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Heh, aggressive marketing from people who routinely recommend their own competitors. That's a new one. Pay no mind to the VPN spammers making 15 accounts here tonight that'll sit idle for the next two years and suddenly start shilling for a VPN service. No no, it's those MXroute boys. That's the real aggressive marketing. Let's see this conversation in video form:

M66B

@jarland said:
Heh, aggressive marketing from people who routinely recommend their own competitors. That's a new one. Pay no mind to the VPN spammers making 15 accounts here tonight that'll sit idle for the next two years and suddenly start shilling for a VPN service. No no, it's those MXroute boys. That's the real aggressive marketing. Let's see this conversation in video form:

Can you give examples?

angstrom

@M66B said: One of my application was rejected as well and adding more explanations resulted in an acceptance without further questions. So, in my experience it boils down to a clear explanation about what you are planning to do.

Okay, so this may be a disadvantage of Amazon SES: (very?/too?) heavy vetting of emails, and the consequent need to explain the situation to them.

The discussion above is admittedly somewhat weakened by the sudden banning of @TotallyNotABot, who first mentioned this issue.

michaels

MikePT said: Very glad to do your house cleaning though! You gave me some ideas for a blog post.

I first read about the idea of personal "outsourcing" in James Caan's autobiography. His story went something like... He was mowing the lawn, something he didn't enjoy and realised that he could pay someone £5 per hour to do it. If he wasn't doing it he could spend more time with his family or earning money, both of which were a much better use of his time. He decided in that moment that he needed to evaluate where he spent his time and money. In his case it was £5 per hour vs £500 per hour vs family time. I have since evaluated my personal "outsourcing"... I work two jobs and am a single parent... Is paying a cleaner worth it to me, yes. Paying someone to do my ironing... yes. Paying MXRoute to look after my outgoing email... yes. Don't get me wrong I love technology, I spend hours playing with smarthome stuff, my network and building and maintaining servers. I have run my own mailserver for years, then moved to amazon workmail and then to office 365... why? Because I don't have the time to make a mailserver sing. It was a similar journey for SMTP... relay'd my own, Amazon SES, MXroute.io. I am not dissing anyone else's choices, but I don't have the time or money to roll my own any more.

michaels

angstrom said: Okay, so this may be a disadvantage of Amazon SES: (very?/too?) heavy vetting of emails, and the consequent need to explain the situation to them.

My understanding is that it isn't the vetting, but the reputation of some of the SES IP addresses.

angstrom

@michaels said:

angstrom said: Okay, so this may be a disadvantage of Amazon SES: (very?/too?) heavy vetting of emails, and the consequent need to explain the situation to them.

My understanding is that it isn't the vetting, but the reputation of some of the SES IP addresses.

Perhaps I misunderstood the (somewhat fragmented) discussion above. In any case, assuming you're right, this could also be viewed as a potential disadvantage of Amazon SES.

michaels

angstrom said: Perhaps I misunderstood the (somewhat fragmented) discussion above. In any case, assuming you're right, this could also be viewed as a potential disadvantage of Amazon SES.

If you use a dedicated SES IP you are responsible for it's reputation. If you use the SES pool amazon are.

This is the paragraph from their own documentation which worried me:

Occasionally, one of our IP addresses is listed on the SORBS, UCEPROTECT, or SpamCannibal lists. Our data indicates that the impact of these blacklists is extremely low. We aren't aware of any major mailbox providers using these blacklists to reject messages. Resolving these listings would require a large amount of effort, but wouldn't provide any benefit for Amazon SES customers. For this reason, we don't actively work with these vendors to resolve blacklisting events.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/blacklists.html

M

M66B

@angstrom said:

@michaels said:

angstrom said: Okay, so this may be a disadvantage of Amazon SES: (very?/too?) heavy vetting of emails, and the consequent need to explain the situation to them.

My understanding is that it isn't the vetting, but the reputation of some of the SES IP addresses.

Perhaps I misunderstood the (somewhat fragmented) discussion above. In any case, assuming you're right, this could also be viewed as a potential disadvantage of Amazon SES.

Or as an advantage because they are actively trying to keep their platform clean, which benefits everyone using the platform. Sendinblue does the same, but they go too far by disabling your account for a single complaint. Amazon allows a small percentage of bounces and complaints, which is fair because the world is not perfect.

Easy acceptance means also easy acceptance of spammers, which is IMO not a good thing.

angstrom

@michaels said: If you use a dedicated SES IP you are responsible for it's reputation. If you use the SES pool amazon are.

This is the paragraph from their own documentation which worried me:

I had been more focused on @TotallyNotABot's and @M66B's posts above, which I had understood differently, but when rereading your post, it's clear that you were talking about IP reputation.

I don't have a firm opinion on what Amazon SES should do about those (rogue?) lists. It would be a constant battle for them, perhaps not worth the effort, especially if they don't charge more. :-D

michaels

@M66B said:

@angstrom said:

@michaels said:

angstrom said: Okay, so this may be a disadvantage of Amazon SES: (very?/too?) heavy vetting of emails, and the consequent need to explain the situation to them.

My understanding is that it isn't the vetting, but the reputation of some of the SES IP addresses.

Perhaps I misunderstood the (somewhat fragmented) discussion above. In any case, assuming you're right, this could also be viewed as a potential disadvantage of Amazon SES.

Or as an advantage because they are actively trying to keep their system clean, which benefits everyone using the platform. Sendinblue does the same, but they go to far by disabling your account for a single complaint. Amazon allows a small percentage of bounces and complaints, which is fair because the world is not perfect

I don't know where you got that from around SES, but even their FAQ states that:

In exceptional cases, accounts identified as sending spam or other low-quality email may be suspended, or AWS may take such other action as it deems appropriate. When malware is detected, Amazon SES prevents these emails from being sent.

It is only malware they stop and they may suspend accounts for spam.

Given they state it is too much effort to remove themselves from blacklists, this is what causes the IP reputation issues that I experienced.

M66B

@michaels said:

@M66B said:

@angstrom said:

@michaels said:

angstrom said: Okay, so this may be a disadvantage of Amazon SES: (very?/too?) heavy vetting of emails, and the consequent need to explain the situation to them.

My understanding is that it isn't the vetting, but the reputation of some of the SES IP addresses.

Perhaps I misunderstood the (somewhat fragmented) discussion above. In any case, assuming you're right, this could also be viewed as a potential disadvantage of Amazon SES.

Or as an advantage because they are actively trying to keep their system clean, which benefits everyone using the platform. Sendinblue does the same, but they go to far by disabling your account for a single complaint. Amazon allows a small percentage of bounces and complaints, which is fair because the world is not perfect

I don't know where you got that from around SES, but even their FAQ states that:

In exceptional cases, accounts identified as sending spam or other low-quality email may be suspended, or AWS may take such other action as it deems appropriate. When malware is detected, Amazon SES prevents these emails from being sent.

It is only malware they stop and they may suspend accounts for spam.

Given they state it is too much effort to remove themselves from blacklists, this is what causes the IP reputation issues that I experienced.

Check under "health" in the Amazon SES dashboard and you'll see the current "health" and if you drill the metrics down you can see the limits. They have a system with warnings, suspension and probation in place. Everything is clearly documented in the Amazon documentation.

angstrom

@M66B: Could one conclude that the issue of IP reputation is potentially more of an issue in practice with Amazon SES than it is with mxroute.io?

michaels

@M66B said:
Check under "health" in the Amazon SES dashboard and you'll see the current "health" and if you drill the metrics down you can see the limits. They have a system with warnings, suspension and probation in place. Everything is clearly documented in the Amazon documentation.

Yes, and everything I have said comes from their documentation too. I spent a reasonable amount of time trying to get reliable delivery from my servers via SES.

https://aws.amazon.com/ses/faqs/#Spam_and_Viruses

M66B

@angstrom said:
@M66B: Could one conclude that the issue of IP reputation is potentially more of an issue in practice with Amazon SES than it is with mxroute.io?

I can only tell that I have tried a number of transaction e-mail providers (with shared IP addresses because I cannot justify the price of a dedicated IP address) and that many have delivery problems, except for Sendinblue and Amazon SES. But note that that is just my experience.

michaels

@M66B said:

@angstrom said:
@M66B: Could one conclude that the issue of IP reputation is potentially more of an issue in practice with Amazon SES than it is with mxroute.io?

I can only tell that I have tried a number of transaction e-mail providers (with shared IP addresses because I cannot justify the price of a dedicated IP address) and that many have delivery problems, except for Sendinblue and Amazon SES. But note that that is just my experience.

I think this is a really important point. It is down to individuals experience. It's not some form of holy email war, but about what works best for you. For the money involved there is no harm in trying them all and seeing which works best for your situation.

Harzem

@M66B said:

@angstrom said:
@M66B: Could one conclude that the issue of IP reputation is potentially more of an issue in practice with Amazon SES than it is with mxroute.io?

I can only tell that I have tried a number of transaction e-mail providers (with shared IP addresses because I cannot justify the price of a dedicated IP address) and that many have delivery problems, except for Sendinblue and Amazon SES. But note that that is just my experience.

I'm using Mailgun for emails sent using an API. Occasionally the shared IP I'm on is blacklisted in some list, and emails from my website aren't delivered to some people. It usually works fine with Gmail and similar, which uses their own metrics to evaluate spam, but when I try to deliver to custom domains (as it is very common with my FR members who use emails like [email protected] instead of gmail), my members are stuck with undelivered emails, blocking registration, password resets, etc.

For the new FR I have developed a mail delivery system, which displays a "retry this email" to the user when they perform an action that will send an email to them. This includes registration, email verification, and password reset.

When the user clicks "retry this email", it displays three providers to them (doesn't necessarily name the providers):

Provider 1 (mailgun): email sent.
Provider 2 (postmark): retry this email in 120 seconds.
Provider 3 (Amazon SES): retry this email in 240 seconds.

If the first provider's email doesn't reach the user, they can request a new one, which will be sent through Postmark. If that one doesn't arrive, a third one can be sent from Amazon SES.

I'm approved by all three providers. Reading this thread, I'm glad that I put Amazon SES as third. While it's the cheapest, it seems like if I somehow get rejected or blocked from using their services, it will not affect my primary and secondary methods. Primary and secondary methods have quite good personal support, while Amazon looks too big to me to care about my ~100 emails per month, which costs like $0.01, and I doubt they will give me personalized responses.

With the other two, I already used their support once each, and they were helpful even though I was a free member (their smallest package).

MikePT

@M66B said:

@MikePT said:

@TotallyNotABot said:

@M66B said:

@TotallyNotABot said:

@M66B said:

@TotallyNotABot said:
Also I'll add onto the entire SES VS MXRoute debate: SES does deny a lot of people without malicious intent. For example, I got denied from SES for transaction password reset type of emails. Very clear in the justification as well.

IMO it is a good thing that Amazon is critical about who to allow on their platform. My experience is that if you make clear what you are going to do and link to the relevant web pages they will allow you without further questions.

They definitely didn't check too hard. It was well documented and justified. And the project was actually entirely ran on AWS.

I use mandrill and mandrill is just as strict if not more. I have a perfect reputation because these are strictly transactional and not marketing.

Did Amazon specify a reason why you were rejected?

No as per usual you have to pay them for anything above a totally canned response.

Thats a serious issue with Amazon.

Not in my experience as already said and I bet you have no personal experience with this.

Can you please stop making MXroute look good by making other providers look bad? MXroute has it uses, but it is not perfect and not the best or the only solution for all use cases. People are not stupid and will see what you are doing, It is just too obvious. It doesn't make things better for you, on the contrary. You have lost me as a customer forever in any case, while I was considering to use MXroute as backup solution. Even though MXroute may work very well, I don't like this attitude. The world is not about selling and money only. In fact that makes the world a worse place.

I guess having worked for 2 big companies (a total of 6 years) spending 6 figures monthly there sending millions of emails per month and using close to all their services makes me eligible to say that maybe you are the one who doesnt have personal experience with Amazon.

MikePT

@michaels said:

MikePT said: Very glad to do your house cleaning though! You gave me some ideas for a blog post.

I first read about the idea of personal "outsourcing" in James Caan's autobiography. His story went something like... He was mowing the lawn, something he didn't enjoy and realised that he could pay someone £5 per hour to do it. If he wasn't doing it he could spend more time with his family or earning money, both of which were a much better use of his time. He decided in that moment that he needed to evaluate where he spent his time and money. In his case it was £5 per hour vs £500 per hour vs family time. I have since evaluated my personal "outsourcing"... I work two jobs and am a single parent... Is paying a cleaner worth it to me, yes. Paying someone to do my ironing... yes. Paying MXRoute to look after my outgoing email... yes. Don't get me wrong I love technology, I spend hours playing with smarthome stuff, my network and building and maintaining servers. I have run my own mailserver for years, then moved to amazon workmail and then to office 365... why? Because I don't have the time to make a mailserver sing. It was a similar journey for SMTP... relay'd my own, Amazon SES, MXroute.io. I am not dissing anyone else's choices, but I don't have the time or money to roll my own any more.

Definitely agree with you. Its like hiring an assistance to help you sorting stuff you dont want to deal with. Time is money. Family and rest are two priorities that are worth all money. I too spend money on monitoring stuff etc so I don't need to handle an observium setup. And I also like to see projects growing, getting better with new features. Its good to support others.

MikePT

@angstrom said:
@M66B: Could one conclude that the issue of IP reputation is potentially more of an issue in practice with Amazon SES than it is with mxroute.io?

We do Outbound SPAM Filtering, it filters accordingly. We bill for the SPAM flagged messages. We are happy to filter all the SPAM and we very clear about this. Its part of our service.
Amazon SES dont offer Outbound SPAM Filtering, they simply deliver emails, they dont want clients sending SPAM and they block if that is the case. It is a different service. I have already mentioned this like 10 times so I don't get why we are still talking about this .
Maybe @M66B thought I was simply defending us, as being a competitor in his point of view. I do have experience with both SES and MailChannels, I know what both offer, pros and cons, I even said we dont consider SES a competitor. They would be, if they offered what we do. But heck, we are damn too small for them to notice our presence

georgedatacenter

Mailchannels is great, manages a very good infrastructure and has good support.

Only once did I have a problem with MailChannels that was never resolved.

a company blocked the ips of MailChannels, MailChannels It communicated with the company, but never allowed the entry of mail.

I had to disable MailChannels for that client domain, and only then did they start sending emails

angstrom

@georgedatacenter said: a company blocked the ips of MailChannels, MailChannels It communicated with the company, but never allowed the entry of mail.

Seems crazy for the company to have done that -- almost sounds like revenge.

georgedatacenter

@angstrom said:

@georgedatacenter said: a company blocked the ips of MailChannels, MailChannels It communicated with the company, but never allowed the entry of mail.

Seems crazy for the company to have done that -- almost sounds like revenge.

No, this is the company claro.com.pe

They have a very strict service.

this was what Mailchannels said

In this case, your mail was rejected by "Claro.com.pe" due to greylisting. The gray - listing is not any type of block or any kind of IP reputation issue. Each time a given mailbox receives an email from an unknown contact, that connection is rejected with a "try again later" message (This happens at the SMTP layer and is transparent to the end user). To solve greylisting, we had to come up with a method of detecting when greylisting has occurred, and then that re-delivery of a queued message would happen from the same IP address on subsequent delivery attempts

Earlier we have contacted "Claro.com.pe" support team to solve this issue. As per their update, we have assigned IP dedicated to deliver your mails to the domain "Claro.com.pe", but "claro.com.pe" is still blocking our IPs.

Again we tried to contact "claro.com.pe", but we did not get any update / response from them. Currently we have rotated all the IP assigned to the domain "claro.com.pe". Even after making these changes, recipient domain is still blocking our IPs. Hence I would recommend you to white-list your account in the recipient mail server which is the best option
to avoid these types difficulties.

angstrom

@georgedatacenter said: this was what Mailchannels said

In this case, your mail was rejected by "Claro.com.pe" due to greylisting.

Oh, greylisting, okay, I see. But it does sound like Claro.com.pe's implementation of greylisting is overly strict.

imok

@georgedatacenter That company, Claro, is full of crap (right after Telefonica). Now I see they don't even want to receive emails :P

bdspice

@angstrom said:
@bdspice: Just curious, what score does your email get at mail-tester.com?

7.1/10