Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

https://github.com/atech/postal

by rendx • 9 years ago

715 181 9 years ago

github.com

yowza• 9 years ago

Not usable without a proper license.

bluehatbrit• 9 years ago

It seems a license will be added in a few hours - https://github.com/atech/postal/issues/6

cryptoledgers• 9 years ago

MIT license has been added

jsiepkes• 9 years ago

Seems to be fixed. Project is licensed under the MIT license.

dan12342• 9 years ago

Isn’t part of the reason for using Mailgun, Sendgrid etc that you get to send via IP addresses with good reputation?

grenoire• 9 years ago

Exactly. These services do not get blocked by spam filters due to their credibility scores. That is the most important feature, not the UX.

hultner2• 9 years ago

I think reputation is counted towards your DKIM these days, which also makes the reputation somewhat portable by moving your private key to with you to a new server/ip.

jrodom4• 9 years ago

IP reputation continues to be the most important factor that impacts deliverability. Providers are slowly moving to domain-based reputation systems that leverage DKIM. Gmail seems to weight domain reputation in their calculations higher than most currently.

michaelbrooks• 9 years ago

For me, it's more the support you get from using third party APIs. It's nice to break away from companies to a certain extent, but if you need help/support you only have yourself to fix the issue. If you go with a third party and something happens, you can go to them for a solution.

Doches3• 9 years ago

And if the third party service goes down, you're SOL -- there's nothing you can do to fix the issue, and it's your users who are suffering. What's your answer when a customer says "my emails aren't getting through, please fix it" and you...can't?

richardkeller2• 9 years ago

Unfortunately, unless you're paying for a dedicated IP address with Mailgun, their sender reputation is mostly quite bad. We are constantly having to request our account to be moved to a new IP due to them landing up in some blacklist.

bowersbros• 9 years ago

What is your emails bounce rates etc? Or is it caused by others using those same IPs too?

mdekkers• 9 years ago

Interesting. I have never seen those issues, and have been using MG for quite a few years, for many clients.

gondo• 9 years ago

but if opt for dedicated IP address, dose it matter if you have it from Mailgun or if you have your own?

jrodom4• 9 years ago

This is an area that we're actively working to improve. The system is designed so that customers who are sending high quality messages get moved into better IP addresses. We look at metrics like complaint, bounce, and engagement rates to help make these decisions. This works much of the time, but is imperfect, especially when you start using Mailgun for the first time. We're developing and iteratively rolling out several machine learning classification systems that look at various features when you signup for Mailgun and place your account into better IP pools based on our internal risk calculation.

If you are seeing continuous problems, I'd love to take a look! My email address is on my profile.

the_mitsuhiko• 9 years ago

Sendgrid gives you dedicated IPs so you are responsible for your own reputation. When you start out using it you might start on a low reputation depending on what the person on that IP did before.

parenthephobia• 9 years ago

From personal experience, if you're not jumping straight from no emails to a million an hour, your mail setup is good (SPF/DKIM/etc), you're not reusing a IP address that was sending spam last week (so be wary sending from cloud servers), and you aren't actually sending spam, then you can send from your own infrastructure just fine.

speleding• 9 years ago

Until recently I sent newsletters from our own infrastructure and I agree that it's doable, but:

- You have to ramp up sending from new IP addresses VERY slowly if you want to avoid getting grey / black listed by Yahoo and AOL, this makes it quite a tedious process

- Make sure you also have rDNS set up, Gmail uses it as an important quality signal

- Accurately handling bounces is a bit of a nightmare because each mail server has a slightly different format and you want to make sure you don't process out-of-office messages

- Bounces and "message delayed" messages can arrive days later

So we ended up switching to mailgun and although they do sometimes give you a bad IP the time saved is worth it, especially their option to have a web hook back to your backend to process the bounces.

_jal2• 9 years ago

This is true, with the exception of AT&T. The Deathstar rejects all mail from my server, despite (a) no spam ever having been emitted from my domain in almost 20 years, (b) the IP having been stable for coming on eight years, and (c) I don't send bulk mail. Best I can tell, their blacklist-removal process is auto-deny with no humans in the loop.

I gave up and decided screw them, I don't need to talk to anyone with an ATT address, and bounce messages from them with an explanation.

jwr• 9 years ago

I tried using Sendgrid and was surprised to find out that unless you buy an expensive plan, then:

* You get IPs from a shared pool, and the reputation is nowhere near guaranteed. In fact, many of my mails were blackholed or rejected.

* The "bad" IPs that were used by someone for spamming are not immediately removed from the pool, so you will encounter them.

The net result for me was that Sendgrid is not a solution for my transactional E-mail, because of the high risk of my E-mails getting blackholed/rejected. I use it for newsletters/marketing only.

jimktrains26• 9 years ago

We really need a better solution to fighting spam.

https://github.com/jimktrains/email_ng is an overly complicated idea I had once, but the basic gist is that the receiver could give the sender a signed receiver email address that is for the sender's email address. This way, transactional email (and sure, I guess marketing from your company) would be able to get through and the email given out wouldn't be able to be used if sold or stolen, as the receiving mail server would reject it because of a bad signature (bad sender, and coupled with DKIM and SPF, a malicious user wouldn't be able/allowed to spoof the sender's email).

eloff• 9 years ago

How can you check if an IP is good or spammy? It would be nice to get an elastic IP in the cloud, test it for spamminess, and give back the bad ones. Catch and release fishing for IPs.

novaleaf• 9 years ago

I use sendgrid for transactional email and I have had no problems regarding that in the year I've been using them.

I have found their nighttime support team to be terrible though, resulting in 14hrs downtime because they didn't have authority to re-enable my account.

lucaspiller3• 9 years ago

I had exactly the same experience. For context I run a SaaS targetting small/medium businesses, who usually have in-house email servers with extremely restrictive spam filters. The IP was on a blacklist, so some of my customers just couldn't use my service. I contacted SendGrid and their only solution was to upgrade from a $20/mo plan to a $80/mo plan with a dedicated IP - they wouldn't even move me to another IP in the pool.

Given this, and my volumes of mail were increasing (once you go over 100k emails/mo SendGrid's pricing goes up a lot), I setup my own mail server using Cuttlefish [0]. I set it up on an OVH instance that I pay £2.50/mo for. I contacted them to enquire about spam policies before opening an account, and they said they take it very seriously and monitor outgoing SMTP for spam.

The IP address I ended up with was still on one blacklist, but the process to remove it was pretty easy (fill out a form, and explain the situation) and took about 1 day. I set this up around 6 months ago and have had no problems with deliverability since then, I'm now up to sending around 300k emails per month.

[0] https://github.com/basho/cuttlefish

joering24• 9 years ago

I second to that. For a few years now my opinion was that Sendgrid is a good guys of sending email... until I realized most of the spam I'm getting is from Sendgrid IPs, including for example continuance of work offers from Uber (I am disabled and I cannot even drive a car)

I'm unsure what problems Sendgrid is battling but their customer support staff is certainly understaffed or they simply gave up on fighting spam. So yes if you want to send spam and can start with highest paid account they offer, probably Sendgrid is your best bet.

Also their spam@ and abuse@ is a waste of time. It came to point that they simply started ignoring my inquiries at all! Here is example of one of my emails that is not getting any response, if Sendgrid is actually reading this: support+id1021573@sendgrid.zendesk.com

As sending spam is a Federal Crime, I have already reached out to FBI, FTC and next plan to write my State Attorney General.

pbreit2• 9 years ago

I generally don't believe these anecdotes when pertaining to successfully companies with 10s of 1000s of staisfied business users. Most are far better off with shared IP addresses. After you establish a sterling domain reputation you can think about your own IPs.

ams61104• 9 years ago

Same experience with Mailgun. The "free" tier servers do not have good reputations. As you can imagine, being free, they are used by spammers. I found it impossible to send to yahoo.com recipients. Gmail, interestingly, did accept and deliver almost all messages.

tyingq2• 9 years ago

And their collective knowledge of how many concurrent connections to open with each provider, how many emails to send in a single SMTP session, how fast to send, etc. There's a fair amount that experience lends to staying out of the spam box.

j_s7• 9 years ago

There have been a few discussions regarding deliverability:

Why does Gmail hate my domain? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855030

How to Avoid Spam Filters | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10465639

If there are others I'd appreciate a link!

j_s7• 9 years ago

Hotmail deliverability: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14210939

cnagele• 9 years ago

This is a big reason for sure. As you can see in this post, those IP addresses can be hit or miss depending on the provider. At Postmark, we don't really believe in dedicated IPs for all customers. We think that our customer base should not include any bad actors, and instead manually approve every customer to ensure our entire CIDR ranges are clean. The benefit is not just clean IPs, but clean IPs that have an incredible transactional-only reputation with the ISPs. This is how we are able to delivery so fast to the inbox. We only really believe in dedicated IPs for higher volume senders, especially since reputation is moving toward the domain more and more. I wrote about this six years ago, and it is even more true today (https://postmarkapp.com/blog/the-false-promises-of-dedicated...).

At the same time, if you are willing to install and manage Postal on your own servers, it's not that hard to maintain your own IP with a great reputation. You just need a good hosting provider (probably not AWS), you need to set up your infrastructure like DKIM, SPF, DMARC, rDNS, and Return Paths, and most importantly you need to maintain good engagement (low bounces, high opens). At a glance, Postal looks like a nice option if you want to do it on your own for cheap. You just might lack the stability, support, maintenance, and performance that goes behind an ESP.

cbhl• 9 years ago

Why wouldn't spammers just start adopting Postal on their servers, too?

howard941• 9 years ago

manually approve every customer to ensure our entire CIDR ranges are clean

This is probably a key element of good performance. To keep my mail admin duties part time I simply whois the IP of evil senders and drop the resulting entire CIDR block into the our local blacklist.

wl• 9 years ago

Mailgun and Sendgrid send plenty of spam. It boggles the mind that they have a "good reputation" when nearly everything they send me is unsolicited.

hw• 9 years ago

There's lots of effort in building AI for chatbots, but why aren't there more efforts in building AI for better spam classification? As much as I would like email to die a horrible death just like snail mail died and have everyone (individuals and businesses) start using some form of IM, it's still quite an integral part of the interwebs for people that it deserves a bit more focus on smarter spam filtering instead of relying heavily on IP reputation pools which screws over many legit users.

massaman_yams3• 9 years ago

Gmail stopped using IP reputation entirely a year or two ago, and effectively every major consumer mailbox provider relies on domain reputation heavily these days. Almost all major filters look at a combination of indicators, so it's becoming less and less common that a good mail coming from a bad IP is subject to filtering.

The answer to why better spam filtering AI hasn't been developed in a non-proprietary setting is fairly straightforward: the success of any filtering method is heavily dependent on consuming data at scale - including recipient behavior (e.g., mark as spam, vs. spend time reading a message), and this underlying data is just as important, if not more so, than the machine learning approach used to compute filtering assessments.

In short - you more or less have to be a large mailbox provider in order to have a chance at doing this well.

hultner2• 9 years ago

I suppose this is more like a open source alternative to PowerMTA? How would you compare them?

throwanem• 9 years ago

More an open-source alternative to Sparkpost, if you're looking to compare it with a Message Systems offering. (But not really all that comparable, since Sparkpost is nothing without Momentum, and this does not appear to rely on or include any specific MTA.)

madspindel• 9 years ago

This project fails to answer the question 'Why?'.

Doches3• 9 years ago

It's a self-hosted alternative to transactional email PaaS providers. Literally the second sentence in the README:

Think Sendgrid, Mailgun or Postmark but open source and ready for you to run on your own servers.

Your comment fails to answer the question: "Did this HN user even RTFT(itle)?"

blowski• 9 years ago

That's just begging the question. What's the advantage of running on your own servers vs using SendGrid?

richardkeller2• 9 years ago

Assuming it has an API, I would prefer to use this over a service such as Mailgun. We used to have our own mail server, but without an easy API to get deliverability details per mail, we ended up switching to Mailgun. Since the switch, our deliverability has nosedived (we're currently not paying for a dedicated IP though) and mails are constantly bouncing due to the low reputation of Mailgun's shared IPs.

Mailgun's 30-day retention period is also a bit absurd, since most of our clients require mail audit trails in the region of 6-12 months.

Ensorceled• 9 years ago

Some organizations can't (due to regulation) or won't (due to privacy/security concerns) give their email list to third parties. That eliminates most of the third party MTAs as they all maintain sending lists, logs etc.

senic• 9 years ago

Interesting, I was just looking for something like this the other day, thanks HN! The software looks quite polished. Hopefully there'll be a dockerzied version to play with it.

ksajadi• 9 years ago

We sent a lot of emails which makes services like Postmark or Mandrill very expensive. Since switching to Amazon SES, the cost has been much lower but the lack of individual email tracking has been a pain (in case a recipient claims they haven't received it or we need to track opens, etc).

This UI with an Amazon SES backend would be ideal.

icebraining2• 9 years ago

Since it uses SMTP anyway, shouldn't be too hard to allow it to use SES as a smart host.

dan12342• 9 years ago

If you’re sending newsletters, you might want to look at Sendy[1] (no affiliation), which sends via SES.

1 https://sendy.co

novalis78• 9 years ago

Seconded. Can only highly recommend send. The license is inexpensive, you get the whole code base and can modify when needed as well. Setup is easy as integration into SES very mature at this point.

kyriakos• 9 years ago

this is exactly what i was looking for. thanks

j_s7• 9 years ago

There was a lot of activity in this space when Mandrill "died" last year.

This comparison was a very good overview of hosted options: https://www.metachris.com/2016/03/free-transactional-email-s... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11328631

And the discussion there linked this detailed sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Nb1YqYJq9eWm6ojLDRXd... | https://sendyhost.com/mandrill-alternatives-245/

j_s7• 9 years ago

Per "Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy" | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9151487

The Sendy codebase is horrifying. [...]Just lots and lots of rough PHP _vs_ This isn't software to be used for analysis. Sendy is f-in awesome!

Amazon SES rocks from a pricing standpoint but deliverability isn't its strong suit _vs_ I find no difference between SES and MailChimp regarding delivery

I would stick with Sendy, but I could never get the unsubscribe links to work _vs_ there is a version 2 of Sendy, which appears to fix all these problems

lighter version of Mailchimp and super cheap [...] Configuration is a bit painful

I have been using it for almost 1.5 years and really like it.

if you are taking all the trouble to install Sendy you should look at Mandrill (2 years go) _vs_ Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account (1 year ago) | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11170713

Also self-hosted: https://github.com/bevacqua/campaign | http://directmailmac.com ($100)

Hosted Sendy: https://www.sentopia.net/

Other/creative alternatives: http://tinyletter.com/ (5000 free) | https://domain.yandex.com/domains_add/ (500 outbound/day) | https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html

tpetry• 9 years ago

If you want to track opens and some more metrics independent of your mailing solution you should try mailspice.com

(Disclaimer: Developer of mailspice)

slig• 9 years ago

If you want to send newsletters, try Mailwizz.

Be careful with some of the alternatives and be sure to read their source code with an empty stomach.

carterehsmith• 9 years ago

the lack of individual email tracking has been a pain

SES did introduce tracking back in 2014 or so. You can get notifications for deliveries, bounces, and complaints.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ses-delivery-notifications/

jonathanbull3• 9 years ago

I co-founded https://emailoctopus.com which might be what you're looking for - we're an AWS partner offering marketing features (list management, open tracking, etc.) on top of SES.

brightball3• 9 years ago

You could also try something like Sendwithus hooked up to your SES account. They provide a consistent template, delivery and customer support interface for email that integrates with a lot of different providers.

It's a nice layer who's pricing works if you're sending a lot of emails to the same people over and over again. The entire setup (pricing and interface) is build around individuals sent to and not total email volume.

nbevans• 9 years ago

The reason why we use Mailgun is to avoid deploying and maintaining e-mail infrastructure which is very hard and high cost. We would rather keep paying Mailgun about $20/mo as this is cheaper by several magnitudes than the self-hosting option.

itburnslikeice• 9 years ago

20/mo as this is cheaper by several magnitudes than the self-hosting option.

exactly this, even the cheapest cloud instances cost around 100$/m, while some might be 20$/m it's just not worth the effort to host your own because it also needs management/maintenance if you do which translates in to hours of work. Yes you can automate these things but it simply not worth it when the only thing you want to do is sent mass emails, without even caring about anything besides configuration to connect to XYZ service.

t3ra• 9 years ago

Sounds interesting. I have been looking for a proper mail Server for sending marketing only for a while now.

I'll wait for the doc to update but until then :

Does it do things like IP rotation?

Is it using postfix at the backend or its a complete mail Server

What kind of list management features does it have? (i am looking to compare with interspire)

no1youknowz2• 9 years ago

Has anyone tried elasticemail.com? I've seen their CEO post here before.

If you have, what's your experience with them vs Mailgun or Sendgrid?

Thanks

lancer• 9 years ago

After the demise of Mandrill I started to divide transactional email between Elastic Email and SparkPost. I send around a thousand messages a month through them and haven't had any problems with either. I still miss Mandrill though. I send high volume mail through Mailgun and have had a great experience with them and their API. I tried integrating with Sendgrid but they have some constraints around MX records that were showstoppers for me.

no1youknowz2• 9 years ago

Thanks. SparkPost mention they have the best deliverability in the market.

How would you rate the deliverability out of 100% for Elastic Email and SparkPost?

Thanks

jpkeisala• 9 years ago

Is Postal and services like Mailgun solution for a functionality where email can be viewed/replied from personal email inbox and a web app? Then somehow magically these services routes mail to relevant inboxes and the web app like Zendesk etc?

spuz• 9 years ago

Does Postal allow you to set up an email group? I.e. an email address that will forward to a defined list of other email addresses any email that is sent to it? This is a feature of Mailgun but unfortunately it does not quite behave in the way we need with regards to setting the 'Reply-to' address.

I'm looking forward to seeing the documentation and setting up Postal on my server.

vanilla• 9 years ago

This seems to be the software behind appmail.io[1], a service just like mailgun and sendgrid.

[1] https://appmail.io/

rayboy1995• 9 years ago

From the repo:

Postal was developed by aTech Media to serve its own mail processing requirements and we have since decided that it should be released as an open source project for the community. It was originally launched by us as AppMail but renamed to Postal as part of making it open source as we felt the name was more suitable.

jbverschoor• 9 years ago

I'm a big fan of mailgun. It is far better than mandril, sendgrid and probably ses - without a lot of the set up

cryptarch2• 9 years ago

Do you have a system to prevent trusted users from being given low-reputation ip addresses without them having to pay for a dedicated ip?

Something like, "if you don't pay for a dedicated ip, but have been a non-spamming client for a month, we move you to a higher-rep ip address pool"?

charlieegan3• 9 years ago

Their premium plus plan seems to offer this: https://appmail.io/pricing

cryptarch2• 9 years ago

That's a dedicated ip address, I meant a system to isolate spammers and new users in a relatively low-rep ip address pool.

IgorPartola• 9 years ago

Now if only there was a decent self hosted alternative to MailChimp.

jonathanbull3• 9 years ago

You might want to check out https://sendy.co/, or https://emailoctopus.com if you want a hosted equivalent. Both will save you a lot of money over MailChimp.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of EmailOctopus.

j_s7• 9 years ago

Not sure if you or I will catch any hate as I point out that your disclaimer as founder of emailoctopus was included elsewhere in the thread but not here.

Just pedancics/semantics from me; many in this situation include the info (some:only) in the profile instead/as well and that has been mostly accepted in the past. I also appreciated your mention of another alternative too, it's definitely not over-the-top astroturfing in any way!

PS. Add yourself to AlternativeTo.net

j_s7• 9 years ago

http://alternativeto.net/software/mailchimp/?platform=self-h...

This actually showed up right away (suprising even though I use alternativeto.net often, nice SEO on their part) - and it had useful info!

brightball3• 9 years ago

I'm most interested to see what their solution for handling INCOMING email looks like. Having used the inbound APIs with the others they are all pretty polished and reliable but have inconsistent APIs. I've always been a little bit concerned about how to handle high volumes of inbound email functionality if the prices on those services ever went up.

ushi• 9 years ago

We are running this[0] with some postfix boxes in front of it. Works quite well for us.

[0] https://github.com/ushis/mailhook

brightball3• 9 years ago

I'll have to check it out.

pvsukale3• 9 years ago

Will this platform be actually usable for independent developers considering today's spam blocking scenario. How one should proceed with this in order to not get blacklisted while actually using it for the first time.

Mahn• 9 years ago

It's an interface, it doesn't take care of email reputation for you. This is for people who want to DIY to have a pretty dashboard on top, but you're on your own for email deliverability.

ramoq• 9 years ago

Question: if all these companies monitor outgoing SMTP traffic, how are people sending billions of spam messages a day? What's the loophole?

ohstopitu• 9 years ago

If I were to host this myself, I'd still need a static IP that had a good reputation. GCP and Azure both mention that we should not be hosting mail servers on their platforms (rather, they all suggest we setup mail servers + relays to a reputed IP).

How would I go about getting a static IP or a reputed IP?

stephenr3• 9 years ago

Companies have been renting/leasing servers for a long time before Amazon and Google got into that business.

stephenr3• 9 years ago

This sort of thing is fantastic to see, regardless of whether you want to run your own mail servers for this task.

That they provide a hosted service using the same stack is great to see: host it yourself, or pay them to host it for you. This is what great open source businesses can look like.

No "open core" where the good stuff isn't available for the community, and community efforts to implement the same thing get rejected.

No viral licensing like the GPL or jesus shit on a stick, the AGPL.

simonhamp• 9 years ago

Completely agree with this, my only concern is that an open-source solution increases the likelihood of spam-ridden senders popping up more frequently and becoming harder to shut-down as they can spin up instances more easily and get going from a new location more quickly.

There is actually some benefit to be had by the process of setting up a mailing service being a little trickier.

From a business perspective, it's also a great decision, as it shows customers who outgrow (or are in fear of outgrowing) your SaaS have a first-party path to scale.

And you could still make money off those customers if you can offer a strong support/hosting solution.

It's a massive win. As an aTech customer with some of their other products in the past, I'm really pleased to see this and I wish them all the best!

Also, proud to support fellow Brit tech companies ;)

stephenr3• 9 years ago

becoming harder to shut-down as they can spin up instances more easily and get going from a new location more quickly

I don't think this is going to work in their favour - spammers already have the tools they need - the real killer is blacklisted IP's/ranges.

If you're legit, you can jump through some hoops if you inherit a blacklisted IP.

If you're a spammer, all you can do is try to get an IP that isn't blacklisted.

smichel17• 9 years ago

That's some pretty strong hate for the GPL without reasoning to back it up. As a fan of the GPL/AGPL, care to elaborate?

soperj• 9 years ago

The reason that Linux is what it is today is the GPL. Otherwise it would be just like BSD, and bundled into the OS for worst of the worst for propriety shit, Apple.

cyphar• 9 years ago

No viral licensing like the GPL or jesus shit on a stick, the AGPL.

This GPL hatred is completely orthogonal to your point. In fact, GPL/AGPL ensures that other services won't turn your lovely free software project into an open core product. See ShareLatex for a similar free software business and project that uses the AGPL and appears to be working just fine.

pratik60• 9 years ago

The business model is very similar to Sentry. Loving it though , don't know how the internal finances team approve such changes, but wow!

jccalhoun• 9 years ago

Is it common now to call email "mail?" I don't know anything about this area (never even heard of mailgun or sendgrid) and wondered if this was some kind of service for sending actual mail.

tysonstewart• 9 years ago

No. These are services to send emails without overhead of maintaining your own service.

xeromal• 9 years ago

Yeah, it's kind of annoying. I thought it was something similar to Easypost

dogecoinbase• 9 years ago

What about sendmail, or /usr/bin/mail?

WA• 9 years ago

Awesome, I've been waiting for this, because I don't believe in the "delivery" promise of big brand mail providers. Most newsletters* go to spam, no matter if they're via Mailchimp, Aweber or transactional mail providers.

Maybe the big names work better with Gmail, since Gmail has quite an aggressive spam filtering. But neither I, nor most of my customers (Germans) use Gmail, so I don't care.

Edit: *most newsletters I receive

nik1aa5• 9 years ago

So can I use this in front of Postfix?

oblib2• 9 years ago

I took a look at the github project and I hope they do great.

As a side project I've been working on setting up my own mail server using "Mail-in-a-Box" (https://mailinabox.email) for about a month now.

It's been a learning process but I do like the idea of having control over this. I've got it set up to send emails from a remote app server using a perl script and an email account configured on my Mac Mail app all working.

Mail-in-a-Box is really pretty sweet. It walks you through the install and has a very nice Control Panel that handles DNS and user account setup and it comes with the Roundcube email web client and ownCloud.

There are hurdles. I got a clean IP from DigitalOcean with no problem, but the domain name I'm using is new and has no reputation so when I tested it last week sending emails from the app server to my personal Gmail account the Gmail server responded saying:

"Our system has detected that this message is 421-4.7.0 suspicious due to the very low reputation of the sending IP address. 421-4.7.0 To protect our users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has 421-4.7.0 been temporarily rate limited."

I only sent about a dozen emails, all to my own Gmail account, so that seems to be a bit harsh.

Then it occurred to me why Gmail exists and it made a lot more sense. So, there are hurdles.

jitbit3• 9 years ago

Great discussion here, not necessarily about the OP's link, but still learned a lot. Would love to contribute my 2 cents...

Our app[1] sends/receives several million emails per month. Not an exaggeration, it's actually seven figures.

Meaning it's more than 100k a day. Meaning it's 5-6 emails every friggin second. On average. It, of course, peaks during US daytime, up to 30 per second.

We tried a looooh-ot of solutions (all priced at THOUSANDS a month at this volume) including Mailgun, Sendgrid, SES etc, but finally settled to a tiny Ubuntu micro-instance on EC2, running Postfix. It has 1 gb of memory, costs us $4 a month and the CPU load rarely goes higher than 4%.

Of course you would need to get yourself familiar with SMTP, postfix, SPF/DKIM, mx-validation, blacklists etc. And by "familiar" I mean "learn it tothe core" :))

Another thing - you need to build-up reputation for your IP, cause email providers like outlook/gmail/yahoo will simply reject your emails if you start sending a LOT out of the blue. You have to build it up gradually, takes months to get there. Makes it a huge PITA when you need to change your IP :((

PS. If you need incoming email to call some external REST-api - postfix can launch a local php-script that does that. Not sexy but - $4 a month, right.

[1] https://www.jitbit.com/hosted-helpdesk/

azca• 9 years ago

This is what I would do as well. Coming from a hosted mail solution (one of the earliest in the Industry as part a of the initial Dotcom bubble) that cost 10000x5+thensome as much to run, albeit with higher send rates and clusters, It totally makes sense to use ec2 for these needs today.

movedx3• 9 years ago

Hey,

So firstly, I don't work for AWS or Amazon, or any Cloud provider. Just wanted to make sure that was clear.

After reading your very interesting comment I thought I'd do some maths on the costs SES should be charging you. Essentially at $0.10 per 1,000 messages, and sending "several million" or "seven figures" worth of messages per month, so a possible total of 9,999,999, you should be paying almost exactly $1,000 for that. That's not really "THOUSANDS", but it is substantially more than $4 haha :)

If you're sending 5,000,000, then the figured drops to $500/month.

Anyway your $4/month server is a very cool concept. Would you be willing to share the configuration? Perhaps you've written an Ansible Playbook to provision it for you?

EDIT: So essentially my point is this: it's not that expensive, compared to compute resources to actually run your application, to have someone else manage all of that for you.

jitbit3• 9 years ago

SES is indeed much cheaper that the others (mailgun, sendgrid, postmark etc.)

But you have some things missing from your calculation:

1) Attachments (yes, SES charges separately)

2) Dedicated IP addresses (SES charges you separately for this)

3) S3 (where emails are stored

4) AWS Lambda (because you need a script/function, that processes incoming messages as they come in).

But yes, you're right, with SES its cheaper than others, couple of thousand tops

krakensden• 9 years ago

SES is on a couple of email black lists though, on the grounds that they're too laissez faire. On your own IP at least you own your own reputation.

nodesocket2• 9 years ago

How about redundancy when your $4 a month VM goes down? If you're sending/receiving that much e-mail, I assume uptime is critically important.

desdiv• 9 years ago

Dumb question, can you reassign an already assigned public IP address to a different EC2 instance?

Let's say GP's micro instance goes down, or extra load brings the need for a larger instance, can they spin up a different EC2 instance and reassign the existing public IP address to it?

ams61104• 9 years ago

you would need to get yourself familiar with SMTP, postfix, SPF/DKIM, mx-validation, blacklists etc. And by "familiar" I mean "learn it tothe core"

Why? Wouldn't the "proper" or "best" way of configuring all these things be pretty much the same for everyone? Why could this just not be a receipe: do all these things, in this order, etc.

sanderjd• 9 years ago

I don't know anything about this space, but I strongly suspect the generic answer applies: because you need to be able to debug the system when things go wrong. Things always go wrong, and no recipe can replace expertise when they do.

jitbit3• 9 years ago

Well, there ARE recipes indeed, but sometimes people (legitimate people, not spammers) have their email settings misconfigured and you have to fix things...

Example: good practice is to reject (or at least defer) an email if the sending server is not listed in the domain's SPF record. But lots of people are sending email "on behalf" of gmail without even knowing it (when their mail-server forwards a gmail-message to another address, and this address never receives it).

There are tons of little gotchas like this that you need to look into :((

hippich• 9 years ago

while it will not give your such configuration precision, i highly recommend to checkout sovereign project - https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign

In the beginning I used to setup just personal "cloud", but now actually using it to send emails for other businesses I run.

In theory it should be possible to run these playbooks without all extras and just keep bare minimum to send emails (never tried it, so not sure what it will take)

Sovereign will configure postfix + dkim + spf + blacklists for you. Plus provides your imap mailboxes to receive bounces and regular mail.

theprop• 9 years ago

Is this more than an SMTP server? Those are services designed to send emails as an API service for many different parties. Is that what "Postal" is? Or is it a another SMTP server like Postflix or something? It's not at all clear from your description...

Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid

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