• 2 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Never heard of before and dgaf about whoever Linus Sebastion is. All this stuff I’ve been seeing about what an asshole “Linus” is thinking it must be some kerfuffle about Linus Torvalds but the bits and pieces I read made no sense. Even less now I’ve figured out it’s just some random asshole named Linus. How did I end up here? Take me back to my room, please.



  • With respect to pricing, I’ve been using SES for maybe 10 years, possibly more - this month is the first time I think I’ve ever been charged. The free tier used to include a very large number - I think it was 30,000 or or more emails a day that I never exceeded. Now it’s 0.10 USD per thousand messages. Which is a pretty big change from free, even though the overall costs are small - and it’s still a bargain. As with everything in “the cloud” though, the big players will squeeze the competition out then increase prices. I fully expect SES prices to keep increasing now they’ve figured out they can extract a few extra dollars from users and how relatively cheap SES is compared to the other overpriced crap. It won’t surprise me if they jack this up significantly in the coming years.

    Referencing sending quotas - Amazon is very lenient - I was talking about the big providers like gmail. It might be different now that my accounts have a long reputation as trustworthy senders, but when I first started using SES way back when, gmail and yahoo would start rejecting mail if more than something like 200 or so messages were submitted in a single batch, so I had to check the recipient domains and limit the numbers for each hourly iteration to stop them rejecting. I keep the email batches pretty small since I’m only sending out about 5-10K at a time and I stagger the send over several hours.

    It’s a bit of a minefield but overall pretty happy with SES, mainly because the mail gets delivered. You don’t need to originate sending from an EC2 hosts (the pricing is the same, even though they make a distinction in the price list:

    Outbound email from EC2 $0.10/1000 emails $0.12 for each GB of attachments you send*

    Outbound email from non-EC2 $0.10/1000 emails $0.12 for each GB of attachments you send

    *You might incur additional data transfer charges for using EC2 (it seems very likely they will increase the non EC2 price to drive you to a place where they are getting your compute and storage $ as well).

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


  • SES is indeed the best option if you want reliable delivery for a reasonable cost. The pricing changed just last month so it’s no longer effectively free for small users but it’s relatively cheap (for now). I looked at the prices you quoted for other services and they seem ridiculously high, but it’s fair to say that sending legitimate (non spam) bulk email is not so easy if you do everything yourself - getting your mail accepted is very challenging. For example, even using SES, if you attempt to originate too many emails to one provider in a single call, they may start rejecting everything - I had to put counters into the code to limit how many gmail addresses would be sent with each iteration. SES also rate limits so you need to manage that somehow. It sounds like you’re planning to send a LOT of email. You’ll also need to be mindful of the bounce rate and complaints (spam / abuse reports from recipients) because SES will shut you down if they go over a certain threshold, which you can see in the dashboard. It sounds like you’ve already figured a lot of this stuff out though - it’s not rocket science but it can be frustrating to work with bulk email delivery for a number of reasons.








  • Well, I just learned something, but what does “control” the IP mean? If they are only validating a single address via http then presumably you could just use an Amazon elastic IP as long as it resolves. I doubt that letsencrypt will support that but I would be interested to know. If they do then yeah, you could presumably set up the instance using the IP as the name, but I don’t know why you would want to. Apart from the fact that it would be hard to remember, could change at some point, screwing things up, it might work. I suggest OP do the necessary and report back accordingly.



  • thanks - that looks like full independence and would be good to try. I’ve been using codeium, which was suggested here and it seems as good, if not better than github copilot and it’s free for solo developers.

    I appreciate you taking the time to make the suggestion - I’ve learned quite a lot about open source software options in a few weeks here on Lemmy and find it’s been an excellent resource for technical info and suggestions.


  • Right, but Lemmy.ml is really just one of a thousand plus instances. We need something instance independent or a way to propagate info that doesn’t rely on any single failure points, or Lemmy as the communication channel. What happens when lemmy.ml is down, or if no instances are able to post due to concerted DoS?

    It’s impossible to stop anyone randomly posting stuff on Lemmy. Attackers can post misinformation as well, especially if they compromise admin accounts. Who are we gonna trust in the midst of the next incident? The account posting most prolifically about the UI exploit in progress was using a burner account that had just been created to post about it. I’m sure there were good reasons for wanting to be anonymous when discussing the work of unknown malicious actors, but it made me think twice about what was being posted at the time.