Ask HN: How much better is Postmark vs. AWS SES?
It seems to be that AWS SES is cheaper and more flexible, but Postmark is essentially charging for giving you the typical use-cases and handling some of the problems almost-out-of-the-box?
For instance, while configuring AWS SES, I had to read through many documentation pages about DMARC, DKIM, SPF, Outlook protection, SMTP configuration, and Email+DNS (for Cloudflare).
Is my understanding correct that Postmark is just all of this low-level details as a service where you pay for an extra premium and support.
I assume you still would have to configure some infrastructure, but it'd mainly be things that they can't do themselves like setting up DNS records.
Some people claim that they got over 10% in open rates, but I wonder if that's because of some nice content analysis they do and some best practices around email protocols that go over my head, or if it's just the typical SPF+DKIM+DMARC issue.
For several years, postmark only allowed transactional email. This led to them having a very high reputation. They are now cashing in on that reputation by allowing increasingly spammy content.
In a couple years, they're deliverability will be no better than SES.
oh, fascinating, but don't you fix that by having separate infrastructure? they don't say that explicitly, but they do advertise that they have separate infrastructure for transactional and marketing.
My impression is that their "streams" are just ways of segmenting different types of content within an account, not actually using separate infrastructure to send the actual mail.
Maybe I'm wrong about that, though.
hey. notice: i work for mailtrap.io but I have domain knowledge
It's always better to separate your transactional and bulk (marketing traffic). We do it as well as it's also best practices recommended by Gmail (use different IPs, and even subdomains). Also another thing is suppression list: as somebody marks you bulk email as Spam, they still can receive their e.g. pass reset emails.
It's probably nothing cheaper than SES, but you probably need more time with it. And if you have any issues with deliverability - you are on your own. Postmark or we provide support, UI, etc for extra costs.