9 ms·

Mail for Good

120 points by quickthrower2 6y ago

thrownaway954 6y ago
FYI: the last commit was in Dec of 2019 https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good/commits/master https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good/commits/master there is an issue open still about the status of the project: https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good/issues/329 https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good/issues/329
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >We believe that a re-write of the platform is due ... Oh oh.
- quincyla 6y ago
  I use Mail for Good every week to send my email blast to 3.5 million people. It works fine and is stable. We haven't made any big changes to it recently because it hasn't broken. There is definitely some maintenance we could do as far as updating libraries. We're hoping to re-write parts of it to use AWS Lambda instead of a Linux server, so we can further simplify use of it for less-technical users (a lot of nonprofits don't have developers on staff).
- jerluc 6y ago
  There are a decent number of branches, one of which is "fix/auth" which has commits from two months ago (but most are much older as you mention). Not saying this necessarily means this project is alive and well, but just noting!
davnicwil 6y ago
This looks really good, but it mentions it uses AWS Simple Email Service to actually send the emails. I was under the impression that one of the big value adds of the more expensive email services is that, basically, they work on solving the issue of avoiding your email landing in spam, whereas if you use a more 'direct' commodity service like AWS Simple Email Service or other cloud equivalents you have to kind of solve that problem yourself which is really, really hard and hence not worth the saving. Is that roughly true? Or do I have it wrong?
- fredley 6y ago
  Not being routed to Spam is largely a two-step process, which is of moderate complexity in SES, but if you're browsing GitHub you can probably handle it: * Setting up DKIM and SPF - Amazon makes this relatively painless, particularly if you're managing DNS in Route53 * Not spamming
  - elif 6y ago
    * convince the other users of your IP block to not hit spamtraps.
  - old-gregg 6y ago
    I used to work at Mailgun. Believe me, there's a lot more to getting your mail delivered. Simply configuring DNS stopped being enough maybe around 2006-08.
- agustif 6y ago
  I think you have it backwards though. if you use a big player like AWS or Azure or GCP, you can be pretty sure your mail will get to inbox and not in the spam folder, not the other way around I think. DIY is a little harder
  - danpalmer 6y ago
    I think the previous comment was potentially more correct. Typically for low volume sending it doesn't matter. For high-volume sending you need to get the IPs, domains, and security controls set up correctly to reduce how much you're seen as spam. AWS SES will allow you to configure this all, but you need to know how. Something like SendGrid (not a small player) will be more expensive, but will provide usability features on top and guide you through that setup of that solid foundation a little more. Ultimately the reputation comes down to the organisation authoring the email (not the email service provider), as they are the ones doing well or badly on the quality of the email they send.
  - elif 6y ago
    Not true. Inbox placement requires vigilance and monitoring of every user on your IP. AWS is so mixed that is an intractable problem.
cmroanirgo 6y ago
> An app for sending millions of emails as cheaply as possible. Mail for Good uses AWS Simple Email Service to send bulk emails at $0.10 per 1000 emails. > Mail for Good is fast and memory efficient, currently sending over 100 emails per second on a 1gb Digital Ocean VPS. > We've used Mail for Good to deliver newsletters to hundreds of thousands of campers per week. ... Good? YMMV, but personally, I'm not a fan of spam. Never will be.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ewidar 6y ago
  I agree, I don't understand the naming here. When clicking the link I thought this was going to be another way to approach emails which better respects... something. This was quite disapointing.
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    >I don't understand the naming here. You mean "Mail for Good"? I think it's because they are focusing on non-profits.
- growt 6y ago
  Not every bulk email is spam. Look at your inbox, I bet there are at least some newsletters, transactional mails or mailing lists in there that you signed up for.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    There are zero newsletters, large-scale transactional emails or mailing lists in my inbox. Are you suggesting that I am missing out on something awesome, or maybe that's how e-mail should've been in the first place before the marketing industry laid its slimy hands on it?
  - cmroanirgo 6y ago
    I've contacted PayPal asking to be unsubscribed from having a monthly email about my zero account balance with them. They said they couldn't unsubscribe me. I don't have any details other than 1 credit card with them... So I'll never have a "balance", so their email is spam to me. I never signed up for correspondence from PayPal about this. That they refuse to fix it is weird. I get exactly zero bulk email in my inbox... Except for this PayPal nonsense.
wiradikusuma 6y ago
Another open source alternative: https://mailtrain.org/ https://mailtrain.org/
nicetryguy 6y ago
I can't stand when project names contain false altruism. Especially one built to send spam emails.
- TheRealPomax 6y ago
  Cool opinion. Ever heard the one about the non-profit activist orgs that had to send emails to tens of thousands of people who had already opted into receiving emails and had to allocate substantial portions of their budget to sending out their donation drive emails because the system keeps breaking and different companies and government departments keep finding new ways to make things worse, requiring regular mail-outs, and there wasn't really any near-zero-conf, _actually_ cheap off-the-shelf solution for that? It's hilarious, the punch line involves being called false altruists and spammers.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    How many of those people actually, intentionally opt-in as opposed to forgetting to uncheck a checkbox? Out of those people that did intentionally opt-in, would they still opt-in if they knew the frequency of the e-mails? I remember being on the receiving end of exactly the same scenario you describe - non-profit entity sending spam. I actually intentionally subscribed when signing a petition and assumed they'd e-mail once a month or so which I would've be fine with. I was so wrong - they were sending some crap every few days, and even worse they attempted to make them look personal (sent from a real-looking name) even though it's the same garbage they email to hundreds of thousands of other suckers that assumed good faith on their part. In a handful of weeks my inbox was dominated by their spam. Another case was for a tech-related non-profit that I donated to and explicitly unchecked any opportunity for them to spam me. Well guess what, one year later they still did. They apologized afterwards and said it was a mistake (fair enough), and yet some time later I got yet another spam campaign from them I had to unsubscribe from.
    - TheRealPomax 6y ago
      What the hell does "if they knew the frequency of the e-mails" even mean? As someone who opted into several of these orgs: yes, of course? I know the frequency because I get the emails: if that bothers me, I can stop funding them, or I can understand that getting more of them means the world is getting more fucked up and I should probably seriously consider stepping up my game in supporting orgs that help fight this fucked up world.
mikl 6y ago
An efficient spam cannon? What’s good about that?
Animats 6y ago
"Email campaign management tool" = spam tool Sorry.
- tibu 6y ago
  From a valid newsletter you can unsubscribe anytime.
  - aahhahahaaa 6y ago
    the operative word here is "valid"
    - Animats 6y ago
      Your unsubscribe request may take up to 30 days to process. You have unsubscribed from our "Save the egrets" campaign. (You are still subscribed to our "Save the whales", "Save the spotted frog", "Save the kudzu", etc. campaigns.) To unsubscribe, please click on this link, log in, give your full name and address (which we will resell) and phone number (which we will resell.)
nitwit005 6y ago
> $0.10 per 1000 emails That seems to be dramatically more expensive than SendGrid, at least based on playing around with the pricing slider on their website. Plus you're paying some other costs like bandwidth and mailing list maintenance. Most of these email providers have the idea that you can create a mailing list, and then ask them to send mailings based on some template.
- MatekCopatek 6y ago
  Are you sure? I just did the same and SendGrid's cheapest plan seems to be $15 for 50,000 emails, which is $0.30 per 1000 emails, so 3x as much. Also, this quote seems to be based on using AWS Simple Email Service. Lower down they say: > We're currently sending weekly email blasts of over 800,000 emails in 4 hours on a $10 per month Digital Ocean VPS with 1gb memory and 1 core processor.
  - nitwit005 6y ago
    You are correct. I had a mistake in my conversion to cents.
29athrowaway 6y ago
If you are sending millions of e-mails, it's very likely not for good.
ddevault 6y ago
Do not Fucking Send Spam emails Seriously, this shit is NOT okay and building projects like this is morally reprehensible. "Mail for good", my ass.
niftylettuce 6y ago
Non-profits and startups are welcome to use my service for free. https://forwardemail.net https://forwardemail.net

120 points by quickthrower2 6y ago

FYI: the last commit was in Dec of 2019 https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good/commits/master https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good/commits/master there is an issue open still about the status of the project: https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good/issues/329 https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good/issues/329

macspoofing 6y ago
>We believe that a re-write of the platform is due ... Oh oh.
quincyla 6y ago
I use Mail for Good every week to send my email blast to 3.5 million people. It works fine and is stable. We haven't made any big changes to it recently because it hasn't broken. There is definitely some maintenance we could do as far as updating libraries. We're hoping to re-write parts of it to use AWS Lambda instead of a Linux server, so we can further simplify use of it for less-technical users (a lot of nonprofits don't have developers on staff).
jerluc 6y ago
There are a decent number of branches, one of which is "fix/auth" which has commits from two months ago (but most are much older as you mention). Not saying this necessarily means this project is alive and well, but just noting!

davnicwil 6y ago

This looks really good, but it mentions it uses AWS Simple Email Service to actually send the emails. I was under the impression that one of the big value adds of the more expensive email services is that, basically, they work on solving the issue of avoiding your email landing in spam, whereas if you use a more 'direct' commodity service like AWS Simple Email Service or other cloud equivalents you have to kind of solve that problem yourself which is really, really hard and hence not worth the saving. Is that roughly true? Or do I have it wrong?

fredley 6y ago
Not being routed to Spam is largely a two-step process, which is of moderate complexity in SES, but if you're browsing GitHub you can probably handle it: * Setting up DKIM and SPF - Amazon makes this relatively painless, particularly if you're managing DNS in Route53 * Not spamming
- elif 6y ago
  * convince the other users of your IP block to not hit spamtraps.
- old-gregg 6y ago
  I used to work at Mailgun. Believe me, there's a lot more to getting your mail delivered. Simply configuring DNS stopped being enough maybe around 2006-08.
agustif 6y ago
I think you have it backwards though. if you use a big player like AWS or Azure or GCP, you can be pretty sure your mail will get to inbox and not in the spam folder, not the other way around I think. DIY is a little harder
- danpalmer 6y ago
  I think the previous comment was potentially more correct. Typically for low volume sending it doesn't matter. For high-volume sending you need to get the IPs, domains, and security controls set up correctly to reduce how much you're seen as spam. AWS SES will allow you to configure this all, but you need to know how. Something like SendGrid (not a small player) will be more expensive, but will provide usability features on top and guide you through that setup of that solid foundation a little more. Ultimately the reputation comes down to the organisation authoring the email (not the email service provider), as they are the ones doing well or badly on the quality of the email they send.
- elif 6y ago
  Not true. Inbox placement requires vigilance and monitoring of every user on your IP. AWS is so mixed that is an intractable problem.

cmroanirgo 6y ago

> An app for sending millions of emails as cheaply as possible. Mail for Good uses AWS Simple Email Service to send bulk emails at $0.10 per 1000 emails. > Mail for Good is fast and memory efficient, currently sending over 100 emails per second on a 1gb Digital Ocean VPS. > We've used Mail for Good to deliver newsletters to hundreds of thousands of campers per week. ... Good? YMMV, but personally, I'm not a fan of spam. Never will be.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ewidar 6y ago
I agree, I don't understand the naming here. When clicking the link I thought this was going to be another way to approach emails which better respects... something. This was quite disapointing.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >I don't understand the naming here. You mean "Mail for Good"? I think it's because they are focusing on non-profits.
growt 6y ago
Not every bulk email is spam. Look at your inbox, I bet there are at least some newsletters, transactional mails or mailing lists in there that you signed up for.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  There are zero newsletters, large-scale transactional emails or mailing lists in my inbox. Are you suggesting that I am missing out on something awesome, or maybe that's how e-mail should've been in the first place before the marketing industry laid its slimy hands on it?
- cmroanirgo 6y ago
  I've contacted PayPal asking to be unsubscribed from having a monthly email about my zero account balance with them. They said they couldn't unsubscribe me. I don't have any details other than 1 credit card with them... So I'll never have a "balance", so their email is spam to me. I never signed up for correspondence from PayPal about this. That they refuse to fix it is weird. I get exactly zero bulk email in my inbox... Except for this PayPal nonsense.

wiradikusuma 6y ago

Another open source alternative: https://mailtrain.org/ https://mailtrain.org/

nicetryguy 6y ago

I can't stand when project names contain false altruism. Especially one built to send spam emails.

TheRealPomax 6y ago
Cool opinion. Ever heard the one about the non-profit activist orgs that had to send emails to tens of thousands of people who had already opted into receiving emails and had to allocate substantial portions of their budget to sending out their donation drive emails because the system keeps breaking and different companies and government departments keep finding new ways to make things worse, requiring regular mail-outs, and there wasn't really any near-zero-conf, _actually_ cheap off-the-shelf solution for that? It's hilarious, the punch line involves being called false altruists and spammers.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  How many of those people actually, intentionally opt-in as opposed to forgetting to uncheck a checkbox? Out of those people that did intentionally opt-in, would they still opt-in if they knew the frequency of the e-mails? I remember being on the receiving end of exactly the same scenario you describe - non-profit entity sending spam. I actually intentionally subscribed when signing a petition and assumed they'd e-mail once a month or so which I would've be fine with. I was so wrong - they were sending some crap every few days, and even worse they attempted to make them look personal (sent from a real-looking name) even though it's the same garbage they email to hundreds of thousands of other suckers that assumed good faith on their part. In a handful of weeks my inbox was dominated by their spam. Another case was for a tech-related non-profit that I donated to and explicitly unchecked any opportunity for them to spam me. Well guess what, one year later they still did. They apologized afterwards and said it was a mistake (fair enough), and yet some time later I got yet another spam campaign from them I had to unsubscribe from.
  - TheRealPomax 6y ago
    What the hell does "if they knew the frequency of the e-mails" even mean? As someone who opted into several of these orgs: yes, of course? I know the frequency because I get the emails: if that bothers me, I can stop funding them, or I can understand that getting more of them means the world is getting more fucked up and I should probably seriously consider stepping up my game in supporting orgs that help fight this fucked up world.

mikl 6y ago

An efficient spam cannon? What’s good about that?

Animats 6y ago

"Email campaign management tool" = spam tool Sorry.

tibu 6y ago
From a valid newsletter you can unsubscribe anytime.
- aahhahahaaa 6y ago
  the operative word here is "valid"
  - Animats 6y ago
    Your unsubscribe request may take up to 30 days to process. You have unsubscribed from our "Save the egrets" campaign. (You are still subscribed to our "Save the whales", "Save the spotted frog", "Save the kudzu", etc. campaigns.) To unsubscribe, please click on this link, log in, give your full name and address (which we will resell) and phone number (which we will resell.)

nitwit005 6y ago

> $0.10 per 1000 emails That seems to be dramatically more expensive than SendGrid, at least based on playing around with the pricing slider on their website. Plus you're paying some other costs like bandwidth and mailing list maintenance. Most of these email providers have the idea that you can create a mailing list, and then ask them to send mailings based on some template.

MatekCopatek 6y ago
Are you sure? I just did the same and SendGrid's cheapest plan seems to be $15 for 50,000 emails, which is $0.30 per 1000 emails, so 3x as much. Also, this quote seems to be based on using AWS Simple Email Service. Lower down they say: > We're currently sending weekly email blasts of over 800,000 emails in 4 hours on a $10 per month Digital Ocean VPS with 1gb memory and 1 core processor.
- nitwit005 6y ago
  You are correct. I had a mistake in my conversion to cents.

29athrowaway 6y ago

If you are sending millions of e-mails, it's very likely not for good.

ddevault 6y ago

Do not Fucking Send Spam emails Seriously, this shit is NOT okay and building projects like this is morally reprehensible. "Mail for good", my ass.

niftylettuce 6y ago

Non-profits and startups are welcome to use my service for free. https://forwardemail.net https://forwardemail.net