Amazon SES Features

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).

To get started sending email, see Sending Email in the Amazon SES Developer Guide.

Deliverability, or ensuring emails reach inboxes instead of spam or junk, is a core element of a successful email strategy. Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) offers deliverability features through Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) that make it easier and more automated to improve inbox placement.

SES provides insights into the performance of senders’ emails, makes recommendations on how to improve deliverability, and can even automatically implement email deliverability improvements for senders. SES features three core deliverability components: insights, recommended changes, and automatic implementation

Deliverability Expert Services is a program that connects customers with Amazon SES’s team of email deliverability experts. These experts help customers optimize their email delivery and engagement rates while accelerating their onboarding to Amazon SES. The service provides direct access to industry-leading experts who analyze sending patterns, build implementation strategies, and create plans to help customers improve inbox placement rates, all while helping customers learn to manage their own deliverability success.

Engaging with Deliverability Expert Services provides multiple benefits for both new and existing Amazon SES customers. For those planning to onboard to Amazon SES, the service helps achieve faster onboarding with fewer technical challenges and higher delivery rates during and after ramp-up. Existing customers benefit from increased visibility into their deliverability performance and higher delivery and engagement rates, which helps them improve their campaign ROI and creates better user experiences. Perhaps most importantly, the service helps customers build their own in-house deliverability expertise through guided learning, enabling them to take control of their deliverability performance independently.

An engagement encompasses a wide range of deliverability services tailored to customer needs. Experts provide guidance on general best practices, conduct SES account sending audits, and help resolve issues with specific mailbox providers. They assist with planning large sending events, review email templates, advise on recipient list management, and help with targeting strategies. The service includes guidance on technical aspects like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication setup, along with regular performance analysis and actionable recommendations.

Deliverability Expert Services complements existing AWS services while filling a specific niche. AWS Professional Services and AWS Managed Services don't focus on Email Deliverability improvements, AWS Support provides service troubleshooting with limited deliverability assistance, and AWS Countdown helps with cloud migrations. Deliverability Expert Services specifically focuses on email deliverability expertise, providing specialized knowledge that other AWS services don't cover.

A Deliverability Expert Services engagement follows a clear structure over a three-month period. It begins with a one-hour virtual consultation to assess the customer's needs and current situation. Throughout the engagement, customers receive direct conversation time with experts and benefit from offline research by the service team. The engagement concludes with a comprehensive report that summarizes deliverability performance and documents any improvements made during the engagement period. DES experts are available today by request, just open a ticket with AWS Support to request a DES engagement and verify regional availability.

SES’s deliverability insights 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 rates, opens, and clicks. You can see breakdowns of these metrics per ISP, sender identity, and configuration set, as well as the delivery and engagement status of each email you send.

SES can notify senders of email deliverability issues and provide actionable recommendations to help improve inbox placement, like reviewing email authentication configuration such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Senders have ongoing visibility if a downgrade in email reputation or improvement opportunity is identified.

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

Global Endpoints by Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) provides multi-region resilience for bulk senders. Global Endpoints lets customers add a secondary Region to their original configuration, streamlines the duplication of configuration values between the two Regions, and then divides sending workloads equally in a load-balanced state until either Region suffers a partial or full outage. In such cases, the traffic shifts away from the impacted Region to the other one with no customer intervention required. Once the outage is restored, traffic returns to a 50-50 split.

Once the customer has configured Global Endpoints and started sending, both chosen Regions will develop warmed-up IPs in parallel, meaning that both Regions are fully prepared to support 100% of the customer workload at any time with no delays.

Updates to the SES console mean that choosing and configuring your second Region is simplified once your first Region is production-ready. Certain parameters are duplicated into the second Region automatically, and the console provides guidance for others which the customer must configure themselves.

Global Endpoints ultimately uses two Regions for its sending, and any added features which support single-Region sending will work if enabled for both Global Endpoints Regions.

Mail Manager by Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) provides comprehensive tools that simplify managing large volumes of email communications within an organization. Mail Manager supports better handling of both incoming and outgoing emails, improving security, and ensuring compliance with data protection regulations.

Amazon SES supports all industry-standard authentication mechanisms, including Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC). When an internet service provider (ISP) receives an email, they check to see if it is authenticated before attempting to deliver it to the recipient. Authentication demonstrates to the ISP that you own the email address you are sending from.

Amazon SES also enables customers to connect an Amazon SES SMTP endpoint to a virtual private cloud (VPC) through a VPC endpoint powered by AWS PrivateLink. With this feature, customers can access the Amazon SES SMTP endpoint securely without requiring an Internet Gateway in a VPC.

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 tracks the overall email bounces and feedback loops for your account, and can 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 automatically publishes the email bounce and email sender complaint metrics from this dashboard to Amazon CloudWatch. You can use CloudWatch to create alarms that notify you when your email bounce or complaint rates reach certain thresholds. With this information, you can take immediate action on issues that could impact your sender reputation.

When you use Amazon SES to receive incoming emails, you have complete control over which emails you accept, and what to do with them after you receive them. You can accept or reject mail based on the email address, IP address, or domain of the sender. Once Amazon SES has accepted the 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 makes it easy 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.