AWS Simple Email Service – SES
- SES is a managed service and ideal for sending bulk emails at scale
- SES acts as an outbound email server and eliminates the need to support own software or applications to do the heavy lifting of email transport
- Existing email server can also be configure to send outgoing emails through SES with no change in any settings in the email clients
- Maximum message size including attachments is 10 MB per message (after base64 encoding).
SES Characteristics
- Compatible with SMTP
- Applications can send email using a single API call in many supported languages Java, .Net, PHP, Perl, Ruby, HTTPs etc
- Optimized for highest levels of uptime, availability and scales as per the demand
- Provides sandbox environment for testing
Sending Limits
- Production SES has a set of sending limits which include
- Sending Quota – max number of emails in 24-hour period
- Maximum Send Rate – max number of emails per second
- SES automatically adjusts the limits upward as long as emails are of high quality and they are sent in a controlled manner, as any spike in the email sent might be considered to be spams.
- Limits can also be raised by submitting a Quota increase request
SES Best Practices
- Send high-quality and real production content that your recipients want
- Only send to those who have signed up for the mail
- Unsubscribe recipients who have not interacted with the business recently
- Have low bounce and compliant rates and remove bounced or complained addresses, using SNS to monitor bounces and complaints, treating them as opt-out
- Monitor the sending activity