Perhaps a bit OT, but will really appreciate inputs on this.
There have been an influx of such tools, and understandably so, related to email lists. Based on various comments, I feel that the biggest item driving success around email is around email deliverability.
What are the the skills and secret sauce of companies that claim to do very reliable email deliverability, and I'm failing to understand why isn't it as simple as doing the right configurations and setting it up using Amazon SES.
Any email gurus to please throw actionable light on this?
> What are the the skills and secret sauce of companies that claim to do very reliable email deliverability, and I'm failing to understand why isn't it as simple as doing the right configurations and setting it up using Amazon SES.
Email deliverability is reputation based (beyond IP) and takes into account technical, reputational and behavioural factors.
Technical basically means getting stuff like SPF, DKIM and DMARC right.
Reputational means you’re sending from a reputable IP and that the domain you’re sending from is reputable. If you’re too small to warrant your own IP, you need to be on a shared one with other good senders.
Behavioural just means that your recipients are engaging with your emails in a manner that the inbox provider deems to be positive.
Some of this stuff is a bit challenging to setup, or it’s a bit tough to build the reputation, there’s no real secret sauce to it though.
Email deliverability is no secret. Just send an email to one of many email deliverability testers to find out the spammyness of your email: https://www.mail-tester.com
The sender IP address is a large component in determining email spammyness. This is why SES allows you to pay extra for a dedicated IP address (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/dedicated-ip.html). However, it's not something you will likely need unless you send in large volumes.
It's definitely no secret but those testers do not provide the full story. No do IP blocklist checkers - not all blocklists are created equal, nor do most have any impact at all.
For most senders, whilst IP reputation does play a role, as long as you're on a decent platform the majority of your deliverability concerns will be surrounding your own domain's reputation. Your domain reputation is directly influenced by your sending behaviour. You need to be sending to people who want to receive your email and will engage with it.
I was surprised, coming back to newsletters, how many newsletter platforms don't support RSS-to-newsletter. I've hacked a work-around that I'm not happy with, but I look forward to digging into this.
A lot of devs and PMs under age 30 have never heard of RSS, or if they have it's not something they ever used, and not top-of-mind when it comes to features.
Maybe, but another thought I had while scanning newsletter services is that they haven't really evolved or changed in many years. Substack would suggest email isn't quite dead, but email feels at-risk. That said, I support both newsletters and Substack but I do a lot of manual copy-and-pasting. I also had to hand-code my own Wordpress newsletter content script to generate something that could then be cross-deployed to newsletters.
None of it feels like an ecosystem.. it feels like feature sets that atrophied about 10 years ago, and lack any ongoing creativity or innovation or product development.
This is cool—happy to see more stuff like this. I like the idea of creating a private RSS feed with a CMS and having it ship out to a service like this automagically.
Listmonk is a seriously awesome piece of software!
Have used it to run multiple newsletters, over various version upgrades (almost all stress free), and even written some custom integrations with the API.
Oh, nice! I recall Reddit did support RSS at one point, I didn't realize they limited it. rss2newsletter is only ~300 lines of code right now and I'd prefer to keep it more on the minimal side of things. But, that's definitely a cool feature to have.
I built a simple self hosting micro blogging platform which can also ingests rss feeds and turn them into posts (lamb — it’s in alpha) so that could produce a master feed and hook nicely into this.
For sure, converting feeds into emails in that direction is something I've seen as a sticking point for a lot of projects. I'm glad I could fill that gap for you.
This is great and very happy to see it. Mailchimp is annoyingly expensive for what it is.
With that said the sending of the emails is the easy part. Deliverability is hard.
Sending via SES is pretty likely to go straight to spam folders or worse. Granted if it’s 100% opt-in and you have the kind of audience that will hunt for the email and mark it as valid you’ll probably improve and be ok long term but it’s something to think about.
Thanks! In my personal experience, I've had success delivering to the inboxes of Gmail, Outlook, and Zoho Mail with SES. However, my newsletter is entirely opt-in on my website. When I signed up for SES, there was a human review as to what I would be sending. So, I think Amazon understands spam is an issue, too.
Listmonk supports many email providers though, if your needs outgrow SES.
There have been an influx of such tools, and understandably so, related to email lists. Based on various comments, I feel that the biggest item driving success around email is around email deliverability.
What are the the skills and secret sauce of companies that claim to do very reliable email deliverability, and I'm failing to understand why isn't it as simple as doing the right configurations and setting it up using Amazon SES.
Any email gurus to please throw actionable light on this?
Email deliverability is reputation based (beyond IP) and takes into account technical, reputational and behavioural factors.
Technical basically means getting stuff like SPF, DKIM and DMARC right.
Reputational means you’re sending from a reputable IP and that the domain you’re sending from is reputable. If you’re too small to warrant your own IP, you need to be on a shared one with other good senders.
Behavioural just means that your recipients are engaging with your emails in a manner that the inbox provider deems to be positive.
Some of this stuff is a bit challenging to setup, or it’s a bit tough to build the reputation, there’s no real secret sauce to it though.
The sender IP address is a large component in determining email spammyness. This is why SES allows you to pay extra for a dedicated IP address (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/dedicated-ip.html). However, it's not something you will likely need unless you send in large volumes.
For most senders, whilst IP reputation does play a role, as long as you're on a decent platform the majority of your deliverability concerns will be surrounding your own domain's reputation. Your domain reputation is directly influenced by your sending behaviour. You need to be sending to people who want to receive your email and will engage with it.
iamacyborg's response above is spot on.
None of it feels like an ecosystem.. it feels like feature sets that atrophied about 10 years ago, and lack any ongoing creativity or innovation or product development.
Have used it to run multiple newsletters, over various version upgrades (almost all stress free), and even written some custom integrations with the API.
https://listmonk.app
How do you handle Reddit feeds? We found those to be tricky to get right because it seems like Reddit doesn’t want you to use rss
With that said the sending of the emails is the easy part. Deliverability is hard.
Sending via SES is pretty likely to go straight to spam folders or worse. Granted if it’s 100% opt-in and you have the kind of audience that will hunt for the email and mark it as valid you’ll probably improve and be ok long term but it’s something to think about.
Listmonk supports many email providers though, if your needs outgrow SES.