3 ms·

I think this is a more modern alternative to Sendy (https://sendy.co/ https://sendy.co/) which is a little cheaper. (no affiliation except being a user) Sendy

I think this is a more modern alternative to Sendy (https://sendy.co/ https://sendy.co/) which is a little cheaper. (no affiliation except being a user) Sendy does look like it has more features though - and it has been around for far longer, corner cases debugged and all. I’d love to hear how this is any different from Sendy.

Tomte 7y ago
I can read the installation instructions of Sendy and say "yup, I can do that. Upload a file, point my web browser towards it". I read the installation instructions of MailCoach and wonder whether this Composer thing is what I would use if I had a server that's not a DigitalOcean server, and whether this is something I can install without becoming a PHP wizard.
- corobo 7y ago
  Composer is the apt, yum, dnf, npm, pip, etc of PHP
  - Tomte 7y ago
    And it's a hurdle when the audience is small non-tech businesses wanting a newsletter. For a dev company, maybe even integrating it into one of their applications, great! Sendy targets very much the former ones. I just assume MailCoach does, too, but I don't really know.
    - masukomi 7y ago
      It's a hurdle for anyone who isn't a PHP developer. Why would anyone else have reason to know that?
PetahNZ 7y ago
Sendy has abysmal performance for large lists though.
- masukomi 7y ago
  that's because SES HATES being used. IT's very much a "If you absolutely _must_ send and email from here.. fine. we'll let you, but you _really_ ought to use some other service."
  - JoshTriplett 7y ago
    Can you elaborate a little on that? SES looks reasonable from the outside; what problems does it have that other email services don't?
    - robjan 7y ago
      Not GP but I can give you my experience. SES seems to be a "good enough" solution if you use their API. There are a lot of missing features, such as logging anything other than metadata, which makes it not so useful if you are operating in a regulated industry. The real problems come when you try to use the SMTP gateway. It's quite slow and unreliable and doesn't really work for parallel workloads. The only way to somewhat mitigate it is to deploy a postfix into EC2 and then queue your emails there.
      - JoshTriplett 7y ago
        > The real problems come when you try to use the SMTP gateway. It's quite slow and unreliable and doesn't really work for parallel workloads. Ah, that's helpful to know. I would normally have wanted to use the SMTP gateway as a more portable API, to avoid tying things to Amazon-specific APIs. But it sounds like doing so would add substantial fragility.
- shortj 7y ago
  I'll never understand why they haven't fixed that. A while ago I ended up writing a little patch that parallelized list sends with Redis backing things and some worker processes. Took me maybe a day of work. If I remember right we were easily getting a few hundred sends a second, could have easily gone faster. Default Sendy was a few a second on the same machine/resources. SES can support tremendous send rates if you get limit lifts from AWS.

Tomte 7y ago

I can read the installation instructions of Sendy and say "yup, I can do that. Upload a file, point my web browser towards it". I read the installation instructions of MailCoach and wonder whether this Composer thing is what I would use if I had a server that's not a DigitalOcean server, and whether this is something I can install without becoming a PHP wizard.

corobo 7y ago
Composer is the apt, yum, dnf, npm, pip, etc of PHP
- Tomte 7y ago
  And it's a hurdle when the audience is small non-tech businesses wanting a newsletter. For a dev company, maybe even integrating it into one of their applications, great! Sendy targets very much the former ones. I just assume MailCoach does, too, but I don't really know.
  - masukomi 7y ago
    It's a hurdle for anyone who isn't a PHP developer. Why would anyone else have reason to know that?

PetahNZ 7y ago

Sendy has abysmal performance for large lists though.

masukomi 7y ago
that's because SES HATES being used. IT's very much a "If you absolutely _must_ send and email from here.. fine. we'll let you, but you _really_ ought to use some other service."
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  Can you elaborate a little on that? SES looks reasonable from the outside; what problems does it have that other email services don't?
  - robjan 7y ago
    Not GP but I can give you my experience. SES seems to be a "good enough" solution if you use their API. There are a lot of missing features, such as logging anything other than metadata, which makes it not so useful if you are operating in a regulated industry. The real problems come when you try to use the SMTP gateway. It's quite slow and unreliable and doesn't really work for parallel workloads. The only way to somewhat mitigate it is to deploy a postfix into EC2 and then queue your emails there.
    - JoshTriplett 7y ago
      > The real problems come when you try to use the SMTP gateway. It's quite slow and unreliable and doesn't really work for parallel workloads. Ah, that's helpful to know. I would normally have wanted to use the SMTP gateway as a more portable API, to avoid tying things to Amazon-specific APIs. But it sounds like doing so would add substantial fragility.
shortj 7y ago
I'll never understand why they haven't fixed that. A while ago I ended up writing a little patch that parallelized list sends with Redis backing things and some worker processes. Took me maybe a day of work. If I remember right we were easily getting a few hundred sends a second, could have easily gone faster. Default Sendy was a few a second on the same machine/resources. SES can support tremendous send rates if you get limit lifts from AWS.