Tell HN: Gmail rate limiting emails from AWS SES

[saradhi]

Unsure if this is the same for everyone but our notification emails from SES are being rate limited by Gmail.

Background:

One of my apps provides time-sensitive email notifications, for 60-90 days, to the subscribers(paid) - so it is critical to deliver emails. We have been using the same email provider and have been using AWS SES for a couple of years now. We have the SPF, and DKIM all verified. Yet, for the last 3 days, we are getting the below email

```

Sub: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

Body: Our system has detected an unusual rate of<CRLF>421-4.7.28 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our<CRLF>421-4.7.28 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily<CRLF>421-4.7.28 rate limited. Please visit<CRLF>421-4.7.28 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedRateLimitError to<CRLF>421 4.7.28 review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines.>

```

Troubleshooting till now: I have got the AWS tech support team confirming my email configuration has no issues. AWS team has informed "The current throttling is just that Gmail is seeing a lot of messages from the SES shared IP and is throttling the messages"

>>> Is anyone facing the same issue with AWS? or similar issues with other bulk email service providers?

>>> How do you deal with such issues in the future? Set up alternative email service providers.

>>> Is this the side effect of Gmail's dormant account deletion rolled out last week?

[jeroenhd]

Things like this are to be expected with shared IP addresses for mail services.

This sounds like something Amazon should figure out more than anything. There's probably something going on with a customer or theirs (misconfiguration, spammer, vulnerability exploited) that's triggering spam detection rules.

At least Google reports the issue back to you instead of silently dropping all of your email like many other mail servers do.

[nomilk]

Very useful thread. I recently considered SES for a quick app and didn't discover the purpose of dedicated IPs. They're listed under add ons, but seem somewhat essential if the emails are important.

Checking out the pricing page, a dedicated IP costs $24.95 per month, which would be more than the actual cost of emails for many small-medium apps (e.g. 100K emails per month would be about $10).

Ooc, do other email providers have the same shared-IP problem? E.g. Mailgun, Postmark, Sendgrid?

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/

[alyandon]

I finally started sending anything from AWS SES straight to trash because the spam on their platform is persistent and they are non-responsive to spam reports. I was getting 30+ fraudulent/spam emails a day in just one inbox alone.

[baobabKoodaa]

Google also silently drops mail in some cases.

[pembrook]

Email sending is a largely efficient market, and SES is the cheapest sender.

Thus, the SES IP pools have the worst IP reputations among all the SMTP-based senders. I would never use them (or an ESP that sends with them) in a million years.

The reason why cheap = bad in email is because Spammers have the lowest conversion rates of all senders (their emails are always untargeted), so price is their number 1 consideration.

You can cheap out elsewhere in your stack. But never cheap out on email — especially if you’re not sending high volume enough for a dedicated IP.

[albert_e]

Thanks

I never had to use SES or really Email for that matter in my own architecture.

Since we get so immersed in best practices and recommendations of good architecture pushed by these very cloud providers (AWS, Azure, etc) -- this kind of candid information is usually not available unless we burn our fingers and learn through own experience.

I wish there was more efficient way of such practical knowledge to be shared among practitioners. Current discussion forums etc work to an extent but just hope there was much more effective way to spread awsreness.

[kureikain]

This is bad advice.

SES is the best among the provider.

They treat spam very seriously, compare to other. You would need to maintain a baseline, failure to do so will get the account into soft-susspend or permanent suspended quickly.

AWS, being an engineering focus product, provider tooling and automated around bouncing, spam reporting handling. Having sophisicated tooling help user deal with that.

They strongly againtst and not suggest end-user to buy dedicated IP. Where as other providers always want user to pay more for "dedicated ip" to "get better delivery".

AWS has procedure, best practice to encounrage slowly warmup when sending mass volume. They had their own rate limit (14 messages per second by default), move the account out of sandbox, a good domain/sender verification.

They are the best among providers when it comes to email.

Sometimes they appear to be worst than others, but that is a specific case. The way email works will always have false positive. If user decided the email is spam(even it isn't) and keep reporting it may appear in a certain spam list.

[manishsharan]

You are assuming that SES allows for spammers. In my experience, SES has pretty good controls , limits and policies to dissuade from spamming.

[nugget]

If SES is the worst, who is the best? By implication, simply the most expensive providers?

[slau]

It sounds like you could benefit from having your own dedicated IP pool in SES.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/dedicated-ip.html

[kunwon1]

Amazon SES is not a good choice for sending critical email notifications. Their 'global suppression list' [1] has caused no end of headaches for me and my clients.

If you and I are both using SES to send to the same person, and my message results in a hard bounce, then your messages to that person will start to silently fail.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/sending-email-glob...

[johanneswu]

You can now use a account-level suppression list to override the global suppression list though.

> If an address is on the global suppression list, but not on your account level suppression list (which means you want to send to it), and you do send to it, Amazon SES will still attempt delivery, but if it bounces, the bounce will affect your own reputation

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/lists-and-subscrip...

[messutied]

Would you happen to know of better alternatives for sending critical email notifications? We're just now working on moving away from Mailgun into SES. This thread is making me reconsider.

[saradhi]

Thanks you all for comments. I have made a decision to subscribed to dedicated IPs (credits: @slau).

The differentiating factor between our current AWS SES plan and the competitors (mentioned in the comments) is having a dedicated IP. With our current volume, none of the competitors are anyway near AWS SES costs. So, moving to a dedicated IPs thats cost 25$ extra not only solves our issue, but also no change in code/infrastructure.

[slau]

Just make sure you have sufficient traffic to warrant a dedicated IP. An unknown IP suddenly sending a burst of emails is going to get soft-blocked very quickly. You need to build up your reputation, and you need to slowly increase how much you send.

The managed IP is an option, although I’ve never used it.

When I was the VPoE at Dixa, we switched over to SES, and we had 3 dedicated IPs, and for our volume back then (a few thousand emails a day), this worked very well. I don’t know if they ever hit scaling issues after I left.

[ttul]

Hey everyone, CEO of MailChannels here. I've been following this thread with interest, as we've also observed similar challenges in the email delivery space. Well, to be honest, the ground game is constantly changing in this space as everyone has scaled.

Email delivery is inherently complex due to the various factors that contribute to deliverability, including IP reputation, domain reputation, content filtering, and recipient engagement. Shared IP pools can indeed be challenging because of the "bad neighbor" effect, where one sender's bad behavior can affect the reputation of all senders using that IP.

However, shared pools can also prove advantageous because it's harder for a receiver to block your IP if tons of email comes from it from a wide variety of senders. Receivers are trying to reduce collateral damage while protecting their users from spam and phishing - this is literally the reward model feeding their machine learning models. If your email travels alongside millions of other emails that are mostly received well, that IP will not be blocked; whereas, if you send email from your own IP, it doesn't take much for a receiver to pull the trigger and block you since there is very little consequence other than blocking your traffic.

Not that anyone here asked, but if you want a "best practice", try multiple different services and approaches and find the one that works best for you. There is no perfect email sending service for all senders and as mentioned above, the ground game is changing all the time.

[LeonM]

This is typically not a big deal, as explained in the message, it is a temporary countermeasure. It'll resolve itself as long as you really aren't spamming.

Though Gmail responds citing your IP, Gmail and all other large email services don't use IP filtering. Just about all email service providers use domain reputation, since IPs are ephemeral.

If you are sending transactional emails that your customers have agreed to, then your domain (!= ip) rating will improve over time and there will be less countermeasures, regardless of which IP you use to send.

> Is anyone facing the same issue with AWS? or similar issues with other bulk email service providers?

This is just Gmail doing it's thing (the right thing, in my opinion, contrary to most HN sentiment). It is independent of which sender you use.

> How do you deal with such issues in the future? Set up alternative email service providers.

Use DMARC reporting to verify that all your email is sent with DKIM alignment, to make sure that you aren't causing the problem. This is independent of email service provider.

But as explained, you are being rate limited, not blocked. Email will be delivered, it'll just take longer. You state that you have a 60-90 day margin for delivery, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

> Is this the side effect of Gmail's dormant account deletion rolled out last week?

No.

[leetrout]

Not entirely true. There is a reason Mailchimp owns a rather large block of IP addresses.

https://ipinfo.io/AS14782

[joshstrange]

I'm currently using PostmarkApp (from before the acquisition) but I've looked longingly at SES for years. My traffic is very bursty and so ~8 months out of the year I pay the monthly cost and send 1-2 emails if that and then the other 3 months I send close to my plan max. I'd love to switch to a pay-per-use provider but stories like this scare me. I've already dealt with deliverability issues (iCloud randomly deciding that unless you can receive emails, have the MX records in place, they will block you. This was for transactional/login/notification emails), since email is the login method for my sites it's rather important that it works. To PostmarkApp's credit they helped me to track down why the emails were bouncing to iCloud, I doubt I would have gotten the same support from AWS (I'm too small of a fish).

I'd love to hear what other people are using to send transactional emails (no marketing). Ideally I'd find a provider that could "scale down to $0".

[baobabKoodaa]

If you are not in the business of selling email delivery, you should be buying email delivery from a company who is in that business. It's extremely hard to get emails delivered and it's even harder for a small company. For your use case you could probably use Postmark and get good delivery with that.

[inopinatus]

Unfortunately Postmark was recently acquired by a so-called “campaign management” company and they have already started sending unsolicited commercial mail to unauthorised recipients, and when I pushed back and complained they became downright hostile and confrontational and told us to unsubscribe - from a marketing list that we hadn’t opted into, and that was operated via their new parent company. It was like a conversation from the dark ages of UCE where the spammer says “just opt out mate”. So Postmark are dead to me now.

[anamexis]

Using SES is buying email delivery from a company who is in that business.

[LinuxBender]

As others mentioned they are using a paid AWS email service. In fairness however the price is very low thus making the bar to entry very low. They will have no shortage of customers that abuse the system, do not handle UCE reports and in some cases are outright spamming. The spammers may get blocked with time but there will be a continuous wake of damage in their path on the shared pools of IP addresses.

[LeonM]

> you should be buying email delivery from a company who is in that business.

OP is doing just that, Amazon SES = Simple Email Service

[topicseed]

I think this is a spammy neighbour problem on that sending IP. Might be you, might be someone else who's using SES. But whoever sends from this IP is penalised.

[ctas]

Do you have a custom return-path configured? Using a custom return path might help, because it ties your reputation primarily to your domain.

ESPs check multiple factors. Both IP and domain reputation play a role. They will check your return path / envelope sender domain reputation and your IP. Your domain will start with it's own reputation, but can be boosted with a good IP reputation. But if your domain had bad sending behaviour in the past, that might be an issue.

Source: I'm running a transactional mail service that solely works with shared IPs: https://www.markix.com.

[cuu508]

FYI: Your privacy policy is missing https://app.markix.com/privacy-policy

[johnklos]

Amazon is very, very spammy. If you want your email to be delivered and you don't want to end up sharing Amazon's reputation, you'll need to use another company for email delivery.

[vladvasiliu]

>>> Is this the side effect of Gmail's dormant account deletion rolled out last week?

IIRC, they haven't started to actually close the accounts just yet, so I doubt it's related.

[bdcravens]

We are always trying to trim waste to stay lean, and the SES vs Sendgrid pricing looks nice on paper (we are on the Sendgrid Pro plan with the dedicated IP address, so it's $90/mo). However when I look at our Sendgrid stats (97% reputation; it's pretty much all transactional) I know it's worth well more than what we'd save.

[jeffbee]

Why does a 4xx even come to your attention? Admittedly I never looked into what SES is or how it works, but I assumed it stores and forwards messages on behalf of its users, in which case a 4xx temporary failure to send should not come back to you.

[hstaab]

For those recommending against SES for critical deliveries, what are you using?

In the recent past I’ve used Postmark, but they were acquired by a marketing company.

[erksa]

For any critical email delivery make sure you can address this thing with the mailsender of choise:

1)SPF,

2)DKIM,

3)DMARC [2] (DMARC is often forgotten or can be super noisy when set up. Postmarc offers a aggregation service for free that sends you a weekly summary),

4)Dedicated IP

5)Reverse IP look up [1] (locate a dns PTR record for that IP address) should match the sender.

Not everyone supports 5).

4 and 5 is what you end up paying for, but totally worth it. Sendgrid, SES, Mailgun etc.

[1] https://www.mailgun.com/blog/deliverability/reverse-dns-whit...

[2] https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com/

[ctas]

Shameless plug: I've recently started my own transactional email service (https://www.markix.com), primarily targeting small senders, after having been a very happy Postmark customer for a long time. Our service is still in closed beta but delivering live emails.

I run a couple other businesses and moved all of my transactional email sending over to Markix.

Would love to have a chat with anyone that might be starting a new project and is open to try out a new mail service (mail in bio).

[the_common_man]

Funny because Gmail is the biggest source of spam

[pixl97]

Gmail is also one of the biggest email providers... it's almost like there is a correlation.

[0ct4via]

What an insightful and intelligent comment, that contributes incredible wealth to the current discourse, and doesn't minimize the seriousness of cancer at all - not.

"Omit internet tropes" is pretty clear in the guidelines, and failing to make any kind of intelligent or reasoned argument adds nothing to the conversation here. Do better.

[ds]

I tried to use cloudflare email routing and had the same issue. I simply set it up so any email to @mydomain.com would forward to a gmail.

The worst is that cloudflare did not let me know this was happening until I saw I was missing some emails and went hunting. About 20% of my emails would just get rejected silently with "delivery failed" in the logs. I wouldnt blame cloudflare so much if they kept attempting to redeliver, but they did not. They simply give up.