1
They're permanently (I waited over a month) sending all emails from a shared Amazon SES IP range to spam because 0.3% of users who received an email from that IP marked it as spam instead of unsubscribing... I can't believe they think that is a reasonable thing to do... People were taught for years to mark emails as spam instead of unsubscribing since unsubscribing can confirm your email to spammers. 1% of people may also simply be dumb, or may be sabotaging your business on purpose. Making such a drastic decision based on less than half of 1% of email recipients seems ridiculous.
They're allowing the 1% lowest common denominator to determine what the other 99% are allowed to see.
"60% of the population have an IQ under 85; this is not a small issue." - Richard Haier https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/IQ_distribution.svg/1024px-IQ_distribution.svg.png
"Too many people are ignorant or rude or both and use the SPAM button as a convenient way to organize their email" https://support.google.com/mail/thread/6901723/
I've done everything in my power to highlight the option to unsubscribe instead of mark an email as spam, including the ridiculous step of opening the email with "You're receiving this email because of xyz. Please blocklist your email if you don't want any more" instead of "Hi, here are the details of an important update".
For years, I've been responding to people who applied via a google form on our website (1.2+ million at this point). When simply sending a first email telling them "you did or did not qualify", the Amazon SES complaint rate has always averaged between 0.3% and 0.5%, and the Google Postmaster rate always jumps between 0%-2%. There's nothing that can be done to bring the rates down besides sending people unnecessary emails in order to lower the average. So sending people actual spam is the only way to decrease the spam rate below that extremely low level...
There are times when 50% of my *incoming* [gmail] emails go to spam. When I contacted Outlook about this their response went to my Outlook junk folder.
Their spam filters are horrible and they don't seem to care at all. And it's causing major problems with a majority of people missing important emails. Eg: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/02/a-spam-folder-may-have-foiled-andretti-cadillacs-f1-entry/
Yahoo said I should request a better IP pool from Amazon SES. I said:
Amazon SES does not have an option to "request a better IP pool". Asking them to assign another IP pool to my account doesn't seem like a valid solution anyway. There's no reason to believe that their other IP pools aren't experiencing the same problem, or will experience the same problem at any given point. I'm very surprised that your system is this unsophisticated. I should be able to use Amazon SES without all my emails going to spam.
I searched Hacker News and found loads of other people with the same problem https://hn.algolia.com/?q=email+spam
I found a way to submit bulk mail appeals to Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc. (https://www.emailtooltester.com/en/blog/why-are-my-emails-going-to-spam/). I think my appeal to Gmail worked (had to wait a few weeks), but Outlook and Yahoo basically just told me "Too bad, your IP pool is bad".
When I was looking into wiki/documentation site options, I found *Static Site Generators* (SSG), which create static websites that are *free to host* with netlify, github pages, Cloudflare pages, etc. They have templates and features built-in so you can often just create some markdown files and they're quickly transformed into a beautiful, fast, secure, free website. You often don't need technical knowledge/expertise, but you can customize them further if you have that.
https://jamstack.org/generators/ has a list of them. *MKDocs Material theme* is pretty elaborate and popular for hosting *documentation/wikis*. If you compare it to bookstackapp.com for example, *bookstack* requires paid hosting since it's not static, and requires much more technical expertise to get running and to customize. I find MKdocs Material to be pretty user/noob-friendly, with good documentation and easy customization. Other SSGs can require a lot more technical knowledge or be less easily-customizable.
But MKDocs Material doesn't seem great for a general business website. After learning about SSGs I realized that my Squarespace site is all static content and should be replaceable with an SSG. I've been *trying to find an SSG that's as good for general sites as MKDocs Material is for wikis*.
# Comparisons:
- https://medium.com/@nampara17/whats-the-best-cms-for-static-websites-12364ab911ef
- https://teleporthq.io/blog/popular-static-site-generators
- https://tiiny.host/blog/10-best-cms-static-sites/
- https://www.sitepoint.com/community/t/static-site-generators-a-beginners-guide/321745
*Hugo, Gatsby, Eleventy (11ty), and Astro* are the main ones I see recommended for noobies. They all have themes or "starter projects" you can use as templates. The difficulty is finding a theme/template that's as good for a regular website as MKDocs Material is for documentation/wikis.
For example Jekyll has tons -- https://jekyllrb.com/docs/themes/, and it would be difficult to browse through and test all of them. I happened to come across this one -- https://mmistakes.github.io/minimal-mistakes/about/ -- which looks quite good for both documentation and general sites, but the search cannot find links (_which is important for my documentation site_).
I found a Hugo theme that seemed good but the dev wasn't active on github and people were having unanswered problems.
*Middleman* is another SSG that sounds good, but their theme page doesn't have any pictures or quick links to demo sites, so it would be even more difficult to check them all out.
And looking into them more, I'm told that *Astro* requires javascript, CSS, and html knowledge. *Eleventy* (11ty) also requires JS and HTML coding. And *Gatsby* doesn't look that simple either https://www.sitepoint.com/gatsby-guide/.
*Publii* (static site CMS) was recommended as noob-friendly but it's extremely limited. I didn't like it at all.
*TeleportHQ* is MUCH better than Publii, but it's not intuitive or easy enough to use to be a good replacement for Squarespace IMO.
*Plasmic, Webflow, and Couch CMS* seem to be similar options.
_(Hit character limit; continued in comments)_
Oh wow, there's no formatting...