What is Amazon Simple Email Service?
Amazon Simple Email Service is a reliable and scalable email platform that lets you send and receive email on behalf of your AWS Services for your own purposes.
You can easily set up Amazon SES quickly by configuring users in Identity management and SMTP settings for Email sending. IP deployment flexibility and email authentication options offered by Amazon help increase email deliverability while protecting your reputation.
Table of Contents
- Manage Identities
- Sending statistics
- Amazon SES Metrics
- Dedicated IPs
- Configuration Sets
- SMTP Settings
- Suppression List Removal
- Cross Account Notification
- Email Templates
- Conclusion
In this Howto, we will see how a domain and email address are added for safe sending in Amazon SMS, and how we can customize our SMTP settings for our configuration.
Manage Identities
In this section, we are verifying domain and email addresses for Amazon SMS safe sending. Also, send a test email & configure email sending settings in Identity Management.
Step 1: Verifying a new domain
Sign in to your AWS Management Console and open Amazon SES. Choose Domains in the left navigation pane.
Click Verify a New Domain.
Provide the domain name in the box, and enable Generate DKIM settings. Then click Verify this domain. Enabling Generate DKIM settings provides you with proof that the email originates only from your domain, and is genuine.
Amazon SES verifies your domain by allowing you to add a TXT record as given below. Similarly for DKIM verification, you are required to add three CNAME records as given below. Do check with your domain registrar to add these records correctly.
After adding these records to your domain registrar control panel, Amazon SES verifies your domain and DKIM settings and shows them as verified. Now your domain is enabled for sending emails using Amazon SES.
Step 2: Verifying email address
In this step, we are adding email addresses to use in Amazon SES for email sending.
Click Verify a New Email Address for adding a new email address.
Provide a valid email address, which belongs to the verified domain in the previous step in the provided box and click Verify This Email Address.
A test email will be sent to the given email address for verification. This test email has the verification link, and you can complete the verification by clicking the link on that email.
After completing the verification process, you can see the status as verified under Email address identities. Now you can use this email address for sending using Amazon SES
Sending statistics
Amazon SES Sending Limits
When you include a new email address for SES, you will be allowed to send 200 emails per day. But you can increase the sending limit by requesting AWS support, and the sending limit will be increased to 5000 emails per day. This setting is unique to each region, so you need to submit an increase request for each region separately. Here, you can monitor the number of email messages sent per day.
Amazon SES Metrics
Amazon SES Metrics charts show the number of emails delivered, as well as the rejection, bounce, and complaint rates for your account. These charts display data for the past two weeks, aggregated daily. You can change the Rejects, Bounces, and Complaints charts to display a number instead of a percentage. You can also click any chart to view it in a larger window and to change the aggregation settings.
Dedicated IPs
By default, Amazon SES sends your email from Amazon SES IP addresses (IPs) that are shared with other Amazon SES customers. At an extra cost, you can reserve IPs dedicated to your exclusive use.
Dedicated IPs enable you to:
- Fully control your email sending reputation
- Isolate the reputation of your separate mail streams
- Use a set of known, unchanging IP addresses for whitelisting or security purposes
You have to raise a ticket to the AWS support to get a dedicated IP for your SMS service if required.
Configuration Sets
Amazon SES enables you to publish email sending events (bounces, complaints, deliveries, sent emails, and rejected emails) to Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Kinesis Firehose.
To get started, you first set up one or more configuration sets. A configuration setting specifies where to publish your events and which events to publish.
Then, each time you send an email, you provide the name of the configuration set, and one or more message tags in the form of name/value pairs, to categorize the email. Depending on which email sending interface you use, you either provide the message tag as a parameter to the API call or as an Amazon SES-specific email header. You need to create a separate configuration set to implement this step.
SMTP Settings
You can send email through Amazon SES by using applications or programming languages that use the SMTP protocol. To send an email by using the SMTP interface, you need the following information:
- Server Name: email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com ( This server name will differ depending on your SES service created region )
- Port:25, 465 or 587
- Use Transport Layer Security (TLS): Yes
- Authentication: Your SMTP credentials. See below for more information.
To send email using the Amazon SES SMTP interface, you first have to create a set of SMTP credentials. Your SMTP credentials are the user name and password that you use to connect to an Amazon SES SMTP endpoint. SMTP credentials are unique to each AWS Region. If you want to send email in more than one Region, you have to generate a unique set of credentials for each Region.
To obtain SMTP credentials for the current Region, choose to Create My SMTP Credentials, and this will let you create a user in IAM for SMTP authentication with Amazon SES. Enter the name of a new IAM user or accept the default and click Create to set up your SMTP credentials.
This will let you create an SES SMTP user, with a unique username and password. You can download this credential and can be saved into your application where you use SES.
Suppression List Removal
A suppression list contains the recipient email addresses for which your emails have resulted in a hard bounce. If you try to send an email to such an email address, the call to Amazon SES succeeds, but Amazon SES treats the email as a hard bounce instead of attempting to send it. An email address remains on the suppression list for up to 14 days.
You can remove an email address from the suppression list by submitting a suppression list removal request.
Cross Account Notification
If you have been authorized to send emails using identities that you do not own, you can use this page to configure notifications for those identities. Note that even if you set up notifications for a cross-account identity, you will only be permitted to use the identity if the identity owner has created a sending authorization policy that explicitly grants you permission.
You need to configure Add notification Config separately.
Email Templates
You can use templates to send personalized emails to your customers. To create a new template, use the CreateTemplate API operation.
Conclusion
Thus, Amazon SES is the best solution for SMBs and large enterprises that need a reliable, scalable, and inexpensive way of sending emails. Amazon SES definitely eliminates the expensive in-house email infrastructure which includes cost on hardware, OS, and email application.
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