Building a large-scale email solution can be a complex and costly challenge for a business: you have to build your infrastructure, configure your network, warm up your IP addresses and protect your sender reputation. Many third-party email solutions require contract negotiations and significant up-front costs.
Amazon SES eliminates these challenges, allowing you to start sending email in minutes. You benefit from the years of experience and the sophisticated email infrastructure Amazon.com built to serve its own large-scale customer base.
Sender Configuration 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).
To get started sending email, see Sending Email in the Amazon SES Developer Guide.
Flexible Deployment Options
Shared IP Addresses
By default, Amazon SES sends email from IP addresses that are shared with other Amazon SES customers. Shared addresses are a great option for many customers who want to start sending immediately with established IPs. They are included in the base Amazon SES pricing, and their reputations are carefully monitored to ensure high deliverability.
Dedicated IP Addresses
For customers that want to manage their own IP reputation, you can lease dedicated IP addresses to use with your Amazon SES account. You can also use the dedicated IP pools feature to create pools of those IP addresses. Customers can either send all traffic from these dedicated IPs or use configuration sets to align specific use cases to specific IPs.
Owned IP Addresses
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 makes leveraging current investments and migrating from other email service providers easy.
Sender Identity Management and Security
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.
Sending Statistics
Amazon SES provides a few methods for monitoring your email sending activity, helping you fine-tune your email sending strategy. Amazon SES can capture information about the entire email response funnel, including 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. Use the Global suppression list to remove bounced emails from your sending list, or configure your own account-level suppression list. Sending data can be stored in an Amazon S3 bucket or an Amazon Redshift database, sent to Amazon SNS for real-time notifications, or analyzed using Amazon Kinesis Analytics.
Reputation Dashboard
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 bounce 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 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. With this information, you can take immediate action on issues that could impact your sender reputation.
Deliverability Dashboard
The Deliverability Dashboard (via the SES API v2) helps you understand and remediate issues that could impact the delivery of your emails, such as suboptimal email content, and attempting to email users who have unsubscribed or bounced in the past.
Email Receiving
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.
Mailbox Simulator
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.
Get started building with Amazon SES in the AWS Management Console.