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SES: Cheap & DIY & somewhat time intensive & Ok but not great delivery. Add dedicated IP for like $60/mo and you’ll get into pretty good to great delivery Send

SES: Cheap & DIY & somewhat time intensive & Ok but not great delivery. Add dedicated IP for like $60/mo and you’ll get into pretty good to great delivery Sendgrid / Mailgun: DIY & somewhat costly & pretty good delivery ConvertKit: $100-150/mo for you current list. Focused on creators. Some marketing automation. They use a third party like Sendgrid but they manage everything. Fantastic to mediocre results. Fairly responsive team. Least labor requirement. Keys to success DMARC. CFL participation. Problem with CFL participation, some of the big guys (like Comcast) won’t let small ships into the system. CFL essential to catching “Spam” button events to unsubscribe and not destroy your sender reputation. Then there’s the whole spam control monoculture/cartel of BrightWorks / Symantec et.Al. Misbehave with one of their customers and you’re fucked for all their customers.

TekMol 4y ago
What benefit do I get from using those services, over putting an open source solution on a $5/month machine and using that? This one has 8k stars on Github: https://github.com/knadh/listmonk https://github.com/knadh/listmonk This one also seems to be popular: https://github.com/phpList/phplist3 https://github.com/phpList/phplist3
- solardev 4y ago
  Deliverability. If you DIY it and mess one thing up (out of like dozens of configs) you're going to get blacklisted by huge vendors who don't care about your tiny business and it's really hard to get out of that. Email is one thing you really really really really don't want to be cheap on.
  - TekMol 4y ago
    Why would the "huge vendors" care about my configs? Let's take Google for example. Wouldn't they just watch the bahaviour of their users? How they interact with the mails, if they flag them as spam etc.
    - solardev 4y ago
      No, there are a few other domain level settings and shared 3rd party reputational blacklists and maybe throttling concerns and such
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  The biggest cost you'd have is getting a "clean" IP in the first place. Forget about any kind of cheap server or cloud provider - you'd want something that's unlikely to have been used by a spammer recently. I've had good results with leased lines but those are expensive and not worth it if all you need is email deliverability.
  - TekMol 4y ago
    I use the mail server of my hosting provider. It is a cheap mass hosting provider that offers mails for free or almost for free when you have a domain with them. Do you mean their IP? When I send one of my confirmation mails to mail-tester.com, I get 9/10: + SpamAssassin likes you - No DKIM - Your message does not contain a List-Unsubscribe header + You're not blacklisted
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      I mean the IP of whatever will end up talking to the mail servers of your recipients - it may be, though is not always, the IP of the SMTP server your sending code is talking to. In general when it comes to hosting providers, if they're doing shared hosting you're guaranteed to have some compromised Wordpress/etc crap that will be spamming and will tank the deliverability of everyone using this hosting provider's email server (and their IP ranges in general). In addition, beyond public blacklists that Mail-tester/etc can query, big email providers maintain their own private ones which you can't query and don't know the inner workings of it. Microsoft is a major pain in this regard.
      - TekMol 4y ago
        Why would Google need to base their spam detection on IP alone? If they see low "mark as spam" ratios for my mails, why would they care if they come through the same IP as spam from compromised wordpress instances?
        Nextgrid 4y ago
        In general, even DKIM and a clean domain isn't a safe indicator of non-spamminess. It doesn't take much effort nor cost for a spammer to get a new domain, set up DKIM/etc correctly and then start spamming, and those emails would appear as "clean" as yours do. Therefore they use extra heuristics including the source IP ranges. Plus in your case your current mail tester result suggests you don't even have DKIM set up, so as of right now there's literally no way for a recipient server to tell your email apart from a spammer impersonating you. (to be clear I'm not defending the practice, just explaining my understanding of the current situation)
- CodeWriter23 4y ago
  If your time is worth Zero then your math is correct. Here’s a hint: I started running my own email servers in 1997 and I eventually ended up using all of the above I suggested. Sending email is not the same thing any more. My best bud is a Chief Engineer at a large ISP and he and his teammates code and config their custom Carrier Grade email sever Farm. They have a 60PB mail store. He says 93% of all email that arrives is SPAM that is summarily discarded after being scored by their third party service similar to BrightWorks. We’re talking emails that NEVER hit your Junk Folder, just drained into the bit bucket. So if they did not stop these emails, their mail store would be ~1,000PB. If your email doesn’t walk the line carefully, you have a 93% chance of it being vectored into space. If you want to reach @gmail @icloud @outlook etc you don’t have the skills to do it at scale. Delivering 100 emails is not the same thing as delivering 5,000.
  - TekMol 4y ago
    So far, I used the rawest approach possible, by sending tens of thousands of mails via PHP's internal mail function. When I send one to mail-tester.com, I get 9/10. Seems pretty good? I don't see why Google should care for technicalities. They can see the behavior of their users. The behavior should tell them that the mails are not spam.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
cma 4y ago
CFL?
- CodeWriter23 4y ago
  https://sendgrid.com/blog/email-feedback-loops-101/ https://sendgrid.com/blog/email-feedback-loops-101/

TekMol 4y ago

What benefit do I get from using those services, over putting an open source solution on a $5/month machine and using that? This one has 8k stars on Github: https://github.com/knadh/listmonk https://github.com/knadh/listmonk This one also seems to be popular: https://github.com/phpList/phplist3 https://github.com/phpList/phplist3

solardev 4y ago
Deliverability. If you DIY it and mess one thing up (out of like dozens of configs) you're going to get blacklisted by huge vendors who don't care about your tiny business and it's really hard to get out of that. Email is one thing you really really really really don't want to be cheap on.
- TekMol 4y ago
  Why would the "huge vendors" care about my configs? Let's take Google for example. Wouldn't they just watch the bahaviour of their users? How they interact with the mails, if they flag them as spam etc.
  - solardev 4y ago
    No, there are a few other domain level settings and shared 3rd party reputational blacklists and maybe throttling concerns and such
Nextgrid 4y ago
The biggest cost you'd have is getting a "clean" IP in the first place. Forget about any kind of cheap server or cloud provider - you'd want something that's unlikely to have been used by a spammer recently. I've had good results with leased lines but those are expensive and not worth it if all you need is email deliverability.
- TekMol 4y ago
  I use the mail server of my hosting provider. It is a cheap mass hosting provider that offers mails for free or almost for free when you have a domain with them. Do you mean their IP? When I send one of my confirmation mails to mail-tester.com, I get 9/10: + SpamAssassin likes you - No DKIM - Your message does not contain a List-Unsubscribe header + You're not blacklisted
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    I mean the IP of whatever will end up talking to the mail servers of your recipients - it may be, though is not always, the IP of the SMTP server your sending code is talking to. In general when it comes to hosting providers, if they're doing shared hosting you're guaranteed to have some compromised Wordpress/etc crap that will be spamming and will tank the deliverability of everyone using this hosting provider's email server (and their IP ranges in general). In addition, beyond public blacklists that Mail-tester/etc can query, big email providers maintain their own private ones which you can't query and don't know the inner workings of it. Microsoft is a major pain in this regard.
    - TekMol 4y ago
      Why would Google need to base their spam detection on IP alone? If they see low "mark as spam" ratios for my mails, why would they care if they come through the same IP as spam from compromised wordpress instances?
      - Nextgrid 4y ago
        In general, even DKIM and a clean domain isn't a safe indicator of non-spamminess. It doesn't take much effort nor cost for a spammer to get a new domain, set up DKIM/etc correctly and then start spamming, and those emails would appear as "clean" as yours do. Therefore they use extra heuristics including the source IP ranges. Plus in your case your current mail tester result suggests you don't even have DKIM set up, so as of right now there's literally no way for a recipient server to tell your email apart from a spammer impersonating you. (to be clear I'm not defending the practice, just explaining my understanding of the current situation)
CodeWriter23 4y ago
If your time is worth Zero then your math is correct. Here’s a hint: I started running my own email servers in 1997 and I eventually ended up using all of the above I suggested. Sending email is not the same thing any more. My best bud is a Chief Engineer at a large ISP and he and his teammates code and config their custom Carrier Grade email sever Farm. They have a 60PB mail store. He says 93% of all email that arrives is SPAM that is summarily discarded after being scored by their third party service similar to BrightWorks. We’re talking emails that NEVER hit your Junk Folder, just drained into the bit bucket. So if they did not stop these emails, their mail store would be ~1,000PB. If your email doesn’t walk the line carefully, you have a 93% chance of it being vectored into space. If you want to reach @gmail @icloud @outlook etc you don’t have the skills to do it at scale. Delivering 100 emails is not the same thing as delivering 5,000.
- TekMol 4y ago
  So far, I used the rawest approach possible, by sending tens of thousands of mails via PHP's internal mail function. When I send one to mail-tester.com, I get 9/10. Seems pretty good? I don't see why Google should care for technicalities. They can see the behavior of their users. The behavior should tell them that the mails are not spam.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

cma 4y ago

CFL?

CodeWriter23 4y ago
https://sendgrid.com/blog/email-feedback-loops-101/ https://sendgrid.com/blog/email-feedback-loops-101/