh I’ll just build it complex.
- wefarrell 7y ago
  It looks like they're helpdesk software. Email would pretty integral to their business model so I don't blame them for wanting to do it themselves, although it wouldn't be my first choice unless I needed some feature missing from all of the ESPs.
KaiserPro 7y ago
Yeah: o SMTP = postfix/exim/sendmail (hint don't use the last two) o dkim, spf & reverse-dns are just DNS records. Spf is a list of IPs that your domain "owns", dkim is a hash that proves you own the originating server. o Log parsing is standard log interrogation stuff. You are better off writing a custom metrics exporter that talks to the queue than parse logs routinely. o Greylisting is a configuration option for email relays where they reject the first attempt of unknown servers attempting to deliver mail. nothing more to it. (https://www.greylisting.org/implementations/postfix.php https://www.greylisting.org/implementations/postfix.php) o rate-limiting is again a config option: https://www.vooservers.com/technical-blog/rate-limit-outbound-mail-in-postfix/ https://www.vooservers.com/technical-blog/rate-limit-outboun... o spam filtering: https://docs.iredmail.org/enable.dnsbl.html https://docs.iredmail.org/enable.dnsbl.html is a good start

atonse 7y ago

I'd love to see if they did the math of the engineer time spent to learn all this vs paying another service. (Although outsourcing this doesn't necessarily mean you don't have to learn a lot of these things). There must be an inflection point where it becomes more economical to host your own, but I doubt 22k an hour is that point? Maybe it is.

allana 7y ago
Sendgrid is pretty spendy, going by their public pricing and assuming the aveage usage is half the peak usage, the Sendgrid bill could be around ~$2500 usage.

nodesocket 7y ago

So, instead of spending “several thousand a month at this scale” which isn’t a lot of money for a business, you wasted how many engineering hours or worse founder hours that could have utilized building features or signing-up new customers. Developer; I have to pay money, nahhhh I’ll just build it complex.

wefarrell 7y ago
It looks like they're helpdesk software. Email would pretty integral to their business model so I don't blame them for wanting to do it themselves, although it wouldn't be my first choice unless I needed some feature missing from all of the ESPs.

KaiserPro 7y ago

Yeah: o SMTP = postfix/exim/sendmail (hint don't use the last two) o dkim, spf & reverse-dns are just DNS records. Spf is a list of IPs that your domain "owns", dkim is a hash that proves you own the originating server. o Log parsing is standard log interrogation stuff. You are better off writing a custom metrics exporter that talks to the queue than parse logs routinely. o Greylisting is a configuration option for email relays where they reject the first attempt of unknown servers attempting to deliver mail. nothing more to it. (https://www.greylisting.org/implementations/postfix.php https://www.greylisting.org/implementations/postfix.php) o rate-limiting is again a config option: https://www.vooservers.com/technical-blog/rate-limit-outbound-mail-in-postfix/ https://www.vooservers.com/technical-blog/rate-limit-outboun... o spam filtering: https://docs.iredmail.org/enable.dnsbl.html https://docs.iredmail.org/enable.dnsbl.html is a good start