In my experience...
In the first week you identify a web server or two some marketing team put together with a contact form that you never realised spoofed your domain and never got past SPF filters. After that, you get hundreds of alerts a day about some server in China sending spoofed emails to a server in Vietnam, neither of which you can do anything about.
EDIT
The article has been updated to include this.
But where most people tend to see "Amazon == No Need To Think", I also see a looming "all your eggs in someone else's basket" and the first thing I look for is whether I can plug in an SMTP provider that isn't Amazon SES. In the FAQ, in a sub-note on a Features page, or anywhere. Almost without fail, none of their sites address this, even though it seems like it wouldn't be much harder than being SES specific.
Perhaps spam reports and bounce tracking might be sacrificed (i.e. requires outsized effort to implement) if it was via generic SMTP and not SES specific?
Does anyone know the answer to the "any SMTP" question for any of these services?
It's self-hosted and from their FAQ: "Amazon SES, SparkPost, SendGrid, Mailgun – you name it. You can use any provider that supports SMTP protocol to send out your newsletters. Bounce and complaints handling via webhooks is supported for SES, SparkPost, SendGrid and Mailgun."
Thanks for prompting me to take a look at them again!
We had a test address that was purposefully undeliverable. A test script sent out thousands of mails when it shouldn't have, and those undeliverable mails got treated as bounces. So, we got our SES cut off for two days, despite our clearly test/undeliverable mail being the cause. Regular AWS support can't do anything, only a special email unlock team can (they protect the 'deliverability' of AWS mail), and they're not exactly responsive.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/mailbox...
I can get around that but the main thing preventing me from using it is there's no success stories associated to the application.
Sendy has dozens of unbiased blog posts, and even some posts where people are sending millions of e-mails without issues. That instills a lot of confidence in using it.
You would have to be a madman to trust an untrusted application with managing your email subscribers.
One thing this article doesn't touch upon is that SES does have a limit on how many messages you may send in a timeframe per second, as well as per day. If you go over these limits, your message will not send out correctly. Make sure your software supports enough of the API for SES to fetch these limits are correctly send your messages, below these limits.
[0] http://dadamailproject.com/
[1] http://dadamailproject.com/d/features-amazon_ses_support.pod...
I'm a co-founder of EmailOctopus so happy to answer any questions on the integration side of things.
SES Pricing is amazing and deliverability seems to be good all across. (Not to mention you get around 60k free emails monthly if requests are coming from a AWS server)
