Amazon SES is an email service among virtual servers, AI apps, and libraries. Ideally, you can integrate your email system with your program hosted on Amazon.

This post explains how Amazon SES differs from other email systems, and how it may be set up and integrated into your architecture.

Amazon SES Definition

It is a cloud-based email service for mailing commercial and bulk emails. Amazon SES allows for numerous implementations: Software like email clients or other electronic mail can be integrated with AWS SDKs.

Why use Amazon SES?

Amazon SES offers a cost-effective, robust framework. Amazon's prices are pretty reasonable with alternative solutions. Its most frequently noted benefit is in customer feedback.

Amazon SES features

  • Deliverability rate is an essential aspect to consider when selecting an email provider. Amazon values reputation and whitelisting by allowing all three methods (DKIM, SPF, and DMARC). You may also track your shipments and monitor your rating.
  • Personalization of content with tags.
  • With Amazon SES, you may send and receive emails. You can use the received information as a prompt in AWS Lambda in this situation.

What is it used for?

Amazon SES is most commonly used to enhance other AWS mail hosting services. Integrations with Amazon CloudWatch, AWS EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS IAM, AWS Lambda, Amazon Route 53, Amazon S3, and AWS WorkMail are seamless.

You can send up to 62,000 mails each month for free if your app is hosted in Amazon EC.

So, if you run your app on Amazon EC2 to send email and need to send emails in bulk, Amazon SES is a good option. But there are email sending limitations you need to know about.

Setting up Amazon SES

Step 1: Create an AWS account if you are new to AWS. You must register with a credit card, but you will not be charged unless you use paid services. Start with a free subscription and get all Amazon services.

Step 2: Open the AWS Management Console and select Simple Email Service.

Step 3: Check email addresses. Yes, it is a nuisance, but it is related to security and high deliverability. Verify all email identities.

Then you can start sending emails from that address. But start in a sandbox. So you can send:

  • emails to certified domains or Amazon SES mailbox simulator
  • 200 texts each day at 1 per second

Step 4: After completing verification, reviewing AWS definitions, and understanding how it works, you can proceed to email sending.

Lastly, you have to carry out email testing. You need to test for:

  • Successful delivery
  • Bounce
  • Hard bounce (recipient address is on suppression list)
  • Automatic responses
  • Complaint

Application

It's compatible with WordPress. You have two choices for sending notifications or newsletters via Amazon SES:

  • Installing a plugin approach. If you search for "Amazon SMTP" in WordPress, you will find many results. We propose WP Mail SMTP, which integrates seamlessly with Amazon SES.
  • A code snippet is a more technical choice. WordPress supports SMTP because it is based on PHP.

Pricing

Amazon's "pay for what you use" principle holds.

Over 62,000 emails will cost $0.1 per 1,000 plus $0.12 every GB of attachments.

For apps not hosted on Amazon servers, the fee is $0.1 per 1,000 emails sent + $0.12 for every GB of attachments.

Paying begins with the first message sent. So 10,000 emails with no files attached will cost you only $1. If each message has a 1 MB attachment, your price will be $1.18. The limit is 10MBs. That's up to $3 per 10,000 emails, no monthly fees!

A dedicated IP address for additional security costs $24.95 per month.

Reasons to use SES (and some reasons not to)

Pros

  • Superior products to price ratio
  • High transmit rates with excellent deliverability and reliability
  • No extra maintenance is required once set up.
  • A complete collection of email reception and management tools

Cons

  • A convoluted start-up. The documentation is quite thorough and inadequate, which is required when working with a new service.
  • Limitations before approval and verification of sending domains. You must correctly configure Amazon SES and request more limits.
  • Amazon SES is not a marketing platform. It lacks templates.
  • Amazon SES does not provide email list storage.

Alternatives to AWS SES

  • Pepipost is an affordable email sending service that can be incorporated via API or SMTP relay.
  • Mailgun is a developer-friendly email service that you can integrate through API or SMTP. It also manages and validates email lists. Mailgun is substantially more expensive than Amazon SES.
  • MailSlurp , a fully featured developer email service. It has an REST and GraphQL API, various official client libraries, and SMTP and a platform for promotional emails.

Bottom line

Amazon web hosing email is a valuable, low-cost email service. Although it takes time, effort, and technical understanding. Amazon SES has few marketing options, but that's by design. This guide was created to help you choose and explore Amazon SES. We hope it has helped and now you know how to send an email to Amazon.