https://gist.github.com/MaximilianKohler/84d2175472612a34bcc1c2ebf99b91d4
When I searched for this I had a very hard time finding a right answer because all the results were SEO blogs advertising their newsletter services (Mailchimp, Convertkit, etc.), which is not the same thing.
My use case is that I have a Google form collecting tens of thousands of applications. And I need to reply to those people en masse (a few thousand per day). None of the newsletter services are designed for this, and they’re all very expensive.
Even if your use case is a regular newsletter, setting up your own server is way cheaper.
My goal was to find the most cost-effective, user-friendly, bulk/mass email sender with good deliverability and open rates. One-time, 100,000+ emails per month, 3-4k/day.
Feel free to share your input in the comments. I’m a total noob and had never dealt with anything like this in the past. But have now hosted multiple sites for various reasons, and wrote guides for them as well.
The short answer is that you need to set up your own web server (Hetzner, AWS, DigitalOcean, etc.), install an email software on it (Listmonk, Mailwizz, Mautic), and use an SMTP like Amazon SES. It’s not that hard. If you’re on Windows, Putty and FileZilla will be your main programs to access your server. When using CSV files for your contacts, you want to use UTF-8 format.
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/