How did you justify paying $6,000/year for a dedicated IP address? SES will provide you with the same thing for $25/month (https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/#Amazon_SES_Pricing). I noticed your statistics didn't include SES. To me, mystery surrounding reliable email deliverability is primarily a tactic some vendors use to entice non-technical people into relying on their proprietary email marketing solution.
The reason we are paying $6k/year for something that normally costa $20 is that we've been with this Marketing Automation provider fir many years, and a lot of our internal training/documentation/integrations are tailored to them. The $6k price tag is not a big enough fraction of our contract to justify switching. And, importantly, all of the other enterpriae-scale marketing automation vendors play this exact same game (the main competitor is owned by Oracle...). We're getting screwed, but I chose to lose this battle in order to reach my greater objectives :-)
The reasons why the stats don't include SES is because the target audience for this article is fairly narrow: it is people at orgs that pay for "Marketing Automation" software. That software has capabilities beyond just email sending, and is used for marketing (hence different deliverability challengea than those at SES, which has a broad customer base and can be used for transactional/alerting emails)
Yes, "deliverability" is often used as something vendors use to spook people. It only matters at scale (like >10,000 people per mailing). And many vendors dont actually know what theyre doing.
I'll be glad to answer more questions on this thread or through email (its in my profile)
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.
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.
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.
Hey, this looks fantastic! I really appreciate minimal software that does what it sets out do well without bloat. I noticed that your GitHub README states "Collect Emails: Create your simple mailing list". It just so happens that I just released a tool for completing the next piece in the puzzle by taking those email addresses and automatically sending a notification of your new articles to them in a newsletter (assuming Nucelo supports RSS). Check it out at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40898313 if you think it can be of help to you.
This looks like an interesting take on email marketing. I use an open source solution called Listmonk (w/ Amazon SES) for my emailing needs. How does this project compare?
Thank you! I'm glad to hear my project is working well for you on the upcoming Qubes R4.1 (currently untested by myself). To the best of my knowledge, no official QWT build exists yet for R4.1, so yes, building it yourself is the way to go for now. Also, good to know QWT is fully operational on the latest version of Qubes.
I'm not sure the exact details of your hardware problems but you may want to try out Qubes R4.1 when it's released (or the RC1 version now). It will ship with a fully updated base hypervisor and kernel feature set thus granting support for newer hardware.
Otherwise, feel free to open an issue on the Qubes issue tracker and the Core Team will look into it.
