[HN Gopher] AWS to remove 62,000-message Simple Email Service 'a...
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AWS to remove 62,000-message Simple Email Service 'always free'
tier
Author : ryan29
Score : 48 points
Date : 2023-06-26 17:25 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (devclass.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (devclass.com)
| ryan29 wrote:
| I know everyone says it's not practical to run your own mail
| server, but I wonder if it's something I should have another look
| at. Even though this article says the cost of SES is 12:1 vs self
| managed infrastructure, and it's likely that SES is on the
| cheaper side of things, it's not really about the cost for me,
| it's about the loss of control.
|
| I don't like having the potential for changes I can't control. It
| almost feels like I need two of everything just to be safe.
|
| I wish some of the up-and-coming auth systems (ex: logto.io)
| would have some kind of tiered fallback for transactional email.
| For example, I have self hosted mail that's tier 1 (use first),
| AWS SES as tier 2 (use for failover), and Postmark as tier 3 (use
| as a last resort).
|
| The reason I list Postmark last is because there _is_ a point
| where price becomes a factor for me. If Postmark is 10x SES for
| 50k messages, and SES is 12x self managed infrastructure, that 's
| 120x costs (12,000% markup), right? I feel like that's so
| expensive I might have gotten it wrong, so please correct me if I
| did.
| miedpo wrote:
| Self hosting the infrastructure is incredibly easy. There are a
| lot of products out there that make hosting your own email
| system a cinch. One I'd personally recommend would be Cloudron,
| but I've heard MailCow is very easy, and I'm sure there are
| many other tools out there that sort of just 'do it for you'.
|
| Email deliverability on the other hand is... I'm going to say,
| it's not hard, but not easy either. Mainly you have to deal
| with blacklists, as well as certain providers being a bit
| weird. Staying off of blacklists can be both easy and hard.
| Most blacklist providers have several different layers of
| "Don't accept email from this server". The highest layer is
| easy to stay off of - just don't send spam. The layers below it
| might not be though. In particular, if your IP address is even
| in the same range as where other people might be sending spam,
| your going to end up on a blacklist because of it. So certain
| blacklists might have a 'Level 2' or 'Level 1' where if you use
| the same VPS provider as a spammer, your VPS that's never sent
| spam is going to get some of that 'bad reputation'.
|
| Email servers deal with blacklists in different ways - some
| just accept most things, some are a lot more strict. Usually
| email server will count up indicators for spam, and score them,
| and then, if it's above a certain score, the email bounces.
| Usually having a little 'bad reputation' (like from Level 2 /
| Level 1 like I listed above) won't be enough 'score' to effect
| things, but having a lot of it certainly will. I had an email
| server hosted on a VPS with a Level 2 warning, and my Gmail
| still got my emails. But I don't know if my emails would go
| well to all email providers (didn't do enough testing). In
| addition, some email providers will silently fail your emails
| if they don't pass - Google is pretty notorious about doing
| this. So it can be a bit of a pain to debug problems.
|
| The advantage of SES is that they deal with the reputation
| problem. They will jump on a Level 1 for a few days, then stay
| off of it for the rest of the month, then jump back on it
| again, and the cycle repeats. This is for the generic shared IP
| form of SES, so it's pretty good. It's certainly going to be
| more expensive, but you will need to send a good amount of
| email before it make sense to start managing reputation on your
| own probably.
|
| If you want the best of both worlds (although this sounds like
| what you are already doing), I'd suggest hosting your own
| server, but then using Amazon SES as the outbound email relay.
| Amazon's outbound costs are very very cheap, and that's what
| you need the reputation for anyways.
|
| It would be really nice if there was a system with fallback
| relays though, I agree. Let's hope that happens sometime :).
| ryan29 wrote:
| > If you want the best of both worlds (although this sounds
| like what you are already doing), I'd suggest hosting your
| own server, but then using Amazon SES as the outbound email
| relay. Amazon's outbound costs are very very cheap, and
| that's what you need the reputation for anyways.
|
| The only thing I'm actually interested in is _sending_
| transactional email. I actually think paying a managed
| provider for it is the most pragmatic approach, but it seems
| like the existing providers are all pushing the limits of
| charging what the market will bear and, based purely on
| subjective info I 've seen online, the margins aren't even
| close to anything resembling fair value (for me).
|
| If there wasn't so much business and technical complexity
| related to bringing your own IPs, the $10k ish (?) it costs
| to buy a /24 starts to look like a reasonable expense when
| put alongside the pricing of a lot of email sending services.
| gwbrooks wrote:
| Email infra is cheap; email reputation management is not.
|
| If you're sending out a few hundred emails a month? Or even a
| couple thousand? Absolutely go your own way. But if you need to
| send out six or seven figures worth of email a month, the time
| cost of IP reputation management goes up very quickly.
| ryan29 wrote:
| > Email infra is cheap; email reputation management is not.
|
| In that Reddit comment linked in that article the person says
| they were spending $325k on self-managed infrastructure and
| the same thing would cost them nearly $4 _million_ on SES.
|
| It's unlikely they're ignoring reputation management with
| their self-managed stuff, so that's included in the cost,
| right? What kind of value added reputation management would
| something like SES be providing that's worth +$3.65 million
| per year?
|
| What's the _real_ threshold where the costs makes the system
| unattractive to bad actors? It 's definitely nowhere close to
| millions of dollars in my opinion. I would say the entrenched
| players like the status quo because it gives them
| astronomical margins, so they act in an anti-competitive
| manner that ensures we never get anything better.
|
| Overpaying by thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even
| millions of dollars per year for email reputation management
| seems like a terrible deal to me. Maybe someone can break it
| down for me and explain what kind of value you're getting for
| the 10-100x increase in costs. Is it anything beyond a pay-
| to-play scheme that's the result of tacit collusion?
| Daishiman wrote:
| The value is that if your transactional mails stop working
| suddenly and you need a week to get it back on track you
| might not have a business by the time you solved the issue.
| redeeman wrote:
| the exact same that happens on SES, only now you are
| beholden to amazon. Trade with care
| codersfocus wrote:
| Nothings stopping you from a backup mechanism to use a
| different ESP
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'm in a similar mindset... I've had on my personal todo to
| play with wildduck or similar for a few months, I had setup a
| Mailu server last year and it ran okay, though I didn't use it
| much. I switched to a dedicated hosted server account a few
| months ago, and didn't migrate my mailu setup as I wanted to do
| it a little differently. In the end, it feels like email is
| still way over priced for what it is, with a wierd contrast
| between too few complete options, and plenty of complex or
| commercial ones.
|
| I'm not sure where the right balance is when you're one person
| with multiple domains and a handful of family/friends. I had
| relied more on Google Domains' free email forwarding, of course
| with them selling the domain business, who knows how that will
| land. I noticed I could do the same with Cloudflare and an
| email worker, even it a bit of a PITA, though kind of nice in
| that I can do an email distribution list with their email
| workers.
|
| In the end, it's such a mixed bag of bad to worse options, I'm
| not sure how to feel, or how much effort is actually worth it
| in the end. And that doesn't cover spam or filtering.
| figassis wrote:
| I've implemented an email service using wildduck
| (https://get.bantumail.com). It works great, and the storage
| architecture is great, but I'm afraid it will cost a lot with
| scale, because I do not want to manage a large, business
| critical mongo cluster that stores attachments. I'd rather
| store these in object storage and have messages in postgres,
| so I'm considering implementing that for wildduck. But for
| your use case (family and friends), wd is a great choice.
| JoshGlazebrook wrote:
| I wonder if Amazon wants out of the email reputation business. I
| was kind of shocked to find that GCP doesn't even offer its own
| SES equivalent, they direct customers to sendgrid.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| There's certain things I really don't want to do myself.
|
| Mainly DNS and email.
| pnpnp wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why DNS?
| skyyler wrote:
| Troubleshooting DNS issues can be quite like trying to catch
| a greasy squirrel at night.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| If DNS doesn't work, nothing works. The hassle of having to
| keep it running is more work than just paying the few bucks a
| month for someone else to do it.
| paxys wrote:
| If you are an individual or smaller company, definitely. When
| AWS and GCP join the "don't want to do it myself" crowd though,
| you have to start to wonder who exactly can take on this
| responsibility. Email and DNS are some of the fundamental
| protocols of the internet. If we have reached a point where
| they are getting too complex to use, what is the path forward
| from here?
| betaby wrote:
| They are not too complex to use. They had low ROI and not
| much differentiation.
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