Can I use multiple AWS Accounts with SES?

• You need to send from more than 1000 verified identities.
• You send several different streams of email with distinctly different content and you want to separate them completely for billing or other reasons.
• You send on behalf of several different clients, and you want to keep their sending separate.
• You want to use both dedicated IPs and shared IPs for your sending, or you are in the process of transitioning from shared IPs to dedicated IPs.

In these types of cases, and some others, sending from multiple AWS accounts may be a good way for you to use SES.  If you are going to do so, keep the following in mind:

1. Generally, you should request production access for one account at a time.  Once one account is fully established and sending mail, request production access for the next account.  If you request production access for multiple accounts at once, you will need to provide a detailed explanation about what you are trying to do, since we don’t have the history of any of the accounts to judge anything by.
2. Each time you request production access for an additional account, include a full explanation (in the use case field of our form) of why you need to use multiple accounts instead of continuing to use the account(s) you already have. We’re going to ask for it anyhow if you leave it out, so you are better off just making sure to include the information up front.
3. Each time you request production access for an additional account beyond the second account, we will look at the sending from existing accounts to make sure the content on each existing account is clearly different from the others. SES’s expectation is that each AWS account should be sending a clearly distinct stream of email. Why?  Well, we want to make sure people aren’t just splitting their sending between many separate accounts to try to avoid detection of bad sending patterns.  If we find that the email being sent from the existing accounts looks similar in nature, we will ask you if you can please consolidate your existing sending before you request production access for additional accounts. If there is a significant reason why the content needs to be the same across multiple accounts, you can reply and explain it to us. After we review we will let you know whether we’ve made an exception and granted you production access to the new account.  If you know the content looks similar, save yourself the back and forth and just explain it to us in the use case section of the production access form to begin with.
4. If any existing account is on probation, we will not grant additional accounts until that situation is resolved.
5. If any of the accounts gets shut down for bad sending practices, it puts the sending status of the other accounts at risk if they are engaging in similar practices, even if they haven’t yet triggered our alarms separately.

As you may have noticed above, there are a couple places where we might reply to your production access requests with a request for more information.  If that is our response, it is important to remember that we are not denying you production access on the new account, we are just asking for more information before we make a decision.

If you keep all of these things in mind, you should be able to send successfully with SES through multiple AWS accounts.