Quoting "Kevin" <kevin@fuber.org>

For an announce feature i would farm that out to something like mailchimp or similar.

Probably. It was my first thought.

EC2 is distrusted thanks to the fairly frequent spam coming out of it.

It looks as Amazon is working with Spamhaus and others to whitelist if you use an Elastic IP. An Elastic IP costs nothing as it runs but 1 cent per hour if you do not use it ($7.20 a month), if I understand correctly. That seems to be the cost of my switched-off system then. Part of this is trying Amazon. Until now I could not see a case (for me) that I really save costs compared to other solutions (in-house, hosting etc). This one looked like it - but as I find out it has costs that were not obvious to me when I started. Upside: I am not locked in. I can walk away from it when I want. Anyway, bulk e-mail is a dodgy business so I understand why Amazon wants to restrict it. (BTW: I don't want to send spam - in case you wonder) Regards Peter