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Ask HN: Recommend an SMTP service for infrequent sending to a large list

5 points by MattBearman 13y ago

A client of mine runs a site with around 30,000 members. I need to find an SMTP / mail service for this site. Mostly it will be used to send single 'notification' type emails to the users, but on occasion (max 4 times a year) they need to send an email out to the entire user base. So far I haven't found a service that would be cost effective for this kind of use. Services like mailgun seem to require a large monthly subscription for bulk mailing of that kind of size, which would be pointless when most months they won't be sending to the whole list. I've tried Amazon SES, which seems to be ideally priced, but it's just so damn slow, and also has a 10,000 emails per day limit. Can anyone recommend a service that would suit this usage?

ibstudios 13y ago
PHPlist? You can run it on your own server.
orenbarzilai 13y ago
Never used it myself but I have heard good things about sendGrid
- dholowiski 13y ago
  Sendgrid is OK if you don't care about the ethics of the company management. Everybody remember when they fired a female employee for speaking out about sexual harassment at a conference? http://mashable.com/2013/03/21/sendgrid-fires-adria-richards/ http://mashable.com/2013/03/21/sendgrid-fires-adria-richards...
swanson 13y ago
Mandrill is pay as you go - so you could use the free plan and then just pay by the email when you send large bursts: http://mandrill.com/pricing/ http://mandrill.com/pricing/ The only issue you will run into is that Mandrill has a per day limit that only increases as your sending volume increases, so they first few times you might have to spread out the 30k over a few days.
- MattBearman 13y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion, I've gone with Mandrill and so far it's working perfectly - their rails gem is beautifully simple.
tptacek 13y ago
We use Mailgun for the crypto challenges (tinyurl.com/mtsocrypt) and are very happy with it.
dholowiski 13y ago
The problem here is that they are in-between two distinct needs 1) low volume transactional email 2) high volume (but very intermittent) distribution. Most service cater to one or the other (and for #2, most cater to non-intermittent use). I would almost say that your best bet here is to roll-your-own SMTP delivery server. It's going to be a pain though because you'll have to delve deeply into email delivery/anti-spam issues (what you pay someone like mailgun or mailchimp to manage for you). If I was doing this and had to do it on the relative cheap, I would probably use SES. When it came time to send that 30,000 recipient email I'd build some sort of queuing system that talked to SES and delivered the email at a lower rate, over several days (say, 10,000/day for 3 days, or something like that). That may seem like an ugly way to do it, but then you do get to take advantage of that $0.10 per thousand (plus bandwidth) price. You could also contact AWS and ask for a higher daily limit, they do specificity state "If you need to send more volume per day than your current sending quota, please contact Amazon Web Services and we will evaluate your request promptly." on the page.

5 points by MattBearman 13y ago

ibstudios 13y ago

PHPlist? You can run it on your own server.

orenbarzilai 13y ago

Never used it myself but I have heard good things about sendGrid

dholowiski 13y ago
Sendgrid is OK if you don't care about the ethics of the company management. Everybody remember when they fired a female employee for speaking out about sexual harassment at a conference? http://mashable.com/2013/03/21/sendgrid-fires-adria-richards/ http://mashable.com/2013/03/21/sendgrid-fires-adria-richards...

swanson 13y ago

Mandrill is pay as you go - so you could use the free plan and then just pay by the email when you send large bursts: http://mandrill.com/pricing/ http://mandrill.com/pricing/ The only issue you will run into is that Mandrill has a per day limit that only increases as your sending volume increases, so they first few times you might have to spread out the 30k over a few days.

MattBearman 13y ago
Thanks for the suggestion, I've gone with Mandrill and so far it's working perfectly - their rails gem is beautifully simple.

tptacek 13y ago

We use Mailgun for the crypto challenges (tinyurl.com/mtsocrypt) and are very happy with it.

dholowiski 13y ago

The problem here is that they are in-between two distinct needs 1) low volume transactional email 2) high volume (but very intermittent) distribution. Most service cater to one or the other (and for #2, most cater to non-intermittent use). I would almost say that your best bet here is to roll-your-own SMTP delivery server. It's going to be a pain though because you'll have to delve deeply into email delivery/anti-spam issues (what you pay someone like mailgun or mailchimp to manage for you). If I was doing this and had to do it on the relative cheap, I would probably use SES. When it came time to send that 30,000 recipient email I'd build some sort of queuing system that talked to SES and delivered the email at a lower rate, over several days (say, 10,000/day for 3 days, or something like that). That may seem like an ugly way to do it, but then you do get to take advantage of that $0.10 per thousand (plus bandwidth) price. You could also contact AWS and ask for a higher daily limit, they do specificity state "If you need to send more volume per day than your current sending quota, please contact Amazon Web Services and we will evaluate your request promptly." on the page.