Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is a cloud-based email service for sending both transactional and mass emails. Amazon SES is an email tool that also supports a variety of deployments including dedicated, shared, or owned IP addresses. To know about SNS refer to the Simple Notification Service (SNS) in AWS.
Steps To Set Up Aws SES For Email Sending
Step 1: Go to the AWS console and search for SES service Click on “Create Identity” – It is to verify the email address through which we are going to send an email. To Know how to create an AWS free tier account refer to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Free Tier Account Set up.
Step 2: Select Email address or domain option and type email/domain you want to verify and click on create identity.
Step 3: You will get “verification pending” as summary for email address.Go to Mailbox and verify that link .Once verified, it will be visible in Verified Identities section .
Step 4: Click on email address checkbox and select “send test email”When clicked on”send test email” one form will open to email format as Raw select Scenario as Custom and custom recipient as receiver’s email address and type message in body and click on send test email
Note:
Both sender and receiver’s email address or domain needs to be verified first as Verified Identity.Then only you can send emails.
How to Track Email Delivery With Amazon SES?
Amazon SES provides methods to monitor your sending activity using events, metrics, and statistics.
- Event : An event is something that happens related to your sending activity that you’ve specified to be tracked as a metric.
- Metric: A metric represents a time-ordered set of data points representing the values of a monitored event type producing statistics.
- Statistics: Statistics are metric data aggregations for a specified period of time including up to the present.
These are the events which track email delivery:
- Send: The send request was successful and Amazon SES will attempt to deliver the message to the recipient’s mail server.
- RenderingFailure: The email wasn’t sent because of a template rendering issue. This event type can occur when template data is missing, or when there is a mismatch between template parameters and data.
- Reject: Amazon SES accepted the email, but determined that it contained a virus and didn’t attempt to deliver it to the recipient’s mail server.
- Delivery: Amazon SES successfully delivered the email to the recipient’s mail server.
- Bounce: A hard bounce that the recipient’s mail server permanently rejected the email.
- Complaint: The email was successfully delivered to the recipient’s mail server, but the recipient marked it as spam.
- DeliveryDelay: The email couldn’t be delivered to the recipient’s mail server because a temporary issue occurred. Delivery delays can occur, for example, when the recipient’s inbox is full, or when the receiving email server experiences a transient issue.
- Subscription: The email was successfully delivered, but the recipient updated the subscription preferences by clicking List-Unsubscribe in the email header or the Unsubscribe link in the footer.
- Open: The recipient received the message and opened it in their email client.
- Click: The recipient clicked one or more links in the email.
How to Configure Amazon SES For High Deliverability
For High deliver ability, first understand issues which we face on email delivery and configure SES .
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Bounce
- If your recipient’s receiver (for example, an email provider) fails to deliver your message to the recipient, the receiver bounces the message back to Amazon SES.
- Hard Bounce: A persistent email delivery failure. For example, the mailbox does not exist.
- Soft Bounce: A temporary email delivery failure. For example, the mailbox is full, there are too many connections, or the connection times out.
- Amazon SES notifies you of hard bounces and soft bounces that will no longer be retried.
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Complaint
- For those emails marked as spam ,if the email provider concludes that you are a spammer, and Amazon SES has a feedback loop set up with the email provider, then the email provider will send the complaint back to Amazon SES.
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Be Proactive
- Amazon SES uses verification, authentication, sending quotas, and content filtering. Amazon SES also maintains a trusted reputation with email providers and requires you to send high-quality email.
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Verification
- To maintain trust between email providers and Amazon SES, Amazon SES needs to ensure that its senders are who they say they are. You are therefore required to verify all email addresses from which you send emails through Amazon SES to protect your sending identity. You can verify email addresses by using the Amazon SES console or by using the Amazon SES API.
Advantages Of Amazon SES
- High deliverability and reliability along with high sending rates
- No need for additional maintenance once you have all set up
- Best quality to price ratio
- A comprehensive set of tools for both email receiving and further management
Disadvantages Of Amazon SES
- A complicated initial configuration.
- Initial limitations before you get approved and verify your sending domains. You need to correctly configure Amazon SES and expand your limits by submitting requests.
- Amazon SES is a simple sending service, not a marketing platform.
- In addition to the previous point, Amazon SES doesn’t provide you with an email list storage.
Best Practices to use Amazon SES
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Compliance:
- Be aware of the email marketing and anti-spam laws and regulations in the countries and regions you send email to.
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Authentication:
- Authenticate your domain with Sender ID. These authentication methods confirm to email recipients that each email you send is actually from the domain it claims to be from.
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Domain and “From” address consideration:
- Consider using subdomains for different types of communications. For example , instead of example.com, use marketing.example.com and trading.example.com for two different scope.
- Avoid using a no-reply address, such as no-reply@example.com, so portrays as user is not interested in taking feedback.
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Building and maintaining list:
- Implement a double opt-in strategy. When users sign up to receive email from you, send them a message with a confirmation link, and do not start sending them email until they confirm their address by clicking that link.
FAQs On Amazon SES For Email Sending
1. Can I End Emails From Any Email Address?
No. You can only use Amazon SES to send email from addresses or domains that you own.
2. Is There A Limit On The Size Of Emails Amazon Ses Can Deliver?
Amazon SES v2 API and SMTP accepts email messages up to 40MB in size including any images and attachments .
3. Can Amazon SES Send Emails With Attachments?
Amazon SES supports many popular content formats, including documents, images, audio, and video.