I find these absurdly limited mail services strange. The one time I had to craft some "extra" email, was sending out surveys to an opt-in group for an EU project. There were some 10 000 recipients, and we had to send each a different email, in order to link responders with surveys (ie: a template email with description and an unique url of the form https://example.com/survey/123xyz).

Generating the emails in a naive loop and sending them via python took an insignificant amount of time - but in the end we worked out doing batches of 2000 at a time was easy enough - and with some help from the college that ran the email service (via exim) it all worked out (if you're going to send 10k mails in a day, it's nice to give your postmaster a heads up).

Hosting the mail server ourselves (using eg exim or postfix) would've worked too. Not sure about any of the spam-as-a-http-api services - even with custom domains they tend to have poor reputation, and they have these silly limits that mean they're not only not "auto scaling" - they're very low performance.

The problem is spam. The big providers providing hosted emails do a lot of work to make sure the emails people send with them actually end up at the recipients inbox and not in spam quarantine - but that doesn't work if the provider is then used by spammers. So the limits are set to discourage spammers while making most use-cases for email still possible.

If one were to ask me what to do, I'd say emails should cost 0.1 cent each, to be paid to the recipient...

> non-sense limitations

Limitations to block bots setting up, spamming, then tearing down over and over to avoid filters.

Its easy enough to ask for a limit increase and you'd only likely run into issues as a new account with little biking history.

That said 100% agree in this solution being a poor choice w.r.t vendor lock in.

The emails sent by your $5 VPS wouldn't stand a chance of actually being delivered to people's Gmail or Outlook mailboxes. Whereas SES actually works.

Also, it is incredibly easy to ask AWS support to increase the limit. A startup I worked with had only thousands of users; we told AWS about it and they gave us 5 million emails per 24 hours.

They stand the same chance, just setup dkim and spf as any of the hundred guides will tell you how to.

Debate it on vendor lock in, reliability and out sourcing sysops, not on having to maybe manually set up some DNS records.

By all reports of people who have set up their own mail server lately, just having SPF and DKIM set up still won’t cut it for delivery to the major mail providers these days.

I run my own email server, with no spam filter, and inspect where every spam comes from. I get a lot of spam from random shitty providers, but none from major VPS providers (Scaleway, Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean, ...) with the exception of OVH.

I do however get spam from Amazon SES a couple of times a month.

> The emails sent by your $5 VPS wouldn't stand a chance of actually being delivered to people's Gmail or Outlook mailboxes.

The emails sent from my $5 VPS arrives in Gmail's priority box :)

This is FUD spread by hosted mail services.

All those limits are removed within hours and are one time support ticket requests. AWS doesn't want every account to be instantly usable as a spam account if someone is compromised.

I think the more significant annoyance would be the lack of IMAP/POP, I don't see how that is addressed.

SES sending email pricing:

> $0.10 per 1,000

I don't think a single send email API counts as "vendor lock-in".