Sending emails through Amazon SES
My business is sending out over 4 million emails per month.
Mostly these are job search alerts.
Typically it is not a problem to send 4M emails, but it IS a problem to make them end up in users inbox.
There are multiple steps that we had to do in order to improve email deliverability (SPF records, easy unsubscribe link, automatic unsubscribe bounced emails).
But that is not enough.
Some users do not care about "Unsubscribe" link in emails and simply click "spam" in their email provider.
The only way to unsubscribe users like that is to get feedback about it from email provider.
Unfortunately every email provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Live/Hotmail/Msn, AOL, etc) has their own interface for such spam reports and it is a pain to implement and maintain.
So we never did that last step.
End result - we are getting enough complaints to have mediocre email deliverability.
With some providers, such as AOL it was getting so bad, that our emails could not land even in spam folder. Our emails simply disappeared.
Users complained that they cannot get our confirmation emails and we could not do anything to help.
Amazon Simple Email Service to the rescue.
Since Amazon is sending so many emails, they have feedback loop implemented with most of email server providers.
So now we are getting all that complaints data and can stop sending emails to all these complainers.
If user reports our email as spam - we blacklist that email so we would never send anything to them again (so they would not report our email as spam again).
The reason for such harsh treatment is that penalty for us are pretty harsh too.
If we are getting more than 0.1% complaints from users (1 complaint per 1000 emails sent) - then it is considered suspicious.
It's interesting that it takes time to switch to Amazon SES.
Initially Amazon allowed us to send no more than 10000 email per 24 hours period.
When we started sending emails - Amazon SES gradually increased our sending limit (~50% increase every day).
Obviously sending limit increases only if number of complaints and bounces is low.
Now we are sending about 60,000 emails every day and keep increasing that number
How much does sending email through Amazon SES cost?
0.01c per email or $1 per 10000 emails.
In order to send 4M emails we have to pay $400.
Update:
Ban for reporting our emails as spam
Mostly these are job search alerts.
Typically it is not a problem to send 4M emails, but it IS a problem to make them end up in users inbox.
There are multiple steps that we had to do in order to improve email deliverability (SPF records, easy unsubscribe link, automatic unsubscribe bounced emails).
But that is not enough.
Some users do not care about "Unsubscribe" link in emails and simply click "spam" in their email provider.
The only way to unsubscribe users like that is to get feedback about it from email provider.
Unfortunately every email provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Live/Hotmail/Msn, AOL, etc) has their own interface for such spam reports and it is a pain to implement and maintain.
So we never did that last step.
End result - we are getting enough complaints to have mediocre email deliverability.
With some providers, such as AOL it was getting so bad, that our emails could not land even in spam folder. Our emails simply disappeared.
Users complained that they cannot get our confirmation emails and we could not do anything to help.
Amazon Simple Email Service to the rescue.
Since Amazon is sending so many emails, they have feedback loop implemented with most of email server providers.
So now we are getting all that complaints data and can stop sending emails to all these complainers.
If user reports our email as spam - we blacklist that email so we would never send anything to them again (so they would not report our email as spam again).
The reason for such harsh treatment is that penalty for us are pretty harsh too.
If we are getting more than 0.1% complaints from users (1 complaint per 1000 emails sent) - then it is considered suspicious.
It's interesting that it takes time to switch to Amazon SES.
Initially Amazon allowed us to send no more than 10000 email per 24 hours period.
When we started sending emails - Amazon SES gradually increased our sending limit (~50% increase every day).
Obviously sending limit increases only if number of complaints and bounces is low.
Now we are sending about 60,000 emails every day and keep increasing that number
How much does sending email through Amazon SES cost?
0.01c per email or $1 per 10000 emails.
In order to send 4M emails we have to pay $400.
Update:
Ban for reporting our emails as spam