- Official Post
Hello there,
Over the past few years, we've gotten quite a few moments where e-mail has been an issue. E-mail is generally speaking a pain, due to how it works and the monopoly that Gmail and Microsoft have over this sphere (the both of them have a 90%+ market share).
How we have been handling e-mail over the years was by using a software program called Postal and ran it on one of our own servers, which allowed us to send quite a lot of mails easily, but from time to time the mailserver froze/refused to accept new mails or providers blocked our mails for some reason.
The last few years, I've noticed more and more problems going on with Postal - not only did the installation method change a few times, but also the monitoring became a pain. Over the longer while, the server that I used to run Postal on also became quite costly - whenever I would do a bigger mailing, the RAM-memory of the server needed to be big enough or it would just fail.
That, paired with the issues we were having with mails not being received that were generally unresolveable by me (this is a real pain to deal with: you can't really get yourself whitelisted at most providers or un-blacklisted, it's a struggle and mostly ends up being though luck).
Due to this, I've decided to look into alternatives. Legacy sends out quite a bit of mail each day - notifications, registrations, password resets and all of that. We however do not have the volume that makes some of the commercial solutions viable, even though I did look into a lot of them. Quite often these fell quite out of our budget, or had limitations that just didn't fit.
Legacy is paid out of my own pocket (in fact, the last donation was years ago) and I don't mind doing that, but I didn't want to overpay for mail and hopefully save some money with this.
So after a while, I decided to go for Amazon SES, the Simple Email Service from Amazon.
This is now live, and I will be keeping an eye on this over the next few weeks.
If you experience worse mail delivery, feel free to let me know so I can look into this.
- Kev
