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Ask HN: Anyone using Amazon's SES & if so are you liking it?

8 points by fjabre ↗ HN
Thinking about integrating this into an app of mine. Anyone have any experience using it? And has it been working well for you?

11 comments

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drewvolpe
We're using it at my startup to send emails to users (welcome, password reset, etc.) and have been happy with it. It's worked as advertised, has been reliable, and is dirt cheap.

We used the django-ses app which is great: you "pip install django-ses", set your AWS key and EMAIL_BACKEND and that's it. And it comes with a nice SES dashboard.

aonic
Can you share a screenshot of the dashboard? I can't seem to find one in any blog posts
staunch
Yes. Loving it. It's ridiculously fast. Like 1-2 second delivery time. Feels essentially free because pricing is so low.

Absolutely essential that you add SPF/Sender ID DNS TXT record for your domain or everything will go to SPAM. That's not SES specific though.

The throttling system they have worries me a bit, but so far hasn't been an issue.

anurag
Do you add DKIM signatures to your emails?
staunch
I don't, but if it ends up helping deliverability I'm definitely going to.
latch
The biggest problem is the inability to authorize a domain for sending mail. This is something they've been interested in adding for a while now, but have yet to do so.

If you plan on sending emails using a dynamic FROM field (like support-123434@domain.com) and then parsing replies, then you'll likely have to use something else.

staunch
Does setting Reply-to solve that?
latch
I never tried, but as I researched the issue, it seemed others tried various approaches (including reply-to), and nothing worked.
mkeblx
Is it feasible to call the script that authorizes an individual sending email address on demand? Or in a loop for every possible support-*@domain.com?
amorphid
I'm using it. It definitely works well for me.
grep
Yes, we are using Amazon SES together with Bouncely (http://bouncely.com) that I built to track bounces. However, Amazon SES still lacks many features.