back to article Amazon offers cloud based bulk emailer to SMEs

Amazon is offering a bulk emailer for businesses via its cloud services arm Amazon Web Services. Amazon's Simple Email Service - Amazon SES to its friends - allows you to send up to 2,000 emails a day for free, if they come from another Amazon cloud service. The book and services giant says that messages can be sent for as …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Spamazon!

    Sounds more like Spamazon to me...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Pirate

      Sorry...

      But that name has already been given to them in the past.

      Oh I agree that this is not a good thing yet its easy to fix.

      Spamhaus, please block their mail server IP addresses!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Stop

      Not interested.

      If you are a spammer / sending bulk mail to purchased lists it probably looks attractive. For the same reasons if you are a genuine company sending to your opt-in customers it will not be - their IP addresses will (if not already) quickly gain a very poor reputation.

      Spammers / dodgy markers do not care about poor deliverability and long term reputation.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Already blacklisted

    The Amazon cloud IP blocks are already heavily tarnished because it's a haven for spammers looking to setup a quick server, blast out millions of emails, then shut it down. The last place I'd want to use for legitimate email marketing is Amazon, that is if you have any desire for reliable delivery. This will only make it worse, but now they'll have paying people complaining. Good luck Amazon!

  3. Martin 19
    FAIL

    No, a thousand times no

    I *am* a SME. We do advertise online, but only to those actively searching for the products we sell (adwords, etc). We do not send out spam, and neither should you.

    If I had a penny for every spam email, sales call and pushy salesman who turns up expecting to see a director RIGHT NOW; I could pack in work tomorrow. All you gits are doing is annoying every single one of your potential customers. Please stop. Please.

    1. Rhyd

      Bulk email != spam

      We send out a monthly email newsletter with special offers and new ranges etc. I wouldn't call that spam, and neither do the 40,000 customers that receive it (we have a simple opt out procedure in place for those that aren't interested).

      It's not about spamming potential customers, and if you're not keeping in touch with your existing customers in this way then you're missing a trick!

      1. copsewood
        Stop

        Was that "opt in" really confirmed ?

        You need more than an email address on a form and an uncheck button hidden by much small print to opt out. Opt out of marketing emails should be the default. Also the email address needs a confirmation cookie sent to that address followed by a response required from the recipient wanting to opt in for this to activate in order to confirm the address is correct and opt in is intended.

        I've lost count of the number of times an email address I have provided for order confirmation has been misused against my consent for subsequent marketing purposes. Nowadays I create a new email alias per company wanting one so I can opt out by rejecting messages sent to this at my server, due to marketeers not processing opt out intentions.

      2. John Sturdy
        Thumb Down

        If you don't avoid pestering existing customers, you're also missing a trick!

        Getting unsolicited mail from a company that I've been a customer of before generally ensures that I won't repeat the mistake of buying from them.

  4. Drefsab

    hmm

    I wonder, the biggest problem I see with this is Amazon will not know if a mail is unsolicited or not, sure it may advertise a valid service, sure it may not have an opt-out link, but does that mean the poor person getting the mail opted in to be begin with? I think not.

    Personally I will be looking forward to finding the IP ranges used on this and making all servers I host place a high spam score if the mail comes from those IP's.

  5. BillG
    WTF?

    Black Hat Amazon

    I've been running a semi-major website for the past ten years. For the past year, we have seen strange activity from Amazon web services probing our website, including weird user agents composed of random characters, non-standard URLs, and trying to access files that do not exist.

  6. VinceH

    Letters, Digits.

    I recently decided to change the email address I use with amazon.co.uk. My email settings stated no marketing emails - but when I changed the address, they started sending their weekly spamverts to the old address.

    When I complained, they said they'd stop - but didn't. In order to stop receiving the emails I had no choice to unsubscribe via the link in the email. I know I could have done that in the first place, but that's hardly the point: they simply should not have started emailing that old address.

    And they are going to offer bulk email facilities?

    Oh dear. :(

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    I hope spammers do use it...

    I hope spammers do use it - will make it easier to block all their mail.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      WTF?

      Making you pay twice!

      Amazon have done this service to allow their EC2 customers to send mail. Is it just me or if you have a server with them already surely you should be able to do that anyway at no extra cost! So effectively they are making you pay twice - once to host a server and again to send mail from that server. What's next - sell you a 'simple web service' so people can view web pages on your server?

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