Amazon SES Deliverability

[Data Swami]

Anyone had any experience with Amazon SES usage for sending emails?

Just wanted to see whether anyone has any stats on its deliverability for outreach etc.

Seems the most cost effective option vs Exchange accounts on MS and Google emails.

 

[moortech]

Broadly, if you're starting from scratch on a sending domain with no or low reputation, definitely use a relay service rather than any random mail server, whether it's an Exchange or a SMTP server.

The basic rules of sending mail are straightforward - have DMARC and DKIM records in your domain with an optional SPF record and increase your sending gradually over a couple of weeks and you're less likely to have mail drop into Google or Outlook spam folders.

However, deliverability also depends on your domain's reputation and the quality of your mailing lists - it only takes a small number of recipients to mark a mail as spam or for addresses to bounce, and your domain's reputation drops - I've seen a 2.72% fail rate mentioned for Google.

Where relay services are concerned, SES's strength is that its very good to automate and is primarily for transactional email and you need to look at its cost per transaction. Other sending services are arguably better for straightforward list sending and if everything is set up properly as above, the big names will all do as well.

 

[Data Swami]

Broadly, if you're starting from scratch on a sending domain with no or low reputation, definitely use a relay service rather than any random mail server, whether it's an Exchange or a SMTP server.

The basic rules of sending mail are straightforward - have DMARC and DKIM records in your domain with an optional SPF record and increase your sending gradually over a couple of weeks and you're less likely to have mail drop into Google or Outlook spam folders.

However, deliverability also depends on your domain's reputation and the quality of your mailing lists - it only takes a small number of recipients to mark a mail as spam or for addresses to bounce, and your domain's reputation drops - I've seen a 2.72% fail rate mentioned for Google.

Where relay services are concerned, SES's strength is that its very good to automate and is primarily for transactional email and you need to look at its cost per transaction. Other sending services are arguably better for straightforward list sending and if everything is set up properly as above, the big names will all do as well.

Awesome and ye i have a relay/warm up service already planned out just wasnt sure on whether Amazon had lower grading overall due to their different style of account setup

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

Don't use your main email platform (MS, G, etc) for email blasts, especially if to a marketing list.

SES, like most other platforms need to be warmed up, remembering that you will probably be using a shared IP.

The real problems come about with poor quality data.

I have used SES to push out hundreds of thousands of emails a month, it's main strngth being it's low cost. I still send 10-20k a month.

 

[Data Swami]

Don't use your main email platform (MS, G, etc) for email blasts, especially if to a marketing list.

SES, like most other platforms need to be warmed up, remembering that you will probably be using a shared IP.

The real problems come about with poor quality data.

I have used SES to push out hundreds of thousands of emails a month, it's main strngth being it's low cost. I still send 10-20k a month.

Ahh perfect yes thats what i want for it but also an easy setup for clients too if the need comes. I did also see Resend as they do IP warm ups too but if i use a warmup setup it should be fine to grow the reputation.

Data quality wise i saw Amazon had a email validation endpoint have you tried that to see its quality?

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

Haven't tried that, but I do validate as best I can on registration and clean the list regularly. My main platform is Acymailer, on WP, which can filter initial emails and then a separate plugin to clean the lists monthly. Deleting bounces is very important.

Separately, I am starting to play with PowerMTA on a cheap server to see if there is any value in this, however, I am not sending the volumes anymore, so it is a bit of a plaything.

 

[Data Swami]

Haven't tried that, but I do validate as best I can on registration and clean the list regularly. My main platform is Acymailer, on WP, which can filter initial emails and then a separate plugin to clean the lists monthly. Deleting bounces is very important.

Separately, I am starting to play with PowerMTA on a cheap server to see if there is any value in this, however, I am not sending the volumes anymore, so it is a bit of a plaything.

Ahhh interesting im looking at Warmbly to host myself at the moment as its got an inbuilt warming setup in there too. I tried an experiment with own hosted mail server with billion mail but it was a bit of a waste of time XD. Deliverabilty for google was great but MS blocked it outright with no reason

 

[EnterprisePro]

We no longer bother with all that, SendGrid, SES etc. All have given us reliability issues at some point. Our approach now is to use Microsoft GraphQL APIs to send mail through the M365 network. We've build our own microservices and outbound email agents to send transactional emails using the MS GraphQL APIs. All our internal systems connect to our microservice and we have full control and tracking of everything.