Amazon SES

Amazon SES, or Simple Email Service, is a cloud-based platform that facilitates the effortless sending of transactional and mass emails. It enables organizations to reach recipients without manual intervention, reducing the risk of emails being marked as spam. Additionally, SES allows integration with SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), enhancing email delivery capabilities and ensuring reliable communication.

Key Features

• Supports various email formats such as Plain text, HTML, and MIME, with attachments.
• Monitor open rates, click-through rates, bounces, and more.
• Integrate SES with your applications for programmatic control using SES API.
• Handles millions of emails per day with ease, making it ideal for mass email campaigns.

Quotas

Sandbox Account (Default or Free Account)

• The user can only send 1 email/s and 200 emails/day.
• The user can only send emails from/to verified identities/users.
• If users want to send emails to unverified users, they should shift to a Production Account, refer to this article.
• Maximum message size (MB) of 10 for the maximum message size that you can send.

SMTP

The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages.

To know more about SMTP read this article.

Steps To Send Emails using AWS SES:

Step 1: Go to the AWS console and search for SES.

Step 2:

• From the left menu go to Verified Identities.
• From here you can verify sender/receiver emails to send/receive emails. If you do not verify the email address, you can’t use the email to perform any action on SES.
• Press Create Identity.

Step 3:

• Add your email address/domain
• Hit the Create Identity button at the bottom.

Step 4: Now, a verification email will be sent to the email address you used to create the identity. Click the link in the email to verify your email.

Skip to STEP 8 if you don’t want to connect the SES server to your backend.

Step 5: This is not a necessary step do it if you want to connect your backend to the Amazon SES server to send emails.

• From the left menu select SMTP settings.
• Create SMTP credentials.

Step 6: Add a User name and Create a User.

Step 7: Note done or download your credentials.

Step 8:

• From the left menu go to Verified Identities.
• Check if your email address is verified or not.
• To send a test email to your other email address press Send test email.

Step 9:

• Select Scenario as Custom which will allow you to send emails to others custom email addresses.
• Remember if you put any unverified email address this will not work, to test you can send this to yourself or just add another email address and verify it.
• Add Subject and Body for your email.

Step 8: Check your mailbox for your test email.

Step 9: Let’s try once more sending it to another verified email address.

Note: I’ve verified other mail to test this. You can follow Steps 1-3 again to verify other email addresses.

Sent Test 2 Mail

Step 10: Check your other mailbox for your test email.

Test 2 Mail

Advantages

1. Cost-effective: SES is one of the most cost-effective ways to send emails as AWS charges based on the number of emails sent there are no additional costs.
2. Security: It uses multiple layers of security to protect email data such as encryption, access controls, and spam and phishing filters.
3. Scalability: It can handle large volumes of email messages which makes it a perfect way for businesses that need to send out mass emails.

Disadvantages

1. Limited customization: It offers a wide range of features, but it doesn’t offer the same level of customization as some other email services.
2. Potential for delivery issues: There is always a small chance that your emails will not be delivered, due to the recipient’s spam filters.
3. Reputation management: If you send out too many emails or they are marked as spam, your reputation with SES can be damaged.

Use cases

1. Transactional emails: Emails that are triggered by an event, such as a password reset email or a purchase confirmation email.
2. Marketing campaigns: It can be used to send out newsletters, promotional emails, and other marketing content.
3. Notifications: SES can be used to send out notifications to users, such as system alerts or appointment reminders.

Applications

1. Netflix: They use SES to send out a variety of emails, like password reset emails, billing reminders, and movie recommendations.
2. Dropbox: They use SES to send out file-sharing notifications, account verification emails, and password reset emails.
3. GitHub: They use SES to send out notification emails, such as pull request updates and issue notifications

Conclusion

We’ve successfully set up AWS SES service to send mail and also created SMTP credentials to connect the SES server to your application backend.

FAQs on Amazon SES

1. What are the different types of emails that I can send with SES?

You can send plain text, HTML, and MIME emails with SES.

2. How much does SES cost?

SES charges based on the number of emails you send and what type of account you are using.

3. How can I track my Amazon SES usage?

You can view your charges for the current billing period at any time by visiting the Billing Dashboard in the AWS Management Console.

4. Can I send emails from any email address?

No, you can only use Amazon SES to send email from addresses or domains that you own.