Amazon SES Functionality

Amazon SES lets you send bulk and transactional email to customers in a quick and cost-effective manner. To use Amazon SES you simply:

• Sign Up: After signing up, you can access the Amazon SES sandbox – an environment specifically designed for developers to test and evaluate the service.
• Verify Domains or Email Addresses: Before you can send email via Amazon SES, you need to verify that you own the domain or address from which you’ll be sending email. To start the verification process, visit the AWS Management Console.
• Request Production Access: Once you are ready to use Amazon SES to send email, you request production access. This will allow you to move from the sandbox environment to the production environment and begin sending email to your customers. It only takes a few minutes to apply for production access, and you usually receive a response within 24 hours.
• Send Email: You can easily use SMTP or one of two different APIs to queue an email message for delivery.
• Get Feedback: Amazon SES provides useful statistics about your sending activities. With a simple query or AWS Management Console visit, you can quickly obtain vital statistics such as volume sent, bounces and complaints. You can also receive simulated email responses by sending to Amazon SES Mailbox Simulator email addresses.

Service Highlights

Simple – Amazon SES eliminates the complexity of licensing, installing, and operating a third-party service, or building and maintaining an internally hosted email solution. Sending email through Amazon SES is as simple as using SMTP or calling an API, and Amazon SES makes it easy for you to monitor your sending activity and deliverability statistics.

Inexpensive – There are no up-front fees or fixed expenses with Amazon SES, and you benefit from the efficiencies of Amazon’s scale. Your only costs are low charges for the number of emails sent and data transfer fees.

Reliable – Amazon SES runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters. All outgoing email messages are stored redundantly across multiple servers and datacenters, providing high availability and data durability.

Scalable – Amazon SES is based on the scalable technology used by Amazon web sites around the world to send billions of messages a year.

Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – You can track your bounces and complaints in Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), and you can set up Easy DKIM or verify any domain you administer via Amazon Route 53 with a few clicks of your mouse. There is also a free usage tier for emails originating from Amazon EC2 and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

Pricing

Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee.

Email Messages*

• Email messages are charged at $0.10 per thousand.

Data Transfer

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon SES. Data transferred between Amazon SES and Amazon EC2 within a single region is free of charge. Data transferred between Amazon SES and Amazon EC2 in different regions will be charged at Internet Data Transfer rates on both sides of the transfer.

Attachments

• $0.12 per GB of attachments sent.

Deliverability

The term deliverability refers to the likelihood that an email message you send will actually arrive at its intended destination.

It is an unfortunate fact that a very large percentage of global email traffic is spam - unsolicited or undesired bulk email. ISPs are equipped with automated filters to detect email messages that appear to be spam, and prevent these messages from being delivered. Most email messages that you send over the Internet are scanned by one or more ISP, each of which has its own spam filters in place. Spam filters are not perfect: even if your email is legitimate, an ISP's spam filter could still falsely identify it as spam, and block it.

When deciding whether to deliver an email, one factor that ISPs consider is where the email originated. If an IP address or domain has a history of sending spam, then the ISP may block delivery from either or both.

Amazon SES takes proactive steps to prevent questionable content from being sent, so that ISPs receive consistently high-quality email and therefore view the service as a trusted email origin. This maximizes deliverability and dependability for all of our senders. Below are some of the safeguards in place:

• ISPs often interpret a sudden increase in email volume as a potential indicator of spam activity, and may respond by blocking such email. To help you avoid this pitfall, Amazon SES automatically “ramps up” the volume of email that you can send from the service until you reach your target volume. (See Detailed Description section for more information).
• Amazon SES uses content filtering technologies to help detect and block messages containing spam or malware before they can be sent.
• Amazon SES maintains complaint feedback loops from major ISPs. Complaint feedback loops indicate which emails a recipient marked as spam. Amazon SES provides you access to these delivery metrics (for your email campaigns) to help guide your sending strategy.

In addition to the steps that Amazon SES takes, you can also configure your sending to use Easy DKIM, where Amazon SES will DKIM-sign your email on your behalf. This industry-standard method, which is accepted by most ISPs, aligns your email reputation with your domain reputation.

Resources

Detailed Description

Managing Amazon SES

Amazon SES can be easily managed through the AWS Management Console which gives users a point-and-click, web-based interface to setup and manage Amazon SES. You can view sending limits, send test messages, set up bounce and complaint notifications, manage verified domains and email addresses, set up Easy DKIM, and more. All of these features are also available via the API, so you can choose whichever method works best for you.

Using Amazon SES with Other Amazon Web Services

Amazon SES integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, such as Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon SNS, and Amazon Route 53.

AWS recommends Amazon SES as the preferred solution for Amazon EC2 users who need to send email. You can add email capabilities to any application running on an EC2 instance, using the AWS Software Development Kits (SDKs) or the Amazon SES API.

You can easily create an email-enabled application using AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Amazon SES. For example, you can write an application that accesses a list of customer addresses, and then uses Amazon SES to send a newsletter to each customer. The AWS SDK for Java provides access to the Amazon SES API, so all of your AWS Elastic Beanstalk applications can send email with a simple API call.

Amazon SES will pass your bounce and complaint notifications to Amazon SNS topics that you specify. These are set according to verified email addresses and domains and can be configured via the AWS Management Console or via the Amazon SES APIs.

When you use the AWS Management Console to verify or set up Easy DKIM on a domain that you manage with Amazon Route 53 in Amazon SES, you can automatically generate the record sets for that domain. This eliminates the need to manually add a TXT record for domain verification or CNAME records for DKIM-signing.

Email Sending Statistics

Amazon SES automatically collects statistics regarding your sending activity:

• Successful delivery attempts
• Rejected messages
• Bounces
• Complaints

Sending Volume

Every Amazon SES sender has a unique set of sending limits, which are calculated by Amazon SES on an ongoing basis:

• Sending quota – the maximum number of emails you can send in a 24 hour period.
• Maximum send rate – the maximum number of emails you can send per second.

Once you have been granted production access to Amazon SES, you are immediately able to send up to 10,000 emails per 24-hour period. After you start sending email via Amazon SES, Amazon SES will automatically increase your sending limits as you continue to send greater quantities of high-quality email. You can query your current sending quota at any time by checking the Amazon SES tab of the AWS Management Console or making a call to the GetSendQuota API. If you need to send more volume per day than your current sending quota, please contact Amazon Web Services and we will evaluate your request promptly.

For more information on sending limits, including strategies on how to migrate your existing email sending to SES, see the Amazon SES Developer Guide.

Intended Usage and Restrictions

Your use of this service is subject to the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement.