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by IgorPartola 4467 days ago
If you use EC2 or the like your IP address or the entire address block could have easily ended up on a spam list so your email will be blocked. I wish SendGrid was only necessary for people who sends lots of mail but the reality is that no cloy provider can guarantee that email from their IP addresses will be delivered.
1 comments
toomuchtodo 4467 days ago
If you invoke sending email through Amazon SES, it's free for the first 2K per day, due EC2 blocks being on spam lists.

http://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/

"You can send 2,000 messages for free each day when you call Amazon SES from an Amazon EC2 instance directly or through AWS Elastic Beanstalk."

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gtaylor 4467 days ago
We just switched off of SES because of the lack of bounce/rejection diagnostics, and their internal blacklisting policies are really aggressive. If someone's email server goes down for a few hours, they're blacklisted for quite some time, even after it comes back up.

After using SES for close to two years, I'd suggest looking elsewhere if you really care about deliverability or stats/metrics. We switched to Mandrill a few months ago and have been very impressed. It's still a tiny, microscopic percentage of our budget, but we get so much more (open/click reporting, sub-accounts, rendered email body history, much better blacklist/whitelist management).

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cheeseprocedure 4467 days ago
> [...] the lack of bounce/rejection diagnostics [...]

My employer has been making more and more use of SES, and we've just started looking at automated processing of feedback notifications [1]. Did you find them lacking?

[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/notific...

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erichurkman 4467 days ago
Another +1 for Mandrill. We've been quite happy with them as well.
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toomuchtodo 4467 days ago
Thanks for the recommendation! Will have to check them out.
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voltagex_ 4467 days ago
Does open/click reporting still work for GMail with the changes to the way they load images?
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gtaylor 4467 days ago
Check out the bottom of this post for where they stand on that: http://blog.mandrill.com/rejection-imports-subaccount-enhanc...

They get accurate data for clicks, but geolocation/browser stats for opens aren't 100%. They still track the rates, but it looks like they're coming from one of Google's proxies, so this is the best they can do for now.

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