5 ms·

I don’t know how many folks really know how much money is spent by big (and medium and small) companies on sending email but I can tell you it is considerable.

I don’t know how many folks really know how much money is spent by big (and medium and small) companies on sending email but I can tell you it is considerable. My last job was a small retailer and we spent maybe 2m a year just on platform costs and at my current role it’s closer to 200m (USD). There are some places where it probably makes sense to use one of the vendors. But I think a carefully architected custom solution like this could get most organizations where they need to be. I’m just not sure how much the talent costs. Do AWS experts charge a premium? Or would it just be cheaper to buy Acoustic and let the account team handle all the work.

southerntofu 5y ago
For that kind of money you'll be better off selfhosting your entire infrastructure and employing the "experts".
- chinathrow 5y ago
  Not so sure about hat. Deliverability is still a huge issue when selfhosting your own e-mail setup.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    From what i saw/experienced deliverability is usually only an issue when spamming people against their will. Sure, Microsoft/Google will block you at first but after a few weeks/months of going through administrative hoops you'll be allowlisted and your mails will deliver just fine. Sounds like paying an office worker a few weeks to keep in touch with Microsoft/Google support plus hardware + employing sysadmins would be considerably cheaper than 200m/year. That is, of course, unless you're spamming your users with undesired messages.
    - luckylion 5y ago
      I'm not so sure. Running transactional-message-only (i.e. double opt-in, password resets) for a small site I own with DKIM and SPF on its own IP for years ... GMail will still block a large percentage of it. Using SES with the exact same emails, Gmail will block significantly less. The large providers are whitelisted and unless you're as large, you're not going to get that privilege. Granted, for $200m you should be large enough to bribe a few Google people to get into the club, but for anything where it reasonably might be profitable to run it yourself and employ a sysadmin, you won't be able to afford that.
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        > GMail will still block a large percentage of it. Yeah Gmail is actively filtering smaller providers. But from what i heard/read it appears after personally contacting them several times they will end up allowlisting you (like Microsoft).
        alfiedotwtf 5y ago
        Not sure about the rest of you, but I can't wait for email to die. It's insecure, spammable, and Gmail has an almost-monopoly in terms of delivery.
        southerntofu 5y ago
        Not sure about the rest of you, but i'm exactly in the opposite team. email is as close to "universal messaging" as we'll ever get. It's the best example of interop we've seen so far and i'm afraid no new protocol could ever catch up with the almost 4 decades of email legacy. Personally i don't care that Google won't let me talk to people. I treat google's email server like i treat a bourgeois café in a fancy district: there may be friendly people to have a chat with in there, but they definitely don't want me around and i have better places to be and better people to meet. Only a revolution can change this balance, and in the meantime i won't loose my energy trying to get into their club, but rather develop our decentralized clubs.
        upofadown 5y ago
        It's silly to claim that almost everyone has problems with Gmail deliverability. The fact is that Gmail has problems with receiveability. Gmail is the email provider for people who don't care if they get all their email.
        alfiedotwtf 5y ago
        This. Gmail deliverability blows away the parent's "interop" comment.
    - theshadowknows 5y ago
      We send multiple billions of emails a year, and text messages, and push messages, and outbound ivr messages, and two way chat messages, and print messages, and in some cases fax messages lol. Our outbound volume is extreme and luckily only a few of our communication streams have trouble with deliverability. But it does take a few different teams to manage it all.
tyingq 5y ago
SES is good at sending stuff, but if you're mailing a lot you'll want to handle both hard and soft bounces correctly. And not just bounces you get live from the end SMTP daemon, but bounce emails as well. If you keep attempting to email an address that bounces, over time, you may get marked as a spammy sender. As far as I can tell, this setup doesn't do much with bounces other than quitting on a clear hard bounce from the end SMTP daemon. This is one of the reasons email services aren't cheap.
- dharmab 5y ago
  It should be noted that CAN-SPAM has very high fees for spanming and major email services can aggressively block spammers. Legitimate businesses have to carefully monitor and correct their issues. AWS can and will suspend your usage until you fix the problems.
- joawan 5y ago
  You're right! Bounces and complaints needs to be handled properly and the design does not reflect that. SES uses account-level suppression lists, to avoid sending emails to addresses that has complaints, hard bounced or soft bounced a number of times. It does not automatically handle bounces sent over email, and I've not seen a provider out there doing that but I could be missing it. We do manually monitor those however, by having the FROM address directed at an inbox that we monitor. Out of the 4M emails we send per month, we only get one bounce email back. And that's not really a bounce but a "please confirm you are real" bounce. This could probably be automated with SES too, by parsing incoming emails and adding addresses to bounce list. For that 1 email per month we decided not to add that complexity. Note: This setup is used for transactional emails, where users opt in via account creation and the first email sent is a verification email, to check that the address is real and that the user owns it.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Thanks...it does appear to handle the live SMTP bounces better than I thought, at least for hard, synchronous bounces that happen at SMTP delivery time: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-email-concepts-deliverability.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-e... However, my experience was that you also had to do something with soft bounces. For example, if someone's mailbox is perpetually full, re-sending to it over and over still can still eventually hurt your sending reputation.

southerntofu 5y ago

For that kind of money you'll be better off selfhosting your entire infrastructure and employing the "experts".

chinathrow 5y ago
Not so sure about hat. Deliverability is still a huge issue when selfhosting your own e-mail setup.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  From what i saw/experienced deliverability is usually only an issue when spamming people against their will. Sure, Microsoft/Google will block you at first but after a few weeks/months of going through administrative hoops you'll be allowlisted and your mails will deliver just fine. Sounds like paying an office worker a few weeks to keep in touch with Microsoft/Google support plus hardware + employing sysadmins would be considerably cheaper than 200m/year. That is, of course, unless you're spamming your users with undesired messages.
  - luckylion 5y ago
    I'm not so sure. Running transactional-message-only (i.e. double opt-in, password resets) for a small site I own with DKIM and SPF on its own IP for years ... GMail will still block a large percentage of it. Using SES with the exact same emails, Gmail will block significantly less. The large providers are whitelisted and unless you're as large, you're not going to get that privilege. Granted, for $200m you should be large enough to bribe a few Google people to get into the club, but for anything where it reasonably might be profitable to run it yourself and employ a sysadmin, you won't be able to afford that.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      > GMail will still block a large percentage of it. Yeah Gmail is actively filtering smaller providers. But from what i heard/read it appears after personally contacting them several times they will end up allowlisting you (like Microsoft).
      - alfiedotwtf 5y ago
        Not sure about the rest of you, but I can't wait for email to die. It's insecure, spammable, and Gmail has an almost-monopoly in terms of delivery.
        southerntofu 5y ago
        Not sure about the rest of you, but i'm exactly in the opposite team. email is as close to "universal messaging" as we'll ever get. It's the best example of interop we've seen so far and i'm afraid no new protocol could ever catch up with the almost 4 decades of email legacy. Personally i don't care that Google won't let me talk to people. I treat google's email server like i treat a bourgeois café in a fancy district: there may be friendly people to have a chat with in there, but they definitely don't want me around and i have better places to be and better people to meet. Only a revolution can change this balance, and in the meantime i won't loose my energy trying to get into their club, but rather develop our decentralized clubs.
        upofadown 5y ago
        It's silly to claim that almost everyone has problems with Gmail deliverability. The fact is that Gmail has problems with receiveability. Gmail is the email provider for people who don't care if they get all their email.
        alfiedotwtf 5y ago
        This. Gmail deliverability blows away the parent's "interop" comment.
  - theshadowknows 5y ago
    We send multiple billions of emails a year, and text messages, and push messages, and outbound ivr messages, and two way chat messages, and print messages, and in some cases fax messages lol. Our outbound volume is extreme and luckily only a few of our communication streams have trouble with deliverability. But it does take a few different teams to manage it all.

tyingq 5y ago

SES is good at sending stuff, but if you're mailing a lot you'll want to handle both hard and soft bounces correctly. And not just bounces you get live from the end SMTP daemon, but bounce emails as well. If you keep attempting to email an address that bounces, over time, you may get marked as a spammy sender. As far as I can tell, this setup doesn't do much with bounces other than quitting on a clear hard bounce from the end SMTP daemon. This is one of the reasons email services aren't cheap.

dharmab 5y ago
It should be noted that CAN-SPAM has very high fees for spanming and major email services can aggressively block spammers. Legitimate businesses have to carefully monitor and correct their issues. AWS can and will suspend your usage until you fix the problems.
joawan 5y ago
You're right! Bounces and complaints needs to be handled properly and the design does not reflect that. SES uses account-level suppression lists, to avoid sending emails to addresses that has complaints, hard bounced or soft bounced a number of times. It does not automatically handle bounces sent over email, and I've not seen a provider out there doing that but I could be missing it. We do manually monitor those however, by having the FROM address directed at an inbox that we monitor. Out of the 4M emails we send per month, we only get one bounce email back. And that's not really a bounce but a "please confirm you are real" bounce. This could probably be automated with SES too, by parsing incoming emails and adding addresses to bounce list. For that 1 email per month we decided not to add that complexity. Note: This setup is used for transactional emails, where users opt in via account creation and the first email sent is a verification email, to check that the address is real and that the user owns it.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Thanks...it does appear to handle the live SMTP bounces better than I thought, at least for hard, synchronous bounces that happen at SMTP delivery time: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-email-concepts-deliverability.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-e... However, my experience was that you also had to do something with soft bounces. For example, if someone's mailbox is perpetually full, re-sending to it over and over still can still eventually hurt your sending reputation.