The issue of transactional email services is a good one that I might write about sometime as well. I send out the email version of the blog using SES because I

The issue of transactional email services is a good one that I might write about sometime as well. I send out the email version of the blog using SES because I know that I would have huge deliverability problems if I sent it myself. Even so, I apologize to my Apple Person readers that Apple Mail routinely hard rejects my emails from SES and I have not been able to figure out why... it comes and goes from month to month and I haven't gotten any useful info. In general I've found Apple Mail to be probably the most aggressive major provider in terms of rejecting at the SMTP level. Microsoft seems to virtually never do it unless there is a major problem (i.e. SPF exists and prohibits the sending mail server). Google is somewhere in between, but seems to stop SMTP hard rejecting at all once it's seen the IP in use for a couple months. The unfortunate thing, of course, is that hard rejections at least give you feedback. When they accept the mail you still don't know if it's actually made it to an inbox.