[HN Gopher] Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain an...
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Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES
Author : edward
Score : 95 points
Date : 2021-05-23 20:53 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (carlchenet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (carlchenet.com)
| tqkxzugoaupvwqr wrote:
| 500EUR is 5 hours of labor. If you are skilled and everything
| works right away you may only spend 2 hours on the self-
| maintained solution which means you save 3 hours or in other
| words ... nothing. You also have to maintain/update the system,
| maybe spend time teaching other people. It's not worth the
| effort.
|
| If you don't have expert knowledge in the required
| tools/services, it will take much longer than 5 hours to set up
| the self-maintained solution. If you are unlucky "you may need
| the help of a professional sysadmin." ... Again, saving nothing.
| Zababa wrote:
| > 500EUR is 5 hours of labor.
|
| It's not, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259000.
|
| > You also have to maintain/update the system, maybe spend time
| teaching other people.
|
| I think it's just one person running a newletter, so I don't
| think teaching other people is a thing here.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Well, if you don't have anything better to do, got the time and
| have a DIY attitude, then it's a great investment. Also, there
| are more years to come so Y+1 it still saves you 500.
| paulcole wrote:
| > 500EUR is 5 hours of labor
|
| Only if someone will pay you for those 5 hours. Otherwise may
| as well say they're worth 37 starfish or 92 leprechauns.
| bifrost wrote:
| This doesn't sound like a good deal for the average business with
| zero experiencing managing their mail. One spam block and you're
| done, you'll spend at least a week dealing with that.
| PurpleFoxy wrote:
| Honestly everyone could spam block mailchimp and their email
| experience would improve.
| mceachen wrote:
| This calculus makes sense, unless what you're moving away from
| has no functional delivery assurances and regularly has server
| errors and downtime.
|
| And customer service that denies their own problems.
| davnicwil wrote:
| I know that one of the very hard problems with automating email
| is not landing in the spam folder.
|
| I always had the impression that using services like Mailchimp
| make that much less likely than doing it DIY on top of a more
| commodity transport like SES. I.e. they stay on top of and evolve
| with best practices over time so you don't have to.
|
| Is that in any way accurate?
| LeonM wrote:
| > I.e. they stay on top of and evolve with best practices over
| time so you don't have to. > Is that in any way accurate?
|
| For the most part, yes.
|
| It's all about delivering as much information as possible to
| aid the receiver with the spam detection process. The goal is
| to reduce false positives/negatives. The beauty of this is of
| course that if you are in fact sending spam, this will work
| against you. Mailchimp does this very well, they actually have
| people working for them with 'email deliverability expert' as
| their job title.
|
| The problem is that rolling a simple email sending solution is
| trivial to set up, but hard to get right. It takes surprisingly
| significant engineering resources to build a solution that
| complies with all the relevant RFCs, scales nicely and follows
| new developments. Resources that are probably much better spend
| elsewhere.
|
| My job is helping customers optimise their email infrastructure
| [0], I have analysed hundreds of domains, and my observation is
| that the vast majority of home-grown email solutions lack even
| the basic provisions for deliverability.
|
| My advice: don't roll your own email solution, unless you can
| afford full-time engineers to do so. There certainly is a
| tipping point (as always) where building your own solution is
| more cost effective as a SaaS solution, but that is certainly
| not at 500EUR/Year.
|
| [0] Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Mailhardener
| PurpleFoxy wrote:
| The problem is that you actually are spamming. Almost no one
| wants the junk that comes out of mailchimp. It's just they are
| big and powerful enough to get their spam in inboxes rather
| than the spam box where it belongs.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| I used to use Pardot ( B2B marketing software) at work, which
| is miles ahead of MailChimp. While there are certain things you
| can't do by default (e.g. email to info@domain.com,etc) , the
| spam filters are still kind of blackbox,so the content can have
| a huge play in addition to marketing software server's
| reputation,etc.
| mythz wrote:
| Not in our experience, we've only used SES to send emails and
| haven't had any reports of Customers not receiving emails or
| any of our emails having ended up in their spam folder,
| although we've never sent any marketing or promotional emails
| so our flagged rates should be really low.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| I moved my mailing list (all explicit subscribes, plaintext
| content) from Mailchimp to an SES-based solution in part for
| better handling of plaintext email, which is a total
| afterthought for most of these tools. Since the switch I have
| experienced minor hard rejection problems with SES that I
| didn't before, primarily with Apple Mail and rarely with gmail
| as well. I wouldn't say it's been a huge problem for me, in
| part because I don't care that much, but as far as I can tell
| Apple Mail was rejecting 100% of what I sent for a while while
| gmail just sporadically randomly rejects an email from time to
| time, not even the same email across multiple recipients.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| "primarily with Apple Mail"
|
| We started having this recently when sending quotations to
| customers. We ended up sending attached PDFs instead,so Apple
| Mail won't complain anymore. It can be either content or how
| the domain is setup,still not sure to this day.
| bdcravens wrote:
| The server you run node/MySQL/nginx on isn't free.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I cannot speak for Mailchimp, but open and click report in a
| Constant Contact seems to be persistently broken.
|
| e.g. email security software driven opens and clicks are
| registered as human by CC's reporting tools (GUI and API).
| Zealotux wrote:
| I've been working on my own startup for a few months now, I'd say
| email is one of these things where I really don't mind paying
| for, even though I hate how expensive Mailchimp/Mandrill is.
| ex_amazon_sde wrote:
| To send 4k emails a month a 1EUR/month VPS running Exim is enough
| and takes 1h to set up.
|
| The real advantage is to have control over your own
| infrastructure and ensure the privacy of your reader base.
|
| The drawback is having to monitor blocklists and the reputation
| of your server IP address.
| ghaff wrote:
| >The drawback is having to monitor blocklists and the
| reputation of your server IP address.
|
| Which sound like big drawbacks for anything reasonably serious.
| Maybe if you're doing this at scale for clients but, then,
| you're potentially exposed to clients who can cause problems
| that affect other clients.
| sneak wrote:
| Deliverability is a thing. When most of your list recipients
| are on gmail, this is a good way to end up in spam for all of
| them.
|
| People who believe this is a viable method to reach the inboxes
| of thousands of gmail users have never tried.
| Silhouette wrote:
| Sadly, this says more about how broken GMail now is than
| anything else.
|
| Real Soon Now(TM), the tech community needs to start a
| serious campaign to shame and isolate email providers that do
| not reliably deliver legitimate emails, regardless of how
| high profile they are. It probably needs meaningful
| government/regulator backing to get anywhere. The odd false
| positive on spam/malware filtering is understandable, it's
| not a perfect science, but the reality today is that a lot of
| these services simply don't work properly and the
| unreliability is probably causing some degree of damage to
| huge numbers of people and businesses. Email is far too
| important for far too many things to let the reliability
| continue to degrade according to the arbitrary whims of a few
| large mail services and to permit oligopoly effects to lock
| new or small-time providers out of the system almost
| entirely.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > To send 4k emails a month a 1EUR/month VPS running Exim is
| enough and takes 1h to set up.
|
| You can use a VPS for web projects. For e-mail you'd want a
| dedicated server with a separate IP that is going to cost you
| EUR40/month. Yes it may take 1h to set up, but gaining
| reputation takes time - you definitely won't be able to reach
| all recipients within one hour of purchasing the server.
| ex_amazon_sde wrote:
| I've done it and it worked. Without the EUR40/month.
| PurpleFoxy wrote:
| No VPS has a shared IP address. The real problem is that the
| pool may have been dirtied by previous customers. But once
| you get a clean IP you can keep it for as long as you keep
| the service running.
|
| I sent emails from a VPS for years without issues. I stopped
| purely because Fastmail had better software and cheaper
| storage.
| Silhouette wrote:
| Hopefully as IPv6 takes over, the contamination effect due
| to some unknown party who might once have used the same IP
| address will become less of an issue. Although you have to
| wonder whether the kind of big mail service that will swing
| the blacklist axe first and probably not ask questions
| later with IPv4 addresses is just going to start blocking
| entire service provider ranges with IPv6 to counter that,
| causing the same problems for legitimate senders with new
| systems anyway.
| krono wrote:
| Absolutely overkill to have a metal server at that cost to
| send emails. A cheap VPS (which always comes with its own IP)
| is fine in most cases.
|
| From experience I can confirm the reputation build-up
| requirement though. And all that reputation can get ruined by
| a single blacklisting - even if you manage to get the server
| de-listed later the damage is done.
| antoineaugusti wrote:
| If you're ready to pay 5$ each month for each thousand
| subscribers, Buttondown seems like a great tool. It does offert
| paid subscriptions as well if you want to earn money with your
| content.
|
| https://buttondown.email
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Intriguing. But run by one person? That's not worth the risk.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| This article is a good example of why MailChimp isn't going
| anywhere anytime soon.
|
| One-to-many email solutions are crazy: it's either some crap or
| super expensive marketing software. We all wish there was
| something a bit better.
| izgzhen wrote:
| Speaking from personal experiences on _non-dedicated IP_ plans on
| both SendGrid and SES, SES is much better in deliverability of
| transactional emails, esp. when sent to .edu domains.
|
| I felt like SES is more careful in vetting their customers to
| prevent shared IPs being polluted.
| mtlynch wrote:
| If you don't want to pay MailChimp prices but don't want to make
| the full leap to self-hosting, EmailOctopus Connect is a nice
| middle ground.[0]
|
| It's similar to Mailtrain in that it uses your Amazon SES account
| to send the mail, but it's a managed SaaS so you don't have to
| worry about keeping your server patched or accidentally wiping
| out your subscriber list.
|
| I've been migrating all my lists out of MailChimp and into
| EmailOctopus over the past six months, and I've been happy with
| the service. One nice perk is that you can disable view and click
| tracking, giving back some privacy to your subscribers. Their API
| is also the nicest of any providers I looked at.
|
| [0] https://emailoctopus.com/pricing-connect
| atonse wrote:
| Is there an open source server that gives you all the goodies
| that MailGun abd SendGrid do? Like delivery abd bounce webhooks?
| degenerate wrote:
| I don't think there is. NodeMailer kind of gets close by
| letting you request Delivery Status Notifications, but doesn't
| have webhooks or handle them for you:
| https://nodemailer.com/smtp/dsn/
|
| The closest thing I think exists would be Sendy, but it's a
| closed source paid app.
| Karishma1234fff wrote:
| I have seen far too many articles of these types.
|
| As someone who has sent billions of emails I can tell you the
| following.
|
| 1. SES is shit. 2. Value of mailchimp is not in its interface. It
| is in mail deliverability.
|
| Use at least sendgrid.
| [deleted]
| stevehind wrote:
| For most reasonable applications that is basically a great
| advertisement for mailchimp, Eg if you rolled your own solution
| you'd only save eur 500 a year before accounting for the build
| and maintenance of your solution.
| monksy wrote:
| Assuming that the newsletter application is a fairly stable
| release and it's on a package manager or auto updates via
| docker. The management of that is probably pretty low.
| offtop5 wrote:
| I had the same reaction too.
|
| Why would I go though all this for 500 euro a year.
|
| Why doesn't OP deploy this as a service for 15$ a month ?
| krrrh wrote:
| Except mailchimp has dumbed it's interface down so much that
| maintaining it takes far more time than installing a package
| like this or paying a small fee for a similar SES backed
| service like Mail Octopus.
| verdverm wrote:
| Given the recent revelations that MailChimp is fact checking
| (reading) your email content and deciding whether they should
| not send it (i.e. the contemporary corporate censorship
| cause)... there may be more than cost for self hosting business
| applications
|
| https://techstartups.com/2020/10/30/forget-big-tech-censorsh...
| throayobviousl wrote:
| This line of reasoning is how to tell the difference between a
| manager and an engineer :)
| tashoecraft wrote:
| An engineer should recognize what is worth their time. If
| setting this up takes more than 5hour a year of time to setup
| and maintain then it's not worth it. You'll be wasting money
| jupp0r wrote:
| Exactly, engineers should be lazy (seriously).
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Yes and no. There is some value in the experience gained.
| That being said, there might be better experiences to be
| gained (i.e., stick with Mailchimp and learn some other
| tool).
|
| Regardless, it's not simply about time.
| Zababa wrote:
| Not eveyone earns 100EUR an hour, especially in Europe. The
| newsletter has a French name ("Le courrier du Hacker"), and
| in France 45/50kEUR a year is a good salary. That's around
| 14/15EUR an hour. Which means ~33 hours a year of
| maintenance.
| tstrimple wrote:
| There are many ways to measure the cost of something like
| this, but a blind look at average salaries is probably
| the worst. It doesn't factor in overhead or opportunity
| cost. In most companies, having a developer spend a week
| on maintenance of a system which isn't a core business
| value doesn't make sense. They would be much better
| utilized on value added work. I guarantee you most
| engineers could delivery way more than $500 in savings in
| a week.
| Zababa wrote:
| As I said here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259123 this isn't
| a company, it's a newsletter so more of something like a
| side project. I don't think you could deliver more than
| 500EUR of savings in a week because the email costs were
| the main costs. I agree with you than within a company
| this would be different, but this isn't a company.
| maddyboo wrote:
| The cost to the company per engineer hour is
| significantly higher than the engineer's hourly rate.
| Zababa wrote:
| But this isn't a company, it's a newletter the author is
| running. It's important to consider the context of
| things. Here the only cost is opportunity cost, which I
| wouldn't know how to evaluate. On the other hand, they
| save 500EUR a year, learned new skills and created
| content for their blog.
| PurpleFoxy wrote:
| Depends who is paying. If it's your own project then 5
| hours of your own time might not be worth that much. If
| someone else is paying you then both options cost money and
| the equation changes.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| And then, it is not even your own solution, but AWS SES.
|
| I have been running mail servers for 20+ years, sending
| volumes that would have made me multiple times bancrupt if I
| was doing it via Mailchimp or SES.
| yread wrote:
| AWS SES is ~1$/10,000 emails. Are you the biggest spammer
| or just very very poor?
|
| Also, 20 years ago running your email server was way easier
| than now
| bpodgursky wrote:
| At a previous job, all API errors were emailed to
| internal email lists.
|
| The dev monitoring the API health kept track of system
| health by looking at the number of unread messages in his
| inbox. If the number of unread messages went up by <
| 100,000 in a day, the API was doing fine. If there were a
| couple million new messages, it means we were having
| problems.
|
| So... I can definitely see how this is plausible, if not
| uh, "best practice".
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| You could email everyone on Earth for less than the salary
| of an engineer with SES.
| andybak wrote:
| Absolutely. We have lots of small business clients on a tight
| budget and this sounds like a bad deal even in that case.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| If you're in the EU you're also saving the GDPR fines. And the
| author probably saved 500 euros a year on a basic plan. But if
| you're on the top end plan you would save tens of thousands.
| andrewnicolalde wrote:
| I don't think GDPR is applicable to private individuals
| running a newsletter..
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| GDPR as far as I know applies to anyone collecting data
| within the EU. But seriously the people who would think
| this is a great ad for mailchimp because the savings are so
| low are companies.
| Silhouette wrote:
| What GDPR fines are those, specifically?
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Mail chimp stores it's data in the us and German courts
| found that it breached GDPR because of US spy laws.
| ratww wrote:
| It's pure FUD.
|
| In fact I bet the chance of having GDPR issues with ANY big
| company from the US is way bigger than with any roll-your-
| own solution, since big US companies have data collection
| up the wazoo.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Not FUD there has been a court ruling on using mailchimp
| being a breach of GDPR.
| [deleted]
| manquer wrote:
| Shoutout to postal [1] , for outbound email delivery for apps and
| smaller well maintained mailing, the likes of SES/Sendgrid can be
| also be removed from the stack.
|
| While email delivery is complex, and reputation matters, for
| smaller apps and well established mailing lists, self setup works
| perfectly fine.
|
| [1] https://github.com/postalhq/postal
| windsignaling wrote:
| For those saying that this is a complicated solution: it is.
|
| I started using Sendy with SES a few years ago and it was much
| easier to setup compared to this blog post.
|
| Went from $120 / mo to pennies, + the initial cost of Sendy.
|
| If you're a developer, it's worth it.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Is there anything similar that does not use Amazon?
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