Amazon Simple Email Service Documentation

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable email service with flexible IP deployment and email authentication options.

Amazon SES offers several methods of sending email, including the Amazon SES console, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) interface, and the Amazon SES API. You can access the API using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or by using an AWS Software Development Kit (SDK).

Amazon SES offers deliverability features through Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM), designed to provide insights into the performance of senders’ emails, make recommendations on how to improve deliverability, and automatically implement email deliverability improvements for senders. 

SES’s deliverability insights is designed to help email senders understand their deliverability performance. View at-a-glance reports on sending and delivery data in a single interface in the SES console, such as bounce rate, opens, clicks and deliverability at ISP and configuration levels.

SES is designed to notify senders of deliverability issues and provide actionable recommendations to help improve email deliverability, like reviewing email authentication configuration such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. 

Senders have the option to allow SES to automatically implement deliverability updates, like optimizing email delivery patterns. Once SES detects an opportunity for improvement, the system is designed to implement the change without the need for monitoring or manual adjustment.

By default, Amazon SES is designed to send email from IP addresses that are shared with other Amazon SES customers. Shared addresses are an option for customers who want to start sending emails quickly with established IPs. They are included in the base Amazon SES pricing, and their reputations are monitored.

Customers can manage their own IP reputations by leasing dedicated IP addresses for use with their Amazon SES account. Customers can use the dedicated IP pools feature in SES console to create pools of those IP addresses, and either send all traffic from these dedicated IPs or use configuration sets to align specific use cases to specific IPs. Tailored for different customer use cases and sending patterns, SES offers two different ways to implement and manage dedicated IP addresses:

• Standard - dedicated IP addresses that customers manually setup and manage. SES provides known IP addresses for leases.
  
• Managed - dedicated IP address that are automatically set up and managed by SES on your behalf, designed to help optimize customers’ cost and usage. 
  

Amazon SES also supports Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP). This feature lets you use a range of IP addresses that you already own to send email with Amazon SES. This is designed to help customers leverage current investments and migrate from other email service providers.

Amazon SES supports authentication mechanisms including Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC). 

Amazon SES is also designed to enable customers to connect an Amazon SES SMTP endpoint to a virtual private cloud (VPC) through a VPC endpoint powered by AWS PrivateLink. 

Amazon SES provides a few methods for monitoring email sending activity such as the numbers of sends, deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, complaints, and rejections. This data is shared by default in the Sending Statistics report in the Amazon SES console. Sending data can also be stored in an Amazon Simple Storage Solution (Amazon S3) bucket or an Amazon Redshift database, and sent to Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Simple Notification System (Amazon SNS), or Amazon Kinesis Firehose based on characteristics you define.

The Amazon SES console includes a reputation dashboard that you can use to track issues that could impact the delivery of your emails. This dashboard is designed to track the overall bounce and feedback loops for your account, and can help inform you when other deliverability-impacting events occur, such as spamtrap hits, references to blocked domains in your emails, and reports from reputable anti-spam organizations.

Amazon SES is designed to automatically publish the bounce and complaint metrics from this dashboard to Amazon CloudWatch. You can use CloudWatch to create alarms that notify you when your bounce or complaint rates reach certain thresholds. 

When you use Amazon SES to receive incoming emails, you can choose which emails you accept, and what to do with them after you receive them using receipt rules and IP address filters. Once Amazon SES has accepted an email, you can store it in an Amazon S3 bucket, execute custom code using an AWS Lambda function, or publish notifications to Amazon SNS.

The Amazon SES mailbox simulator is designed to help make it easier to test how your application handles certain scenarios, such as bounces or complaints, without impacting your sender reputation. Using the mailbox simulator is as easy as sending a test email to a specific address. You can use the mailbox simulator to simulate successful deliveries, hard bounces, out-of-office responses or feedback.

For additional information about service controls, security features and functionalities, including, as applicable, information about storing, retrieving, modifying, restricting, and deleting data, please see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html. This additional information does not form part of the Documentation for purposes of the AWS Customer Agreement available at http://aws.amazon.com/agreement, or other agreement between you and AWS governing your use of AWS’s services.