I know that one of the very hard problems with automating email is not landing in the spam folder.
I always had the impression that using services like Mailchimp make that much less likely than doing it DIY on top of a more commodity transport like SES. I.e. they stay on top of and evolve with best practices over time so you don't have to.
Not in our experience, we've only used SES to send emails and haven't had any reports of Customers not receiving emails or any of our emails having ended up in their spam folder, although we've never sent any marketing or promotional emails so our flagged rates should be really low.
> I.e. they stay on top of and evolve with best practices over time so you don't have to.
> Is that in any way accurate?
For the most part, yes.
It's all about delivering as much information as possible to aid the receiver with the spam detection process. The goal is to reduce false positives/negatives. The beauty of this is of course that if you are in fact sending spam, this will work against you.
Mailchimp does this very well, they actually have people working for them with 'email deliverability expert' as their job title.
The problem is that rolling a simple email sending solution is trivial to set up, but hard to get right. It takes surprisingly significant engineering resources to build a solution that complies with all the relevant RFCs, scales nicely and follows new developments. Resources that are probably much better spend elsewhere.
My job is helping customers optimise their email infrastructure [0], I have analysed hundreds of domains, and my observation is that the vast majority of home-grown email solutions lack even the basic provisions for deliverability.
My advice: don't roll your own email solution, unless you can afford full-time engineers to do so. There certainly is a tipping point (as always) where building your own solution is more cost effective as a SaaS solution, but that is certainly not at 500€/Year.
I moved my mailing list (all explicit subscribes, plaintext content) from Mailchimp to an SES-based solution in part for better handling of plaintext email, which is a total afterthought for most of these tools. Since the switch I have experienced minor hard rejection problems with SES that I didn't before, primarily with Apple Mail and rarely with gmail as well. I wouldn't say it's been a huge problem for me, in part because I don't care that much, but as far as I can tell Apple Mail was rejecting 100% of what I sent for a while while gmail just sporadically randomly rejects an email from time to time, not even the same email across multiple recipients.
We started having this recently when sending quotations to customers. We ended up sending attached PDFs instead,so Apple Mail won't complain anymore. It can be either content or how the domain is setup,still not sure to this day.
I used to use Pardot ( B2B marketing software) at work, which is miles ahead of MailChimp. While there are certain things you can't do by default (e.g. email to info@domain.com,etc) , the spam filters are still kind of blackbox,so the content can have a huge play in addition to marketing software server's reputation,etc.
The problem is that you actually are spamming. Almost no one wants the junk that comes out of mailchimp. It’s just they are big and powerful enough to get their spam in inboxes rather than the spam box where it belongs.
I always had the impression that using services like Mailchimp make that much less likely than doing it DIY on top of a more commodity transport like SES. I.e. they stay on top of and evolve with best practices over time so you don't have to.
Is that in any way accurate?