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Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service
- maverhick 16y agoI like this. They are priced at 25% of sendgrid, which we use as we send a million emails a month or so. But sendgrid provides a dedicated IP address. Having a dedicated IP over a period of time helps with delivery as the IP 'reputation' increases based on your delivery rates. A lot of EC2 Ips are blacklisted by ISPs because people just create instances and spam away using exim/sendmail. If amazon and keep its IPs clean and also manage the service well, this is going to be THE email sending service to use.
- jsatok 16y agoI'm in a similar situation. Sending hundreds of thousands a month with SendGrid, and while it'll be more than Amazon, I think the dedicated IP makes it worthwhile.
- ordinaryman 16y agoSeems Amazon wants to fight it out with Google, by matching the new services with Google App Engine's free quota. $0.10 per thousand in SES -> $0.0001 per email recipient // Same as in GAE. You can send 2,000 messages for free each day when you call Amazon SES from an Amazon EC2 instance directly or through AWS Elastic Beanstalk. // Same as in GAE. This, along with the recent AWS Elastic Beanstalk release and Amazon's intent of making Java hosting easy and without restrictions (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119104 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119104) all point to the day when I will be able to upload my Python app on GAE directly onto a pre-configured Amazon service (possibly making use of AppScale or TyphoonAE), which internally uses all these new services with free quotas.
- watchandwait 16y agoIt will be interesting to see how Gmail treats email messages from Amazon SES.
- ordinaryman 16y agoTo add to it, it is not that I want to switch from GAE to AWS now. But, to know that it will be easier in case I need to, makes it good news. I also believe competition which facilitates such migrations not only validates the space and the standard (write for GAE, you can host it on Google or on AWS), but also helps drive innovation and service levels.
- tybris 16y agoI actually doubt that they really care about competing with Google App Engine. I mean, AWS has NetFlix, New York Times, Dropbox among their customers and GAE has.... who? What I do think is that services like GAE have set a standard for the ease of use and price. People are now looking for free tiers, instant deployment, and traffic-based pricing. Customers are expecting Amazon to provide the same and so they do.
- mgw 16y agoAWS' pace of innovation is simply stunning. It shows that the business is not an afterthought for Amazon but rather treated as being of the same importance as their core business. Compare that to AppEngine and you have to say they leave them behind in the dust. (I know it's not an Apples to Apples comparison.)
- vladd 16y agoIt seems they implemented a gradual increase of daily quota to protect themselves against spammer abuse. Here's the link to the document describing the system: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/ManagingActivity.PlanningAhead.html http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/...
- aonic 16y agoAnd also, after you sign up for SES, you can't actually use it to send out emails to your customers until they grant you 'production' access. This process seems to be done manually as they say it can take up to 24 hours after an initial request, and from the sounds of it, someone contacts you personally to confirm your email usage.
- aonic 16y agoJust an update, I requested SES production access 4 hours ago and just received notification that I was approved. Maybe they ramped up support to handle the launch day? Or maybe it's because I've been an AWS user for years, or maybe because I've been using $1000/m worth of AWS services for a month, and the SES account was for the same website hosted on my AWS. Update: switched all my web servers to use SES via Postfix. So far so good! Setting it up over postfix took ~10 minutes including installing the perl libs needed
- ladon86 16y agoYou get a daily quota of 2000 messages if you're an EC2 customer. That's pretty competitive, and nicely within the limit of what I'm sending at this stage of my startup. Sold, well played once again Amazon.
- kordless 16y agoI can send up to 2K messages a day with a premiere Google Apps account.
- scraplab 16y agoWhich you've paid for separately. This is inclusive if you've got an EC2 server.
- bryanh 16y agoThat may be true, but from what I remember, the transition past 2000 was very difficult with Google Apps. In the end you'll have to go with a email provider like SES (or the now troubled PostmarkApp).
- jonknee 16y agoIf it works like they say, this is a godsend. Email is a royal pain and the pricing of SES is well below market rate. Postmark (http://postmarkapp.com/ http://postmarkapp.com/) is similar and is $1.50 per thousand, compared to $.10 per thousand from Amazon.
- Jabbles 16y agoMailchimp appears to be offering unique emails from $5 per thousand! They appear to have significant discounts for emailing lists, but even at $12903 for 24.8 million emails, that's still $.52 per thousand. http://www.mailchimp.com/pricing http://www.mailchimp.com/pricing Data transfer rates still apply for Amazon, but still... am I missing something?
- jonknee 16y agoI think they are more for the mom-and-pop business who wants an email list, not web apps that need to send email (which was always a sore spot for EC2 customers). That's why I compared it to Postcard, which is directly marketed as email for web apps. It would certainly be possible to run a Mail Chimp-esque email list with this, but it would take a lot more technical know-how (at minimum you need to create your own views for subscribe/unsubscribe/send). Or at least it will until someone starts selling a wrapper around it for a small mark-up...
- DXL 16y agoYou're missing the fact that Mailchimp offers an entire email marketing app whereas Amazon offers an email deliverability web service. They each have completely different features and are in a different market.
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- kule 16y agoYeah but don't forget you are buying MailChimps' UI for that too. It may not be the best but it's definitely usable for a non-technical user. However for your own custom interface this is going to be the obvious choice.
- nolite 16y agoI wonder how well their mailing reputation is for high deliverability with this new service.. I've heard that mailing from EC2 was almost pointless due to its low reputation score
- nolite 16y agoAfter reading through the guides, this is the most simple and clear exposition of email deliverability and reputation I've ever come across. http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/index.html?SPFSenderIDDKIM.html http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/... (The mailchimp guide is also nice, and very extensive http://www.mailchimp.com/articles/email-delivery/ http://www.mailchimp.com/articles/email-delivery/ ) Seems like they'll like use a completely different IP range than EC2, and there shouldn't be any problems.. lets hope
- pfarrell 16y agoI work as an engineer for an email service provider. I can tell you that deliverability is one of the core things you bring to the table when you are doing sending for a lot of people. It's the sloppy, people oriented aspect that developers ignore (imagine you've got a huge send going out and gmail just flagged you as a spammer, you better have a contact there to fix it fast). Sure, you can write an app to send a million emails in a few minutes, but your work (and bandwidth costs) are pointless if it never makes it to the customer's inbox. There are a lot of dirty details in sending at volume. But like the old saying goes, "where there's muck, there's brass."
- scrrr 16y agoI suppose this will hurt the competition, sites like sendgrid and mailchimp.
- healthyhippo 16y agoI haven't been managing our email messaging, but this seems considerably cheaper than Sendgrid which charges something exorbitant (I mean, its like $80 a month, but they're f*cking emails). Does anyone have a perspective on whether their service is just as good?
- dclaysmith 16y agoI don't think it will kill off the likes of SendGrid. It might actually help expose Email-as-a-Service to potential customers who weren't aware that those companies existed. In the end it could expand the market for everyone and end up benefiting the competition as well. Pick an Amazon Web Service and for most (all?) there are several standalone companies competing on quality, customer service, and ease of use. The problem for the competition is that Amazon's suite of services is getting more and more comprehensive and using ALL of their offerings really does lower development overhead (versus picking and choosing the best standalone Email/Queue/Storage/CPU offering).
- jasonkester 16y agoIt might just help them. If Amazon just undercut their infrastructure costs, they can ditch their own servers and simply route mails through Amazon. Regardless, MailChimp does a lot of stuff besides just sending mail. I suspect that most of its customers are there for the list management and campaign management pieces rather than just the .send() bit.
- markessien 16y agoSendgrid & other such senders will be shaking in their shoes now. Personally, as soon as I have more time, I'll switch to the amazon service. Also, any new app I make will use Amazons service by default. Sending email out is quite important for growth, and such services really help businesses. What impresses me about amazon is that they are not looking at what the competition is charging or trying to charge high based off the fact that there are not too many such services, but are simply providing the service at a reasonable price.
- arikfr 16y agoI think they aligned their prices with Google App Engine (they charge the same $0.1 per 1000). Why are you going to switch from the other providers to Amazon? Because of price?
- plusbryan 16y agoThe thing is, Sendgrid et al will continue to innovate in terms of feature set, and AWS never will. And that's a good thing: They focus on the absolute core of a product need - and let providers like heroku or dropbox grow like a vine on top of them, providing things people want.
- zacharypinter 16y ago> Sendgrid et al will continue to innovate in terms of feature set, and AWS never will Seems to me that Amazon has been quite busy innovating and expanding their feature set.
- plusbryan 16y agoYou're right, I misspoke when I said "innovate" - what I meant was, Amazon's goal is to create reliable base-level services for the developers of the world. Whereas a Sendgrid might provide unsubscribe management and fancy graphing, I don't see Amazon adding on additional services like this.
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- retube 16y ago> Start sending email in minutes through Amazon SES using the AWS software development kits for Java and .NET I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the java ecosphere in terms of libraries and resources is unparalled.
- mike-cardwell 16y agoPerl/CPAN wins hands down. And I am both a Perl and a Java programmer.
- tybris 16y agoWell, except in code quality.
- astrodust 16y agoThere's some awfully shady Java code out there, but since it looks impressive with all those abstract bases and factories you can't see the real problems. A 12,0000 line Java program with the same features and the same bugs as a 500 line Perl script is going to look clean in comparison even though it's just as crappy.
- tybris 16y agoSure, but in case of Perl the shady code is on a big pile with the good code. In Java you have projects like Apache commons that generally produce fairly good code as long as you steer clear of the experimental stuff.
- chromatic 16y agoSure, but in case of Perl the shady code is on a big pile with the good code. Does Java have anything comparable to CPAN Testers? http://www.cpantesters.org/ http://www.cpantesters.org/ Note that commits to Perl 5 get tested against the whole of CPAN for unintentional breakage.
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- citricsquid 16y agoThe pricing is! Step one, click http://aws.amazon.com/ses/ http://aws.amazon.com/ses/ on the page, step two click pricing at the side: http://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/ (I'm not logged in)
- e1ven 16y agoThanks! Deleted my post.
- hazelnut 16y agobye bye postmarkapp, critsend, sendgrid, authsmtp, cloudsmtp ...
- bryanh 16y agoI don't know about that... In preparing to launch a high volume email startup, I have a few problems: * How reputable are Amazon's IP's? Will my emails get flagged as spam due to reuse and general abuse? * Another cranky API to use. Why not STMP? * Sendgrid (and several others) have wonderful built in statistics and other quick n' easy apps. * Also, those services' core business is deliverability, not volume. I feel AWS's offering may be the other way around...
- aonic 16y agoThis is excellent. I recently moved a production website to EC2 at the last minute due to contractual disagreements with a hosting vendor. My next step was to sign up on SendGrid and configure postfix to use that for emails, SES will be better integrated into the AWS ecosystem. As a lot of you may know, emailing out from EC2 is mostly impossible as all ISPs bounce them back
- leftnode 16y agoI'm not so sure Sendgrid, Postmark, and other email senders should be shaking in their boots. There's plenty of other businesses that leverage AWS technology and resell it for a higher price. I bet they add AWS as an option as a value added reseller. If you have an existing email host integrated throughout your site, it might make more sense to just stick with them. It will force them to lower their prices though.
- eli 16y agoAgreed. I use Silverpop for high-volume sends even though I pretty sure they're just a front-end for PowerMTA
- megaman821 16y agoWe used to use SilverPop but then we just bought a PowerMTA license and wrote our own front end. If you are a small company with a large list, SilverPop is too expensive. Amazon is cheap but it doesn't look like it has any mailmerge (email personalization) capabilities.
- eli 16y agoIf you don't mind my asking, how much of a pain is it dealing with spam complaints and deliverability issues on your own versus through Silverpop?
- megaman821 16y agoThe pain is all up front. You configure PowerMTA to slow down its sending due to the responses of the various email providers so they never block you. As the trust for your ip goes up you can send at a faster and faster rate. Also you then store all the email bounces and run a cron job to clean your list. Usually I stop sending to emails that return hard bounces and ones that have soft bounced three times.
- d_r 16y agoIt amazes me how quickly AWS iterates and adds new features. Also, this is just what I needed for a site I am building (I was trying to figure out which third-party mail provider to use.)
- latortuga 16y agoOne of my coworkers remarked that it's amazing how Amazon just takes their existing infrastructure and repackages it to be sold as a service. When you look at it as something that they already had built for themselves, while still being awesome, it helps keep perspective.
- smokinn 16y agoThat's not how AWS works at all. Werner Vogels (Amazon's CTO) explains it well here: http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-cloud-computing-business http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-clo... And the history is well presented here: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-computing/amazons-early-efforts-at-cloud-computing-partly-accidental/ http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-computing/am... The tldr; is basically that AWS was a skunkworks project within Amazon with its own completely separate infrastructure. Its success is mostly independent from Amazon.com's success. (Amazon.com funded it but mostly left it alone until it hit it big.) As Vogels points out, within 2 months of launch AWS would already have surpassed Amazon's excess capacity. I imagine now with some of the huge customers such as Netflix and NYT on AWS the AWS traffic may dwarf Amazon.com's.
- bromley 16y agoI wonder how they will respond if an account gets over the allowed threshold of spam complaints. I could see them responding either by: a) Cutting off the customer's use of Simple Email Service; or b) (Much much worse) cutting off the customer's AWS account, including EC2 and so on. I'm guessing a), but it would be nice to have assurances against b). Otherwise a false positive on the "they're using SES to spam" detection system could be catastrophic. The SES docs just point to the standard customer agreement - http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ - which doesn't appear to make any specific mention of SES terms and conditions.
- fooandbarify 16y agoHow would legitimate use be falsely flagged as spam in large numbers? Other than a malicious conspiracy of some sort, I don't understand why a disproportionate number of e-mail recipients would target legitimate mail as spam. Am I missing something?
- izak30 16y agoWell, illegitimate use has to be handled appropriately as well, or we're in a "This is why we can't have nice things" scenario.
- bromley 16y agoAll sorts of things can lead people to erroneously assume that an email is spam (and mark it as such). For example, if your app sends out an automated email that isn't clear about what site/service it relates to, a proportion of recipients are likely to mark it as spam without reading it and figuring out who its from. Few people have time to read email that looks to them like spam. Or, if your company or service emails its list of subscribers for the first time in months, quite likely half the list will have forgotten who you are and the fact that they opted in to your list in the first place. And a disproportionate number of them will mark your email as spam. Or if people sign up for MyBrandedWebsite.com, but then receive an email from Software Company X (the company behind MyBrandedWebsite.com), people won't recognize the link, and a proportion will mark the email as spam. It's a rookie mistake on the part of Software Company X, but it happens all the time. Ultimately, minimizing spam reports requires a lot more than double opt in and an unsubscribe link. Amazon will be keen to minimize spam reports for emails sent through their system, because they'll need to ensure that their deliverability rates stay high. So they'll need good automated systems to detect spammers. But email/spam detection is an inherently fuzzy business, and false positives are inevitable. If a false positive could bring down an entire service hosted on AWS, even if just for a few hours, then using SES starts to look pretty risky.
- aristidb 16y agoSo I was immediately looking at their REST API... And true to form, Amazon adds yet another slightly incompatible request signing method. Consistency is for wimps.
- eli 16y agoI dare you to look at the API for some of the "traditional" email service providers. I've had the displeasure of working with a few from some of the big names and they are real DailyWTF material.
- jonknee 16y agoI have worked with Constant Contact and it was a Constant Headache. My favorite was when they took the API down for maintenance and maintained HTTP 200 OK status codes for requests but instead of XML returned it was an HTML page saying they were down. I took a screenshot of the page because it was so surprising: http://www.jongales.com/blog/2009/10/17/constant-contacts-insane-api-downtime-practice/ http://www.jongales.com/blog/2009/10/17/constant-contacts-in...
- eli 16y agoEmailLabs/Lyris decided to invent their own XML-over-HTTP API format rather than use REST or even SOAP or anything else you might already have a library for. They combined this with a very poor understanding of how XML is supposed to work (lots of <DATA> tags) and return results that aren't guaranteed to validate. Dates are represented in one of six different formats depending on which particular function you're calling. If there's a problem, you might get an error, you might get back nothing. I could go on. Silverpop is similar.
- biot 16y agoHave you had any experience with Exact Target, at the API level or other? And don't get me started about a certain email broadcaster vendor out of Seattle that starts with "what" and ends in "counts"... their idea of XML is to parse an entire file line-by-line and treat each line independently of the whole. So it kind of looks like XML... to a kid who just learned Java I suppose.
- elvirs 16y agoconsidering the fact that 95% of all email is spam, the email service providers should implement a similar quota system to fight spam. actually it would be great if entire email ecosystem had something like this in its core.
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoI love what Amazon is doing with AWS, and I like this new service a lot. Plus I'm a happy customer. But damn this is all getting very complicated. First they turn off email, so you have to find a provider, then they turn it back on, but you have to pay them. Looking at my AWS console, I've got 8 or 9 tabs on there -- each representing a little piece of what I might want in an app. Each has it's own help section with bunches of docs to read to get up to speed. Each has it's own forum category. Each has a usage policy. Don't get me wrong -- it's all good stuff. But good luck trying to guestimate what kinds of prices you'll be paying. You're paying for data transfer in and out of the cloud, you're paying for disk storage, you're paying for a database, you're paying for basic email services, etc. So I'm kind of stuck looking at the monthly bill and saying "Does this look about right?" instead of having some firm idea of what's going on without having to use a spreadsheet and 3 whiteboards. That's no good. It's probably completely acceptable for BigCorp, who has a guy dedicated to figuring all of this out and managing it, but I'm busy and pressed for time all I want is the big red button to push -- and a known price for pushing it. I love what they're doing. Just wish they'd put a little more "simple" back into it, especially in terms of pricing and bundling.
- kevin_morrill 16y agoSeems like a white labeling opportunity. Though I am not sure if their TOS allows it.
- ez77 16y agoCould anyone explain the usage of 'white label' here? The Wikipedia entry (+) doesn't help this foreign speaker. (+) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-label_product http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-label_product
- jrnkntl 16y agoResell services under another name, maybe in another package. In this particular case, with a fixed price :)
- 16y ago
- dardan 16y agodardan
- dardan 16y agodardan__@live.com
- jeffbarr 16y agoHere's my blog post: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/introducing-the-amazon-simple-email-service.html http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/introducing-the-amazon-si... If you like to solve puzzles, be sure to read the PS!
- ronnier 16y agoJeff, join the HN phonetool page :-)
- jeffbarr 16y agoWill do!
- Lukeas14 16y agoYou forgot to mention this at your PHP Meetup talk last night. I'm enjoying your book by the way. Thanks.
- moeffju 16y agoHmm, you made me hungry.
- shadowpwner 16y agoI don't have time to solve it, but translated from binary to text is .zncf anug erggro fv abpno Anyone want to take up the mantle? :D
- ROFISH 16y agoThe bitstream converted to their ASCII value is ".zncf anug erggro fv abpno". When reversed and ROT-13ed, it is: "Bacon is better than spam."
- jeffbarr 16y agoIndeed it is!
- jollojou 16y agoJeff, are there any plans to support mailbox provisioning? At the moment I'm using Rackspace's REST API to create a mailbox for our new customers. I like their API, but I don't like the fact that we have to communicate with their IMAP and SMTP servers to receive and send email. It forces us to write a lot of bug-prone email handling code. Could Amazon help in this kind of a scenario?
- sunny36 16y agoI can't find it but can you send attachments as well?
- ComputerGuru 16y agoAttachments aren't actually a separate field in the email. They're base64'd binary data at the end of the text field.
- tomstuart 16y agoYes, there's a SendRawEmail action (http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/APIReference/API_SendRawEmail.html http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/APIReference/AP...) in the API, which allows you to send a multipart MIME message.
- pilif 16y agoI wonder who's going to be the first to announce a SMTP proxy for this? More seriously: While I can kind of understand that Amazon has their API and probably wants this to work similarly, but there is already a wide-spread protocol for sending out email (SMTP) and I just can't understand why they can't provide an endpoint for that. Many applications which I really see making use of this already have built-in SMTP support (and are using that today), so why force developers to work with another, completely different API to send email over Amazon?
- devicenull 16y agoIf they use SMTP, they run the risk of a compromised server sending spam through them. With the API, it makes it a bit more difficult for a compromised machine to start spamming, unless it already has API keys for this service.
- pilif 16y agoNothing prevents them from requiring SMTP-Auth for authentication to make sure that the sending is coupled to a specific account. If we are talking compromised machines, then the key would be compromised as well at which point a spammer can use that key to send spam regardless of protocol. I'm not saying to use smtp auth with your amazon username and password, but with some token derived from the API key, but just SMTP.
- dalore 16y agoExcept they already have auth setup for all their other webservices. Why not make email yet another service and the auth infrastructure is already there.
- taylorbuley 16y agoMakes sense to me. Those gradual rate increases show they're pretty wary of the spammer threat.
- rst 16y agoUnless the compromised server already has sendmail or postfix configured to use Amazon's perl script as a transport (according to the directions in Amazon's own help files). In that case, the attacker doesn't have to even bother looking around for the API keys --- everything's already set up.
- koevet 16y agoThere is really no excuse to not launch a web application!
- infocaptor 16y agoI guess this is a great opportunity for individuals to provide services like aweber, mailchimp etc. Think about it, now you don't need to worry about the hardware. Provide a killer interface, make it super super easy and have a low monthly fee and let the user pay the amazon bill. ofcourse there are multiple revenue models but now is the opportunity.
- d_r 16y agoOn the topic of sending e-mail, I discovered the following note on my utility company's bill payment page. I'm guessing they have never heard of SendGrid or the like. http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dennis/GGBFG75hiG3uBWhtFRwldtwQed8zbwHzVsQBpp6M872kvawj6D7ZqxfLrLfu/conservice.jpg http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dennis/GGBF... (They did not reply to my friendly e-mail about it. Or perhaps their box was over quota...)
- rozim 16y agoObvious followup: "Amazon Simple SMS Service". Watch out Twilio...
- johns 16y agoThey announced they'd support SMS when the launched SNS awhile back, so I don't think this would surprise anyone.
- JoelSutherland 16y agoIt seems like Amazon is friendlier than SendGrid about bulk marketing email. Does this lower the barrier to entry for MailChimp/Constant Contact/Consumer Newsletter Service competitors? Or are there other high technical barriers as well?
- jgroome 16y agoThe future: Everything run by Google and hosted by Amazon.
- mono 16y agoplus: Everything you need to own, you buy at Amazon (rhymes!)
- sdh 16y agohopefully, this improves the deliverability of email that originates within amazon's environment. the service can be easy, but if the messages aren't getting through, then there is no point and sendgrid and others will continue to survive.
- blhack 16y agoI want to be excited about this, but amazon basically destroyed any trust I had in them (at least the people that handle AWS). I signed up for the amazon free usage tier of AWS, excited to try it out, and really really loving amazon for doing something like that (giving away service for free). I signed up, spun up an EC2 instance (careful to make sure that this really was free), checked it out for a few minutes, then moved back to my linode and slicehost boxen. I was excited to have another spare machine to try stuff out on for the next year (I really wanted to try nginx as a reverse proxy). About a month later, I got a bill for $60 from amazon. I tried to find a support chat for AWS (like what slicehost has), but couldn't...tried to find a way of calling them...but couldn't. Finally I sent them some sort of feedback saying "Hey, was this a mistake? Why are you billing me for something that is free?" The response that I got back was something like "The cost for AWS is $60/mo! Thanks for using AWS!" To me, this is absurd, and is borderline fraudulent (although I'm sure it was a mistake). Luckily for me, I have a good job, and while eating $60 worth of amazon making a mistake is annoying, it isn't a catastrophe. This wouldn't have been true for me while I was in school though, and wouldn't be true for some of the friends I recommended give AWS a try. I'm starting to think that stuff like this is where "the cloud" falls apart on people. If I have a problem with my Verizon Business internet, I can call them and talk to somebody until it's fixed. If I have a problem with one of our AT&T telephones, same thing. If the power goes out at our building, I can call down to APS and find out why. From what I can gather, this absolutely isn't true for google, or amazon, or any of the other "cloud" providers. If I build an email system myself, buy bandwidth/power/rackspace from a colo myself, and manage it myself, there aren't going to be any surprises. If it goes down, I can just look at why. Nobody is going to surprise me with a bill (except maybe the colo). To be honest, amazon, I don't even plan on building anything on your platform...ever. Same goes for you, google. While I really really love the idea of cloud computering (or elastic computering), I definitely don't love the idea of some faceless company with no customer service of any kind who can arbitrarily just take money from me and doesn't care if I leave. To me, stuff like this is a massive step backwards. While not related to AWS, but more "the cloud" in general...look at what happened a few months ago when facebook's OAuth system bailed out for a few hours. Anybody dependent on facebook for login handling was simply SoL without really anything that they could do to solve the problem until facebook fixed it. How is this desirable? There was an article here yesterday (an it seems like something like this pops up just about every week) about how the days of the system admin are over. I wouldn't be so sure. You can yell at system admins until you feel better, you can call them endlessly at 3:00am until they wake up, you can tell them that they have to come in to the office RIGHT NOW and fix it RIGHT NOW. (I'm a sys admin, btw) You can't do this to amazon, you can't do this to google. If amazon email service bails out...sorry, but call back later and maybe it will be fixed.
- slig 16y agoDoes anyone recommends a self-hosted webapp to manage and send the newsletters through AES/SendGrid/etc? I would love to use mailchimp or campaignmonitor, but I only have users, not customers, and the high price ins't justified.
- joshfraser 16y agoAmazon's IP's have terrible email reputations and are blocked by lots of services. Unless they are opening up a new block of IP's, I'd be very concerned about my deliverability rates. SendGrid give me a dedicated IP which helps a lot over time.
- gdesouza 16y agoWell you have to love Amazon's focus on KISS (keep it simple, stupid) -- heck it's even called the _Simple_ Email Service! I can only imagine the number of (illustrious) tech companies that would have tried to dress this up like a revolution in computing.
- sojourn 16y agothey are seriously taking over the world
- nolite 16y agono attachment support.. no mimetype support for anything but text and html.. not evident from the docs.. just errors when you try to send a jpeg definitely still in beta
- gizmomagico 16y ago.. Aaaaand does this work outside of the goddamn US of A?