[jen729w]

Roll your own with Amazon SES. Bang up a little script and call the CLI.

    for recipient in "${recipients[@]}"; do
    aws sesv2 send-email \
      --from-email-address "$sender" \
      --destination "ToAddresses=$recipient" \
      --content "Simple={Subject={Data='$subject',Charset='UTF-8'},Body={Text={Data='$body',Charset='UTF-8'}}}" \
      --region "$region"
    done

I got that script from their website. Should be easy enough to knock something up in Deno or whatever. 50,000 emails/month free! Amazing.

If you want an actual product, check out Buttondown. Indie, great support, and amazing APIs.

[snapplebobapple]

At my corp we are almost to tge point of sending amazon ses straight to spam by default. Those guys will send email for anyone with predictable quality problems.

[samspenc]

And if you are looking for an easy-to-use UI on top of SES, consider this app https://sendy.co/ which is downloadable and self-hosted.

Tbh I haven't used it in a few years but it was super useful. I see it's a one-time cost of $69 (used to be $29 but that was over a decade ago).

[Brajeshwar]

For those using AWS SES, I have had good success with SendWithSES - https://sendwithses.com

Disclaimer: I'm in contact with the founder after stumbling on HackerNews and I'm trying to help revive this awesome and economical tool. (I'm not paid.)

[tetrisgm]

Thanks! Any guide wrt using dkim / dmarc and such to ensure it's bulletproof? Any customizations you did beyond the CLI script above?

[jen729w]

My entire script is here.

https://gist.github.com/johnnydecimal/e7b1a03e26b79239363b5d...

Though I've since updated that to include a .txt file as the body vs. typing it out in the email. But that's easy enough.

I might have added TXT records to satisfy DKIM etc., I don't remember. There are guides on the Amazon site; I'm a bit of a dummy when it comes to this so if I worked it out it must have been obvious enough.

[tetrisgm]

Tyvm! If you have pointers to find the guides that'd be appreciate just for the sake of seeing if they're a good option. I'll look either way. Ty for the help

[jen729w]

Just the 'getting started' stuff here. Like I say I remember it being pretty obvious. The doco is good.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/

[scrose]

In my experience, it’s extremely difficult to get out of the SES sandbox, for what I presume is if your account/org is under a certain amount of spend with them. While basically free under a certain amount of usage, the gatekeeping there does make the idea of self-hosting your email free/cheaply sort of a nonstarter for indie devs.

For context, getting out of the sandbox at every org I worked at was essentially a single ticket with the word please and had almost immediate approval.

For my own account for a low volume form notification tool I wrote AWS’s response was ‘We will not approve your request and we will not revisit this decision’.

[Marsymars]

I actually just did this a couple weeks ago. I'm just one data point, so I've no real idea what the difficulty is of escaping the sandbox, but I created a brand new AWS account, made it clear that I'd be using SES purely for low volume transactional emails for people who had opted in and could opt out at any time, and they approved me within a couple days.

[RobMurray]

I got approved instantly for personal mail for my domains. even though they charge for smtp they don't actually take payment for very small amounts so it has been completely free for over a year.

[jen729w]

Mine did take a week but I have an actual website and active forum that I could point them to so perhaps that helped.